Pa Daly (Kerry, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Ordinary workers, families and businesses the length and breadth of the country are crippled by exorbitant gas and electricity bills. Week in and week out, people come to our office who are struggling to afford to keep the lights on and heat their home. Often, we have no choice but to send them to apply for an additional needs payment or to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. That is why the extension of the lower VAT rate on gas and electricity is necessary. It is the least the Government can do.

Why is the Government not doing more to address Ireland's rip-off energy costs? As colleagues have noted, prices here are either the highest or second highest in the EU, at €500 more than the average. Prices are set to rise even further in the coming months with the recent SSE Airtricity announcement. The Government, in its wisdom, has decided to rip away supports from struggling households. Rather than making things easier, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Healy-Rae brothers and the Lowry-led Independent Deputies are determined to make things even harder.

I want to be clear: the electricity credit scheme should be kept in place until the prices reduce. Last month, the Government told us it had no intention of providing this essential relief to households this year but is it really the Government's plan to abandon workers and families to crucifying energy prices in the depths of this winter?

Electricity credits, while important supports, are really only a sticking plaster in a fundamentally flawed system that has developed over decades. It is also deeply regressive and inequitable. It is the unfairness at the heart of our energy system that leads to such high energy costs in the first place. For example, network charges and the PSO levy place a disproportionate burden on ordinary households, pushing up bills even further while larger energy users such as data centres get off relatively scot free. We have called out this deep unfairness repeatedly and the Government must urgently reform network charges and the PSO levy so that the burden is redistributed more equitably. I fundamentally refute the idea that households should be expected to pay for the damage wreaked by the recent Storm Éowyn through an increase in the standing charge.

Why can the profits being made by the energy companies not be invested in repairing the damage to the distribution network and make it resilient to the increasingly frequent extreme weather events? The Government also needs to get serious about accelerating the transition to indigenous renewable energy. Rather than continued overdependence on imported fossil fuels, we should not entrust Ireland's energy security to the hands of commercial LNG developers with a dubious financial history and untested or untried job creation records. This move makes a mockery of Ireland's commitment to achieving 80% renewable energy by 2030.

While the indigenous generation of renewable energy will be a prerequisite of reducing the cost of energy here, this will not, in isolation, fix a system that is fundamentally broken. As long as energy is treated as a commodity for private gain and profit rather than as a basic right and necessity, and with the overall influence of the common good, the price is going to remain unreasonably high and we will continue to have such high bills. Sinn Féin will deliver the wholesale change necessary to make energy affordable in a system that prioritises fairness over the corporate balance sheet. Ireland's energy system should be reoriented towards fairness, transparency and affordability and ensure that energy companies are held to account so that ordinary workers and families feel the benefit of the inevitable renewable transition in their pockets and not be continually overdependent.

The recent announcement regarding a State-led backup system should be that - State-led, State-prioritised - and be temporary. It should not, as I said, entrust the future of any backup system completely to private enterprise.

See this speech in context