Cian O'Callaghan: Government cruel on energy supports, must act now

Go raibh maith agus Ceann Comhairle and first I just want to thank the proposers of this motion for giving us the opportunity to raise important issues around the cost of living. Look the Social Democrats we've said time and again that this government needs to introduce as an emergency measure targeted energy credits and the government seems to have no interest in doing that, has no interest in the fact that there's people on low incomes all across this country absolutely struggling to keep paying their electricity bills, struggling to keep the food on the table and before Iran was even attacked people on low incomes were already feeling the pressure. So to ignore that time and again, to pass a budget that took those supports away and didn't replace them with targeted measures for people that need them most was nothing short of cruel and I have to say if I think during the year one of the memories that really stands out for me it's when I visited the Irish Wheelchair Association in Kintyre for my constituency and met with disabled people after the budget who were absolutely horrified that this government had decided to reduce their incomes by about €1,400 and they were aghast and they were asking why were they being targeted by this government with those cuts, why was the government being so cruel to people who are already struggling to heat their home and to get by day to day. The second thing that is needed on top of that, those emergency measures, cost of disability payment, targeted energy credits, is we have to have investment in the kind of permanent measures that will bring down the cost of living and my colleague Jennifer Whitmore was just talking about that. It makes no sense that we are living on a windy island at the edge of Europe and yet we are so far behind when it comes to wind energy, renewable energy and indeed solar energy. We've put forward proposals to increase the grants for solar panels to help households permanently reduce their electricity bills. They are the kind of measures that the government should be doing, could be doing and would have a long term effect and would get us out of the situation of needing emergency support. So we need the emergency supports now because the government hasn't done that but we also need to be investing to get households permanently reduced energy bills. That has to be an absolute key part of our conversation. It is unbelievable that we are in a situation years after we've been talking about the need to electrify, decarbonise and the government can't even get EV charging right. I mean a very basic bit of infrastructure, not regulated. The news today about charges on the public network being more expensive now for EV charging than if people are using petrol or diesel. I mean what? We're in 2026, how's the government not able to get something basic like that right? Hasn't been able to address the issue of EV charging for people who don't have their own driveways, who only have on-street parking. Hasn't been able to address that years later. It just hasn't gotten around to it and that's before we talk about inability to deliver wind energy. Here we are, there's no one from Fine Gael in the chamber, but here we are 15 years after Fine Gael took office and we've less, we've no offshore wind energy in the country now. We actually did have the one wind farm when Fine Gael took office. So this is an incredible inability of the government to deliver, an incredible inability of the government to actually listen to people who are crying out on lower incomes that need support. Incredible continued reliance on fossil fuels. We're one of the most exposed in Europe, which means our electricity costs are the highest, but also means we're most exposed to these shocks and there is no excuse for the inability to move us towards more renewable energy and that has to be an approach and the ESRI has done this. They've examined the grants that the government has given out and shown that the government has pursued a two-tier strategy here, given grants to households with more means and locked out those households just above the thresholds in terms of being able to get full costs who just then cannot avail the grants because they don't have matching funds. This is low to middle income households really struggling with bills, not able to avail of the retrofit grants or grants in terms of moving to EV because the government has designed their grants in a way that is accessible to people on better incomes but squeezed incomes who don't have extra money to be able to match those grants are just forgotten about and then they are faced with higher and higher prices. So it's a two-tier system that the government have created. Of course this has really been driven by the government's overall economic strategy here. We have a two-tier economy going on. We've got some companies that are able to afford high rents, high fees and pay out high wages, but others are being squeezed out of this. Everybody else in the country has been squeezed out of it, not able to afford ever-increasing housing costs, ever-increasing cost of living costs, ever-increasing electricity costs, just forgotten about by this government and instead what you could be doing and should be doing is investing in renewables, doing that in a way to make it accessible to low to middle income households and then we have a permanent reduction in the cost of living for households, permanent reduction for smaller businesses as well and we'd be helping to meet our climate targets and we wouldn't be paying out billions of euros in fines in coming years. It's the exact trajectory we're on at the moment and that needs to be reversed immediately and needs to be reversed now. Go raibh maith agat.