Ciarán Ahern (Dublin South West, Labour)

For the past number of years under Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Governments we have seen what feels like a permanent cost-of-living crisis. People are being squeezed from every angle, be it grocery price inflation, the cost of renting or buying a home or childcare costs, something the Government has been conspicuously silent on since the promise of it costing €200 a month. We know student fees are going to be increasing. Compounding it all, we have the matter at hand, which is energy bills.

The Barnardos report during the summer was really eye-opening in terms of just how stark the picture really is for families, especially vulnerable ones.

Some 40% of parents have been forced into borrowing money to help pay for essentials for their children, while lone parents were disproportionately more likely to cut back on those essentials. We are seeing parents going hungry so that their children are fed and others are going without heating in their homes, or taking on debt to keep the lights on.

The Government had the chance to alleviate some of that burden in the recent budget but against the advice of officials chose not to – a conscious choice. It was a conscious choice not to support some of the most vulnerable households with targeted energy credits that I and the Labour Party had been calling for. There was a conscious choice to instead give a needless tax cut to the likes of McDonald's and big property developers. The cost-of-living crisis has perhaps never been so acute but now that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have bought the votes they needed to get back into Government, we now cannot afford to give people the little bit of support they need to get through. We can, though, hand over more than €630 million in VAT cuts to the hospitality sector. It is ridiculous and offensive. We should have seen targeted energy credits in the budget, not the pre-election sweeteners that were given out to everyone by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the previous couple of budgets, but actual supports given to those who need it most. There are 300,000 people are in arrears on their electricity bills and 185,000 are in arrears on their gas bills. They are the people who should have been supported with meaningful and targeted measures in the budget but they were let down by this Government.

It is three years since the first universal energy credits were paid out. This Government is, with a few exceptions, broadly the same as the previous one. Three years should have provided more than enough time to have devised a way to target the credits more effectively. Either the Government could not do it or it would not. As I have said before in this House, if we are talking about energy costs we need to talk about the energy companies themselves as well, and the profiteering and the outright greed that has been on display over the last few months. I will give a few examples. Flogas has hiked its prices by 7% after its parent company, DCC, recorded operating profits of €820 million in its most recent accounts. Bord Gáis Energy, after a year in which it made €75 million in profits, raised its prices by 13.5%, adding €218 a year to the average bill. Pinergy went up almost 10% after having increased its revenues by nearly 40% in 2024. Energia increased electricity prices by more than 12% after making a very healthy €154 million in profits last year. SSE Airtricity had a 9.5% increase in electricity prices, its second hike this year after a 10.5% increase in electricity in April, alongside an 8.4% rise in gas prices. SSE Airtricity's most recent accounts show a €111 million operating profit.

It is hard to see this as anything other than blatant greed and ordinary families, many of whom are already struggling, are paying for it. How are they supposed to cope? The energy credits, as imperfect as they were, were a lifeline for so many people but the bigger picture is that these energy companies need to be reined in. The gross profiteering in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, which is almost capitalising on the cost-of-living crisis, needs to be called out. The energy market is supposed to be competitive but these companies are carrying on more like cartels, like an oligarchy. As I have called for again in this House, the Minister needs to start looking-----

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