Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)

Irish households are being ripped off by electricity companies. That is not just how they feel about it; that is a fact. We have it black and white from the International Energy Agency and I quote its report, which states the disparity in Ireland, talking about the gap between wholesale electricity prices and retail prices, was the largest in all of Europe, with the energy component of retail prices three times higher than wholesale prices. In plain language, the reason we have the highest electricity prices in Europe is electricity companies are engaged in blatant profiteering off of the backs of ordinary people. SSE Airtricity declared profits of €113 million to the end of March 2025; Energia; €33 million for the first quarter alone; and Bord Gáis; €39 million in the first half of this year. I could go on. The cost of their profits is a crisis for households, one in three of whom is now in energy poverty. Those families are facing a cold, long, dark winter. They are facing electricity companies that, one after the other, have hiked their prices in recent weeks. Their worry is confounded by failure of the Government to do anything in last week's budget to protect them. The economists are very clear.

The Government's budget will lead to an increase in poverty, particularly for older people and renters, who are more likely to suffer from energy poverty in poorly insulated homes. There are to be no energy credits despite the fact that people's bills are higher now than they were last year. There are to be no price controls to stop what I think the Taoiseach described earlier as price gouging. There is to be no significant investment in the retrofitting we need to give people warmer homes and much reduced bills. There is also to be no change from the policy of households subsidising the data centres of the big tech companies. Households are paying for their hundreds of millions of euro worth of so-called capacity payments.

The fundamental root of all of this is the so-called liberalisation of the energy market, the artificial creation of a market in which we must pay for the profit of all of these different corporations. We have moved from the ESB being the sole publicly owned not-for-profit generator and supplier of electricity, the global success of the ground-breaking rural electrification scheme, which became a model around the world, and the lowest electricity prices in Europe to having the highest prices in Europe because of the neoliberal orthodoxy of the 1990s and 2000s, which meant that anything State-owned had to be broken up and privatised. This process should be reversed. We should renationalise the electricity market on a not-for-profit basis.

Earlier, the Taoiseach asked what we are going to do to put pressure on the energy companies to lower prices. That is my question to him. Will he introduce price controls as proposed in our Emergency Price Controls Bill, something he has the power to do under the Consumer Protection Act? At the very least, will he reverse course on the energy credits and give people something to protect them?

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