Irish households are being ripped off by electricity companies. That is not just how they feel about it; that is a fact. We have it black and white from the International Energy Agency and I quote its report, which states the disparity in Ireland, talking about the gap between wholesale electricity prices and retail prices, was the largest in all of Europe, with the energy component of retail prices three times higher than wholesale prices. In plain language, the reason we have the highest electricity prices in Europe is electricity companies are engaged in blatant profiteering off of the backs of ordinary people. SSE Airtricity declared profits of €113 million to the end of March 2025; Energia; €33 million for the first quarter alone; and Bord Gáis; €39 million in the first half of this year. I could go on. The cost of their profits is a crisis for households, one in three of whom is now in energy poverty. Those families are facing a cold, long, dark winter. They are facing electricity companies that, one after the other, have hiked their prices in recent weeks. Their worry is confounded by failure of the Government to do anything in last week's budget to protect them. The economists are very clear. The Government's budget will lead to an increase in poverty, particularly for older people and renters, who are more likely to suffer from energy poverty in poorly insulated homes. There are to be no energy credits despite the fact that people's bills are higher now than they were last year. There are to be no price controls to stop what I think the Taoiseach described earlier as price gouging. There is to be no significant investment in the retrofitting we need to give people warmer homes and much reduced bills. There is also to be no change from the policy of households subsidising the data centres of the big tech companies. Households are paying for their hundreds of millions of euro worth of so-called capacity payments. The fundamental root of all of this is the so-called liberalisation of the energy market, the artificial creation of a market in which we must pay for the profit of all of these different corporations. We have moved from the ESB being the sole publicly owned not-for-profit generator and supplier of electricity, the global success of the ground-breaking rural electrification scheme, which became a model around the world, and the lowest electricity prices in Europe to having the highest prices in Europe because of the neoliberal orthodoxy of the 1990s and 2000s, which meant that anything State-owned had to be broken up and privatised. This process should be reversed. We should renationalise the electricity market on a not-for-profit basis. Earlier, the Taoiseach asked what we are going to do to put pressure on the energy companies to lower prices. That is my question to him. Will he introduce price controls as proposed in our Emergency Price Controls Bill, something he has the power to do under the Consumer Protection Act? At the very least, will he reverse course on the energy credits and give people something to protect them?
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Earlier the Taoiseach posed the question as to what we were proposing to do to pressurise the energy companies to lower their costs. We have a Bill already to have price controls to stop the blatant profiteering. I put it back to the Taoiseach: what is he going to do? The answer, it appears, is "Nothing".
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He mentioned a bunch of things that have already been done. He is standing over the withdrawal of the cost-of-living supports, the impact of which will be deeper poverty. The budget was spoken about as a budget for child poverty. It absolutely was a budget for child poverty - increased child poverty. The Taoiseach should look at the report of the Parliamentary Budget Office, an impartial office, which states that income poverty rates nationally will have risen from 11.7% in 2024 to a forecast level of 13.2% in 2026 due to the withdrawal of the cost-of-living package. Income poverty rates will have risen most for the elderly, from 13.3% in 2024 to a forecast level of 19%. Child poverty will also increase. The Taoiseach's budget increased poverty in this State. We have evidence now that people are being ripped off by the energy companies, which are charging three times what they are paying for the electricity-----
Sentiment score: -0.29
-----and the Taoiseach is saying we will do nothing about it and we will not have price controls.
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He has power, under the Consumer Protection Act, to introduce price controls to stop this profiteering and people want him to act.
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Tax them.
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Tax them more.
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