Ciarán Ahern (Dublin South West, Labour)

I am going to focus on the climate and energy aspects of the budget. I will start by giving some credit to the Minister, Deputy O'Brien. There have been some positive steps from a long-term emissions reduction perspective. For starters, I am glad he has convinced the Minister of State, Deputy Healy-Rae, of the need for carbon taxes.

The funding given to EirGrid and the ESB for grid investment is very much welcome and will help unlock our renewable wind energy capacity. I was happy to see some, though not enough, additional funds being provided for retrofitting. In this budget, the Government has allocated an additional €50 million for local authority home retrofits, though we in Labour provided for double that in our costed alternative budget.

The same goes for the better energy warmer homes scheme. Increased funding is great, but there are huge delays for people trying to avail of the scheme. We need to see a plan from Government to reduce the wait times and address the affordability gap for home retrofits more generally.

The increased investment in our energy network is very welcome, but there is data-centre-sized elephant in the room with regard to this budget. Making our grid more resilient is vital, but are we doing it to enable more renewable energy generation to decarbonise homes or is all this new renewable energy just going to go towards the additional energy needs of new large energy users like data centres? This budget fails to make large energy users pay their fair share and the CRU’s draft price review 6 is proposing we give them a discount on their energy bills. There was an opportunity to tax data centres in this budget so they actually contribute to our efforts in strengthening our grid, but that was missed.

We cannot just have business as usual if we are to meet our emissions targets. The Labour Party has proposed an SUV tax. There is no sign of that in the budget, despite a very obvious and concerning trend towards bigger, higher emitting and more dangerous vehicles entering the market over the past decade. It is deeply unfortunate that the positive steps taken with regard to investment in our energy and water networks and in things like home retrofits have been undone by the overall theme of the budget being a budget for big polluters and big business. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the decision to give a massive tax break to the likes of McDonald’s, while pulling the rug from under the hundreds of thousands of households across the country that are struggling with their energy bills.

There should have been targeted energy credits in this budget to help those most in need. This Government has chosen corporate welfare over social welfare. It has made it clear whose side it is on, which is not the side of those who are stuck in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’s perpetual cost-of-living crisis and who worry about how they will keep their homes warm this winter. As usual, this Government has put the interests of big business, big developers and big polluters first. People deserve an explanation as to why the profits of drive-throughs and developers matter more to it than households that will be forced to choose between heating and eating this winter.

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