Paul Murphy warns of energy bill crisis, urges emergency price cap

A huge crisis is about to hit hundreds of thousands of households across the country. That is the crisis of soaring energy bills. Electricity, gas, heating oil. For many people they are going to be faced with the choice that they pay to heat their home properly or they put food on their table. That is the choice that is faced by maybe one in six, one in five households in this country because that is the number of people who struggle to pay their heating bills. And now, with the heating bills rising, they are going to be put under even more pressure. This is an international phenomenon, no question about it. There is an extra edge here in terms of the data centres and I am sure we will come to that. But other governments in Europe, far from being socialist governments but under pressure from below, in Spain, in Italy for example, have moved to take some action to defend some sections of their population from this increase in prices, to shield them from this increase, to shield them from that choice of buying food or heating their home. But this Government proposes to wring its hands, say how bad it is and then, according to the Government's own counter motion, propose literally nothing to alleviate the burden facing people but to reassure people that in the long term, competition between suppliers is an important means of exerting downward pressure on electricity prices. So don't worry, neoliberalism and capitalism will sort it out in the long run. Energia recently announced their third price increase of the year. In total, they have increased electricity prices by 45% and gas prices by 42% in the last 12 months. That is over €800 for the average household. Other companies have done something similar. And what is the Government planning to do about it? In fact, not only are they planning to do nothing in terms of addressing the crisis, next week the Government is planning to announce a further 22% increase in the carbon tax. With one in five already having to cut back on light and heat for their homes due to the costs, the Government is planning to add to the problem, driving even more into fuel poverty. The carbon tax does nothing to help people reduce their fuel bills or their carbon footprint. Our motion today says, at the very, very, very least, it should not be increased any further in this year's Budget. In reality, it should be scrapped and it should be replaced with a pollution tax on those who are responsible for pollution, i.e. the profits of the big business polluters, the data centres, big agribusiness, fossil fuels and so on. It is time to tackle the profiteering and the power of the private energy companies. The Government likes to pretend there is basically nothing they can do in the face of market forces driving energy prices up. But actually, they can do something extremely simple, and they could literally do it today. Literally, at the stroke of a ministerial pen, they can declare an emergency in the supply of electricity, in the supply of energy, and then another stroke of a pen can set a maximum price to protect people from these rises. The Government has in its power today the capacity to put an end to these energy price hikes. The truth is that the greed of big energy companies has added fuel to the fire of rising energy prices in this country. Privatisation has not delivered the promised affordability and efficiency. It has been a complete disaster. Energy prices in Ireland were already 23% above the EU average prior to this crisis. Across the globe, we see that energy price hikes are highest in states with privatised networks. Investments in improving services and switching to renewables have not happened. Instead, we have had bloated marketing and managerial budgets as well as large profit margins driving up prices. Instead of actually improving services for ordinary people, privatisation has made life more difficult, with customers every single year having to spend hours researching to try to find the best prices, adding one other unnecessary task to already overburdened lives. The privatisation experiment is a failure from the point of view of workers, from the point of view of ordinary householders and, crucially, from the point of view of the environment. As part of a socialist Green New Deal, we should bring the energy sector fully back into public ownership, cut out the profiteering and create thousands of decent jobs, investing in a rapid and just transition to 100% renewable energy. Instead of that Green New Deal, this government is overseeing a dirty old industry. This year has seen the coal-fired Money Point station actually ramp up production. The Greens get into power and our use of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, actually increased. It is one of the most environmentally destructive sites in the entire country. The fact that we are almost one-quarter of the way through this century and still reliant on coal energy plants is testament to the abysmal failure to invest in renewable energy production. Our usage of tidal power and offshore wind power is still minimal compared to similar-sized countries, such as Denmark. Instead of the profits in the energy sector being reinvested into renewables, they have been siphoned off by profit. Public ownership of the energy sector would allow us to direct all resources to that transition and shut the likes of Money Point for good. In relation to the fuel allowance, the Government, in its counter-motion, simply references the current level. It is a payment of €28 per week for 28 weeks to over 370,000 low-income households. A majority of those who are going to be hard-hit, who are going to be faced with difficult choices in energy prices, do not currently avail of fuel allowance, i.e. the level of fuel allowance is inadequate. Again, there is something very simple that can be done in relation to that, it is to increase the fuel allowance by the level in which energy prices are rising, €15 a week, and extend eligibility to mean that all those who are suffering, all those precisely who are faced with that choice, have the ability to avail of the protection afforded by it. Obviously, a crucial reason that we are hit so hard by energy price rises is the very poor state of our housing stock, in terms of very poor levels of energy efficiency. The Government s plan, and they have not met their targets in their plans yet so far, are completely inadequate. We should be aiming to completely retrofit all of our public buildings and all public homes or local authority approved housing body homes by 2030. Instead, the Government s target was for retrofitting 2,400 social homes in 2021, out of a total stock of over 160,000. Again, retrofitting ordinary people s homes is a very good example of the kind of policies that make up an eco-socialist Green New Deal, things that simultaneously improve people s lives for the better, while also tackling the environmental crisis. I just want to finish again on the point of privatisation. I do find it s quite incredible that the bottom-line point of the Government s counter-motion is that competition between suppliers is an important means of exerting downward pressure on electricity prices, i.e. continue to let the market rip, and eventually that will help ordinary people. There is no evidence for that. I gave the example previously of the difference between European countries with privatised versus non-privatised markets, and the difference in prices with non-privatised is better. Look at the example of Ireland. The development of the ESB was an historic development, a nationalisation of 300 expensive, badly run, inefficient private and local authority undertakings. This is from an article by Sinead Mercier. It was described at the time by a newspaper as the first fruits of Bolshevism in the country, but it was enormously successful. Whenever it was privatised, the ESB was forced to artificially increase its prices to attract competitors into a new energy market that the States had spent millions in creating. The exact same story is seen internationally. For example, in Australia, there was a study that found that price rises have been highest in states with privatised electricity markets. Continuing the reliance on markets, privatisation is a disaster, again, from the environment's point of view, from workers' point of view and from ordinary householders' point of view.