Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I appreciate the opportunity to speak and I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I have much respect for the Senator, but when I hear her praise the Chinese for anything I want to spend at least 40 minutes explaining why we should ignore them, no matter how many trees they are planting. Ireland and the rest of western Europe is sending shiploads of waste to China every day. There are cities in China of which we have never heard, such as the city of Dongyang, where that waste is being burned. We are asphyxiating, suffocating and killing ordinary Chinese people against their will, and the Chinese Government does not allow people to give information about it on the Internet.

Channel 4 recently broadcast a programme on the huge dam being built by the Chinese Government on the Yangtze River, the Three Gorges Dam. People were literally shoved out of their houses and told if they did not move, they would be flooded. I will use every opportunity I can this year, during the celebration of the Olympic Games, to point out the repressive Government that exists in China. The western world should be ashamed of what is being done there. One new coal station is being opened every six days in China.

I appeal to the advisers to bring some of the points I am making to the attention of the Minister. I believe there is an agenda running on the EirGrid issue. The Minister of State comes from the west of Ireland. A famous writer from the west of Ireland, John Healy, published a book entitled Nobody Cried Stop. I believe we are walking head first into major difficulties with electricity and electricity security.

There are three aspects to electricity in the country. Everybody has been talking about electricity generation since we set up the facility at Ardnacrusha near the Minister of State's constituency in 1929. The national grid brings electricity from there to local transformers around the country. The electricity network brings it from the transformers into houses. According to the programme for Government, we are now about to package up the national grid into one neat company and run it separately from the rest. That is the biggest mistake. Of all the people who could come in here, nobody knows more about packaging parts of a public utility than the Minister of State. He even had to walk away from his party Whip on a similar issue on one occasion.

The only parts of the whole system that we need to examine are the grid and the network. It does not matter where the generation comes from. Once we put down international interconnectors, we can buy and sell the stuff from Europe. The most powerful electricity company in Europe is probably Electricité de France. That company has built the two main power lines connecting eastern Europe with France. It is buying and selling electricity every day of the weak. It is also the greatest generator of electricity given that 80% of French electricity is based on nuclear power. Electricité de France is also buying up every single utility company that comes on the market in the UK or anywhere in Europe. It is growing every day and its strength is based on the following simple fact. It is a vertically integrated utility company. It runs everything, from generation to grid to network.

When debating the issue of Internet access ten years ago, I said that I did not believe that any private company would ever be interested in bringing a copper wire to Belmullet. Time has shown that to be true. I believe this is exactly the same. I want to give an example of where I have seen this working, although I know the Minister, Deputy Ryan, does not accept my point. I do not for one moment query his commitment on these issues and I welcome the boldness of the initiatives he has taken, especially the initiatives on light bulbs and so on. It is not a Minister's job to worry about the problems of implementation. Donagh O'Malley taught us 40 years ago that a Minister says what he wants and lets the officials deliver. The biggest mistake a Minister can make is to share the problems of the officials. Officials are there to deal with the problems and Ministers are there to have the policy implemented.

A grid is being set up which is now being packaged. I want to put on the record that I believe the national grid will be privatised in five years' time. Therefore, we might own the generation capacity and the network which brings it to Mrs. Murphy's door, but we will not own the national grid which brings it as far as the local network. This happened before in New Zealand, a country with exactly the same population as Ireland, with the same rural background and the same history as a former British colony. The Government there broke up the utility company into several different companies and it broke up the network. As soon as the grid was sold off in New Zealand, there were immediate problems. Who was going to pay to connect the grid to the network? The first place in which they encountered difficulty was in Wellington, the capital city, which was left without power for three full weeks while the company which owned the grid held the Government to ransom to pay for the connection from the grid to the local network. That is already happening in this country. Private providers charge exorbitant rates at peak usage times to the Government in order to provide the surplus we need. A few years ago we had to buy in portable generators and that is what happened.

I believe we are doing now with EirGrid what we did with airports and with Aer Lingus. We are packaging it all up. We have seen that this has gone wrong everywhere. It happened in the UK when water provision was sold off. The Government realised it then had to spend €1 billion on pipes. It happened again in the UK when the railways were sold and investment in tracks was forgotten. It is the same here now as we are selling off the national grid. The national grid needs about €2 billion in investment. Either the Government pays the money and it will be a prosperous company later sold off to the greedy private sector, or the Government could do what it did with Aer Lingus. It could state that it has not got the €2 billion to invest in the company, will blame Europe for not being able to invest in it and state that it must get the private sector in to do it. I believe that will happen. While I do not believe that is on the agenda of the current Government, and certainly not on the agenda of the Green Party, it will happen.

We need to keep a vertically integrated utility where the State owns the generation capacity, the national grid and the network. If we do not control all three, we are dead. If we want to sell off one of those, the generation capacity is the least important. We might have a lot of trouble convincing people of that, but it is the reality. We had to reopen the turf burning station in Cahirciveen two years ago and another station near Belmullet, simply in order to raise capacity. We could not cope without it. This is what will happen if we do not own it anymore.

