Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)

There are 300,000 people in energy debt. The Minister for Finance will stand in this Chamber on this day two weeks and talk about how well we are doing in managing the economy when people in my constituency will be going to bed early because they cannot afford to turn the heating on. If the Minister of State goes to any of the shopping centres out my way, he will meet a lot of people who are sitting around. Many of them are elderly. When they are asked why they are there, they say they are there to meet friends but they are also there because they cannot afford to turn on the heating at home. That is the reason they are there and their friends will tell you that is why Mary or Johnny is there every day.

That is the reality for many people in my constituency. The Minister of State said there was a retrofit scheme. If those elderly people are living in council housing, there is a difficulty. We know that, in my local authority area, the funding the local authority gets will take possibly another 30 years to get around the council housing stock and then we are back to square one. There is a big challenge for those people. For people who own their own homes, the challenge in relation to retrofitting is getting the funding for it. There are huge challenges there as well.

There is also the cost of wholesale electricity. It has actually fallen since 2022 yet bills for householders continue to rise, as we have heard. The question people are asking has to do with why Irish people are paying the highest prices for electricity in Europe. I do not hear any answers from the Minister of State. Far from holding the energy companies to account, the Government wants to strip away the one relief workers and families had in the energy credit. The Government has also committed to hiking the carbon tax over the next five budgets, making homes even more expensive to heat and denying people any chance of retrofitting their homes. The Government has rejected all calls to strengthen the regulator so it can finally hold the energy companies to account.

Surely we have to reduce the cost to households of progressive PSO levies and network charges by making sure large companies pay their fair share by implementing a fairer model. That would be Sinn Féin's approach. We have heard the Government's approach. It is not working for a lot of people who are out there, the people who are sitting in those shopping centres. They are elderly, but not exclusively so, and it impacts on families as well. We are asking that the Government take notice of this and start to act.

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