Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will raise the excellent session that was held in the audiovisual room on energy poverty and energy pollution. It was a very welcome initiative to see both the social and the environmental organisations come together to call for a true just transition. We know that 29% of Irish households are currently living in energy poverty. That is the highest number that has ever been recorded. Average household energy Bills have increased by €1,100 in one year and the rising costs of energy continue to disproportionately impact households in the bottom 20% of the income distribution, who spend a higher percentage of their income on energy.

We had an issue with energy poverty in this country long before the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis. We heard today from civil society groups such as Age Action, Community Law & Mediation, Disability Federation Ireland, the European Anti-Poverty Network, Friends of the Earth, Irish Rural Link, the Money Advice & Budgeting Service, Social Justice Ireland, the Think-tank for Action on Social Change and Threshold that the current system of addressing climate change and energy poverty is deeply unfair and that unless we have a system whereby we reduce our carbon emissions through a retrofitting programme that will also reduce energy poverty, all we are doing is transferring wealth up in society to those who can afford to retrofit their homes and put in heat pumps while the rest of society is left behind. It is a very important message and I thank the colleagues who came to hear it.

The energy poverty strategy lapsed in 2019, which shows that it is not a priority for this Government. I do not know how many times I have raised it in this House. A report by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform said that we did not have the data to see what sort of social impact our retrofitting scheme was having on households. I encourage everybody, especially coming up to the early budget, to read this document and the joint statement and to look very closely at the solutions they are putting forward. Nobody is saying we do not have to meet our climate targets, but we have to do it in a fair way. We have to bring society along with us and it has to be about a just transition.