Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

It is a painful truth that we will be faced with more and more extreme weather events. We will have more storms, more flooding and possibly even more serious snow if we see the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, AMOC, including the Gulf Stream. We should resist those who would try to respond to these extreme weather events by driving us further into the arms of the fossil fuels that are responsible for the crises. We need to act on climate adaptation, a crucial part of which is electricity resilience. We must listen to and learn from the affected workers and communities, who know what their needs are, to begin to plan democratically for future disaster prevention and response.

A bottom-line point is that the State has a responsibility to provide reliable electricity for people. When that supply is not reliable, every household must be compensated, not only for the loss of power but also for the inconvenience and suffering they experience. A worker in my office who lives in south Dublin had no electricity for three days last year. She received a cheque for €240 in compensation from the ESB. There cannot be one law for people in Dublin and another for those in rural areas when it comes to compensation. The ESB is now threatening to increase prices for everyone to pay for the cost of the clean-up. This is the direct opposite of the direction in which we should be going. Instead, we need low-cost renewable electricity, free retrofitting and solar panels and batteries with no upfront costs, thereby giving people a secure renewable power source whenever the grid fails.

We also need to act to build the capacity of ESB Networks. I stood on picket lines four years ago with workers who warned me about the outsourcing that was going on and the loss of capacity. We must build up ESB Networks as a publicly owned and publicly run crucial public utility.

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