Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

While I am going to speak mostly about the issue of the cost of electricity, it is important to address some of the points that were raised today, particularly around liquified natural gas, LNG. There is a lot of misinformation out there and a lot of people are exploiting the current situation to try to argue the case for an LNG terminal in Shannon. What they are not saying is that LNG will do nothing to address the costs that people are facing. Those of us who follow this closely and understand the energy wholesale market will watch the LNG tankers turning in the ocean and going to the highest bidder. It is not realistic to expect that Ireland, a small country, would be able to bid against Asia when it comes to getting LNG tankers to come here for a price that we can afford to pay. This is a commercial industry which will be selling LNG at market prices to Ireland. That is why a State storage facility is a much better approach, if we must have a storage facility at all. It also matters where the LNG comes from. If it is coming from fracked gas, it is destroying communities. If we believe we are entitled to drink fresh water and have a healthy environment to live in, then so are people in other communities. Buying in fracked gas means that we do not support that belief and are quite content to have other communities destroyed in order for us to have gas

It is bizarre to hear calls for the opening up of exploration licences as we watch mainland Europe experience heatwave after heatwave and widespread drought. The River Rhine has dropped to levels such that energy supplies cannot be transported along it. We have nuclear power stations being shut down in France because they cannot be cooled. One third of Pakistan's land surface is under water while people in this House are seriously calling for more fossil fuel exploration. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, report is absolutely clear that there can be no new fossil fuel exploration and no new fossil fuel infrastructure.

It is important to point out that those who are arguing for an LNG terminal need to be honest with people. It will not bring down the cost of energy for anybody on this island. There is also confusion on another point. It does not matter how full that energy storage is. Our problem at the moment in terms of possible blackouts has nothing to do with the supply of gas but with the generation of power. That is a separate issue. There is a lot of conflating of issues here to further certain agendas. People are effectively exploiting a war to further their agendas.

I will now turn to the amendment, included in which is a reference to the issue of demand and why we are facing blackouts in this country. We know it is because the demand for electricity could outstrip supply. We have arrived at that position because we have rolled out the red carpet for data centres. While it is a Green Party Minister sitting in the Chamber today defending Government policy, we all know that Fine Gael for the past ten years has had a policy of not asking any questions and not putting in place any strategy to enable us to accommodate all of these data centres. Its policy was to keep on taking them in while not asking any questions about what sort of data they were storing or whether these data were critical for our economy. We are now dealing with the consequences of that policy. It has led to the catastrophic failure of our energy system and it is jeopardising our grid. In the context of gas and gas security, what is also not being looked at is the fact that because there is a moratorium on data centres getting connected to the electricity grid, they are putting a huge amount of unsustainable pressure on our gas supplies. Gas Networks Ireland, which I met this week, is saying clearly that it is really concerned because it will not be able to connect data centres to the gas network due to the unsustainable pressure this would produce. All of this is happening at a time when we are trying to reduce energy demand by 15% to do our bit for the war effort in the context of gas supplies.

The amendment makes reference to the Government's data centre policy. It also refers to the Government's failure to adequately protect households and businesses. The energy poverty strategy lapsed in 2019. I welcome the Minister's statement that the new strategy will be published after the budget but I hope it takes on board some of the points that were made in the previous energy poverty strategy. We need to be collecting data on household incomes because we cannot have a strategy if we do not actually measure how bad the situation is around energy poverty. Likewise, we need to make sure the recommendations will be followed up this time. The CRU was told to conduct an analysis of the barriers that prevent people from switching energy supplier. The CRU keeps telling people, through radio advertisements, to switch supplier to save on their energy bills but we know from organisations like Age Action Ireland, the Money Advice & Budgeting Service, MABS, and Citizens Information, as well as various Traveller organisations, that there are barriers to switching which include credit ratings and difficulties with direct debits. The CRU has not produced the data it was asked to produce in 2019. That is why the Government is reaching for blunt instruments like the energy credit which is causing frustration. Many Travellers did not even get the energy credit and are hearing of more credits being rolled out in the budget. I want to hear guarantees that members of the Traveller community will get those energy credits and will not be let fall through the cracks as they did previously.

I heard some criticism of Sinn Féin's policy on an energy cap but our energy cap goes hand in hand with a windfall tax to make sure fossil fuel companies are not profiteering on the back of the war. We have repeatedly called, since as far back as December 2020, for the energy market in the EU to be reformed and for the decoupling of gas and renewable energy. However, the Irish State was one of nine states that opposed that. I note that there has now been a shift in position and while I welcome that, we have lost time on it. Particularly for countries like Ireland which have so much indigenous renewable energy, we need to ensure that this renewable energy is leading to reductions in people's bills.It will not do that when it is coupled with the cost of gas because the vast majority of the renewable energy produced in this country at the moment is under the old arrangements whereby the energy companies do not pay back the public service obligation, PSO, levy when they are making excess profits. I could go on and on about energy because it is one of my hobbyhorses. I hope the Minister of State will take on board some of the comments in our amendments. I know he will not accept our amendment but I think he needs to work constructively with the Opposition on this matter. Perhaps when the Government brings forward the credits, it may look favourably this time on the amendments we brought forward last time which excluded holiday homes, second homes and the homes of millionaires. That can be done using data from the Central Statistics Office.