Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal East, Fianna Fail)

I have detailed some of the initial supports, which are targeted at households that need them. The retrofit programme is critical in helping us to decarbonise and making permanent savings for households and businesses. That programme will ratchet up even further. We established a task force in June this year. I always said there would be an interim report in advance of the budget to inform budgetary measures for this year.

That is not all of the work required. Energy prices are too high. There are reasons for that in Ireland. We are an islanded nation with a dispersed population. We need to invest further in our grid, which we discussed last night during the debate on the ESB Bill. We need to continue to expand renewables to have cheaper, greener energy in our system. We are doing well on that. About 42% of our electricity generation last year was through renewables but we need to expand that further, and indeed we will.

I will look at the structure of the network charges. There is a conversation in Europe on the spark gap and the fact we tag retail prices across Europe to the wholesale gas price, even though we are expanding our renewables. That is a European conversation because energy costs across Europe are a real issue for households and businesses. We are committing to doing everything we can to stabilise and bring prices down.

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