What is happening with Electricité de France? It is investigating nuclear fusion. It has also won the global pitching initiative. It is the only concern investigating nuclear fusion. There has been no debate in this country. The Minister is quite right in saying that we need a debate on nuclear energy. I am opposed to nuclear based electricity, but there should be a debate on it. In such a debate the distinction must be made between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission. Nuclear fusion has certain attractions and at least is controllable. It has between one tenth and half of the risks associated with nuclear energy, but it is not happening. The other issue, in terms of energy security, is the amount being spent on research. In the UK at present major research is taking place into hydrogen based power, but that is not happening here. Our brains can match those of any nation state in the world. This is a knowledge society and that is what is needed to move on this.

To have energy security we need to have storage capacity. How do we store electricity? If we create 100% electricity at six o'clock in the morning when people are getting up and it is needed at six in the evening when people are cooking, how do we get the balance right, and where do we hold the electricity? The only place I know where it is done at the moment is at Turlough Hill, where we pump it up and let it come down. However, we can only store a tiny percentage of what we need.

I have put this question previously to the Department and was told the interconnector would do it. In other words, it is sold into the grid. The grid we are selling it back to is in the UK, which has precisely the same type of peaks and troughs as Ireland. That is not the answer, but there are ways for storing electricity, although I am not an expert in this area. If we take hydrogen based electricity, the substance in most supply on this earth is water, H2O, hydrogen and oxygen. One of the difficulties is that it is not effective and efficient to remove hydrogen from water and then use it for power. It takes almost as much energy to subtract the hydrogen as one will get from burning it. That is precisely why it appears an extraordinarily good way to have storage. If we use our spare capacity to extract hydrogen from water and then use this for power when it is needed, it is the cleanest energy on earth. The waste produced by the burning or usage of hydrogen is clean drinkable potable water. There is no better way of approaching it and we should do it.

The Minister suggested recently that perhaps the energy might be stored in batteries. Battery technology is nowhere near as efficient. I told him at the time that a battery the size of Mount Leinster would be needed to look after Dublin alone. It cannot be done. There are enormous issues here on which there has been no debate and we do not know where we are going. Within a couple of years, not only will the grid be sold off — although that is not intended at the moment — it will probably be owned by Electricité de France, or whatever. This means that in five or six years time the switch will be in Paris to control our lights, electricity and energy. I have nothing against the French, but in terms of energy security, that is precisely where we are going. Energy security is not just about creating sufficient power and holding enough of it on the island or within the State, but about controlling it and using it precisely as we need it. That is the difficulty we face and there is no sign of a solution to the problem.

Fair play to the Green Party, which has pushed the Government via VRT and in the new Finance Bill today, apparently, into giving tax breaks for energy efficient projects. In simple terms, however, what Ireland is doing with waste is in breach of European regulations. Waste is supposed to be disposed of as closely as possible to the point at which it has been created. We are disposing of enormous amounts of waste in China. That cannot be right. It is not right. I do not know whether any colleague here has ever tried to track a piece of waste. I tried to do it two years ago, and again last year, to see where it gets to from the doorstep, into various distribution channels, and how it is checked as regards where it ends up. The figures are all over the place. If they were to be audited, half the people involved would be sacked because it is not possible to track them. They are mixed and matched in three or four different places among various companies throughout Ireland. They are then sent for redistribution to another place. Nobody knows what percentage finishes up in China.

Another issue raised by the two previous speakers was the question of chicken waste and human waste. Both of these produce methane, which is between 20 and 25 times more damaging than carbon. In other words, a tonne of methane equates to 25 tonnes of carbon. The great thing about methane, however, is that it is a power source. Effectively, we should put a tent over every landfill and chicken farm in Ireland. That would save the atmosphere from emissions and also harness a power source. These are issues we need to look at with some degree of enthusiasm and energy. The way we are moving at the moment, in creating a separate company, EirGrid, in the midst of an electricity utility is inexplicable. I do not know why we are doing this. I have asked questions and got all types of answers to the effect that "we must ensure they buy from the right people". We do that all over the place. People are forced to buy, either by proper tender or by regulation etc. I see nothing wrong with the ESB continuing to own the grid system and running it properly in its own interest. Neither will I condone Europe taking the blame for this, by the way. All I suggest may be done well within the parameters laid down by Europe.

I have just touched on some of the issues I wanted to raise. On a final point, over the past 18 to 20 years we have made the ESB leaner and leaner. The Minister of State, Deputy Tony Killeen, will have seen that as regards Moneypoint in his constituency. From having had about 14,000 employees, the ESB now has approximately 7,000 on its payroll. We have closed between 13 and 15 power stations and made the company a superb example of national industry. This was achieved on the basis that it would be a vertically integrated national utility. I want us to maintain and control that and be in charge of our future and security.