Bríd Smith Urges Public Ownership of Energy, Blames Neoliberalism

I want to first of all correct a record that Deputy McGrath failed to correct, and that is that from the gecko, People Before Profit were the most vocal opponents of the carbon tax on the Climate Action Committee, and Eamonn Ryan can be witness to this, I got a lot of research done, I got Vincent de Paul and Mabs in to talk about energy poverty and why it is that taxing people to the hilt will not reduce emissions, and we provided international evidence of the same. and issued a minority report on the Climate Committee, based and pivoted around the need to get rid of the carbon tax, so I think the rural independents need to get a fact checker, on many levels actually. So I want to take up the questions, the ideological questions that Minister Ryan has proposed, but I am going to do it in my own way. Yesterday the debate was interesting around housing, because what was absent from it was any mention of politics or ideology, and until the Minister spoke there was mostly an absence of politics or ideology from the previous Minister, and a big absence of any other Government speakers. So what we are seeing here is an attempt yesterday to present the housing crisis as an unfortunate set of events, on the one hand you had this unfortunate set of events including the war, Covid, the current mess we are in, and on the other side you had a decent man who was being unfairly blamed by us on the opposition. Now we see the same effort happening here, that we are in this current mess because of a series of unfortunate events, and the Government motion, counter motion to this one, really restates the position that the Government have, that we are going to keep doing business as usual, relying on the market to deliver, knowing all the time that the market is part of the problem. Some may think that our energy crisis is a lack of investment in LNGs, some do in this House, or because we stopped drilling and exploring for oil and gas, or some like the Junior Minister in this House, who has taken to social media and the airwaves to champion LNGs and live cribs, either don't believe or care about climate change, and that's fair enough if they don't believe in it or care about it, and others think that the crisis would not exist were it not for Putin's war. Others want to blame it on the sun not shining and the wind not blowing. The reason we believe the energy crisis in front of us is because of political decisions that were taken here in this House and across the EU in the 1990s and in the year 2000. It lies in the economic and social policy of the 80s and 90s in the era of Reagan and Thatcher, when there was a revolution, a neoliberal revolution, and its aim is then as now. And when the rhetoric is stripped away, the aim was to privatise, to deregulate every industry, to boost profits for private investors and to tax jobs, unionise jobs and conditions. The political and social aim of neoliberalism is to entrench a shift in favour of private vested interests over the public good and the interests of society and workers. It won and it succeeded. And we live in a world that is dominated by that ideology, dominated by political, economic and social discourse, so much so that many here, including you, Minister, don't believe that it exists. You see this world as a natural order, like the air we breathe, that we don't ever question it. That revolution promised people cheaper goods, more efficiency, greater wealth, but it universally failed. And instead, we have fast-tracked environmental destruction, climate change and the spiralling of social and economic catastrophe more generally. But in energy, we see the stark effects today. Price hikes that see cases of older people suffering from hypothermia, as reported earlier on RT radio by a doctor in the matter hospital. Record levels of energy poverty, record and unheard profit margins here and across the globe from the fossil fuel companies. And an utter failure on climate. A boom in fossil fuel infrastructure, new gas projects, record emissions and record levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. This crisis is not a series of unfortunate events. It is the logical outcome of political decisions taken here and across the world to prioritise profit over people and public goods. When Fianna Fáil and Fianna Gael joined in enthusiastically in this neoliberal revolution, they passed laws which changed the not-for-profit remit of the ESB. A singularly successful energy company which had done what no private or not-for-profit company could have done. It provided the cheapest, most efficient energy supply in Europe and electrified a huge chunk of rural society. The laws that were passed here in the 2000s and replicated across the EU paved the way for massive profiteering that we are witnessing today. For the failure to invest at scale and the pace needed in renewable energy. For the climate failure. For the price hikes that are driving more and more people into energy poverty and literally into hypothermia. This motion is part of a fight against those disastrous political choices, those historic political choices that are accepted as the norm today. And I am asking Sinn Féin to take a position here, a position with us and on the right side of history and vote for this motion. We can and we must take the control of energy and other areas of society back into public ownership. We can and we will have a housing policy that is not based on the profits of developers and builders but on the needs that people have for shelter and for safe and decent accommodation. And we can and we must take back control of energy and have a supply of energy and heat that is based on the needs of people and not on the needs of profits of energy generators or the fossil fuel corporations. And we must take control of our national and renewable energy sources of wind and solar, of tidal power and reverse the present policy of privatisation of renewable energy. That minister is the best guarantee of us being able to keep CO2 levels emissions down, to begin to really decarbonise society and at the same time provide everybody with affordable clean energy. And of course it would mean that we could start to electrify our bus fleet, all our public buildings and do so in a clean way. And I just want to finish by saying that we may lose this today with the government counter motion we expect to. But this is the start, not the end, of a debate that has taken place both nationally and globally on the need to nationalise power and the energy system. It has taken place in academia, it has taken place in science and in the new year People Before Profit will launch a document around which we will continue to campaign for the need to nationalise the energy sector. We are not going to give up with one motion here that will be defeated by a majority government which does not really look at politics and science in the way it needs to be scrutinised. It is not good enough and we will continue to campaign for it, we will produce our document and we will campaign across the trade union movement, across society and, as you mentioned, internationalism minister, we will be doing this with our brothers and sisters and other organisations and NGOs across the globe. Because it is the sensible thing to do, it is the most productive thing to do for climate and for the safety and future of people who live on this planet. Thank you very much, thank you if it is. Thank you very much. Thank you for your Belan and good Wickham 20th Col кв Mercier. This has failed to be a downloadable freeway article on Centre which they have found on the 해서-based laptop Leave and so if it meets the professional doll in the cold! Thank you, and please proceed to the public Americans. Thank you. We Hubbard more people who live on this planet. Good MatsSQL here, please. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good ich agencies. Please, press your colleagues. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What the country is also about having yourVIS. Add you. There are the ones who live on this planet. Thank you. Yes, please raise a message over applause.