Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Acting Chairperson and the Senators for their comments. I listened closely to what they had to say. It was a useful debate. Even though we all agree we want to go ahead with this legislation and realise the urgency there, useful contributions have been made by all Members about how we should proceed for the coming months and what is going to happen in the spring because this problem is not going to go away in the short term. There are longer-term problems as well, as Senator Keogan pointed out.

I will start by addressing that question about what is coming next in the spring. I confirm that the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Ryan, has committed to reviewing the situation in the spring. Many of the measures that were introduced in the budget are timed to run out at the end of February. The course of the war will determine some of this and we are committing, as a Government, to review that.

There are also questions about the pay-as-you-go customers. I confirm that transfers from pay-as-you-go hardship meters to bill pay are free for all utility suppliers. I encourage anybody in that situation - anybody who is a vulnerable customer, whether medically or financially vulnerable - to transfer to bill pay as soon as possible. It is a more appropriate measure. Not everybody on a pay-as-you-go meter is there because of energy poverty. I have a pay-as-you-go meter because I prefer to track my energy use in that way. Senator Keogan asked whether the transfers to pay-as-you-go meters will be made. I confirm the payment of €200 arrived in my account earlier this year and I expect the same mechanism and transfer will happen again this year.

Senator Keogan referred tangentially to the energy security review and asked what is going to happen to protect our country from energy shocks and to promote our energy sovereignty. In that regard, the energy security review has completed and has produced its list of recommendations. They are out for public consultation this month and I suggest that anybody who is interested should comment on the options that are there. We are looking at them all with an open mind. Senator Keogan also called for peace and requested that we all sit down for talks, with which I absolutely agree.

A number of Senators referred to the price cap policy that is being pursued in the UK, for example. The decision on this was that we would transfer money directly to citizens' electricity accounts. We will give it directly to the people using electricity in their domestic accounts. We will treat businesses in a different way. We will bring is a scheme, similar to the pandemic support scheme, which will look at businesses previous energy use and at the increase in their costs and will then compensate them for that change to try to ensure those businesses stay viable and do not shut down.

To return to domestic and to the citizen perspective, if a person has an electricity bill, they will find a credit on that bill directly to help them. The alternative was to bring in a cap which really consists of a subsidy to energy companies, whereby we guarantee the price will never go above a certain level, regardless what the international price of gas is, which of course means we are entering into an unconstrained financial guarantee and that is something we did a decade ago and is not something we are rushing to do again. We have the benefit of the experience of seeing how price caps are working in other jurisdictions and I would say that it is not going well. We are not really inclined to move towards price caps.

I turn to the comments of Senator Sherlock. The Senator asked about the quantum and if this was a large enough approach. There is €2.5 billion in cost-of-living measures in this budget and that adds to the €2.5 billion from the last budget. That is the measure and, as I said, it is to be reviewed again in the spring. It is an exceptionally large amount of money but it is an exceptional crisis and it is for a period of time. Senator Sherlock pointed out that people get missed by targeted payments. We have a range of targeting payments - there at least eight I can think of that are to help with the energy crisis - and some people get missed by those. Someone might not qualify for a particular payment or a long-term payment. If you are a single parent and you have a job, you do not get the welfare payments. That is the reason we have universal payments. That is the reason this Bill will provide for one of the universal payments as it pays money to everybody. As Senator Dooley pointed out, it is unlike a price cap which pays you more money the more you use - in other words, it is the opposite of a targeting payment and it directs and targets money towards those who use more electricity. If you are heating your swimming pool, if you are washing all your cars at the weekend, if you are using giant qualities of electricity, you get more money if the price is capped. Unlike that, we-----