As I and others have said in this House, the measures were too little and too late. Nevertheless, we are extending them for another period of time. I would have preferred to have seen them extended to September because I cannot see the Strait of Hormuz crisis being sorted out by then, given the incumbent in the White House. The measures are welcome insofar as they are coming forward, but they should have been for a longer duration and for greater amounts, while being cognisant at all times that the bigger picture, the strategic picture, is, as I have said previously, our energy self-sufficiency and the fact that we are slow to ramp up to self-sufficiency and cut down on the massive amounts of foreign imports for which we are paying. In the new era in which AI will impact on certain types of jobs, we have to find other types of jobs. We have to go the vocational route because there are huge incomes to be made in data centres if someone is an electrician, for example. However, if we have demand from companies to store data in Ireland, the only way it will be done is if we have a massive surplus of capacity, which is not what we have been gearing towards. I note, although it is not being done in this legislation, the trial EV scrappage scheme of €5,000. I welcome this measure because for some vehicles, it will bring the price of a new EV with a range of between 200 km and 300 km down to around €12,000, which is an affordable amount for a credit union loan. I welcome the measure but it needs to be put on a better footing, with more of an incentive on top. In Dublin, I have been driving a 24 kW EV for the last ten years. It has a range of about 120 km, which is sufficient most of the time, although if I am travelling down the country, I have to stop off a few times. For someone in rural Ireland, a 250 km or 300 km range goes quite quickly. We have to encourage people in rural areas to invest in these types of vehicles at an affordable rate, alongside taking up grants for solar. We need to ensure that people get fair prices for exporting home-grown energy from their solar panels and make retrofitting affordable in the first place. The roll-out of retrofitting in local authority housing remains abysmal. We are still hitting those who can least afford it.

Sentiment score: 0.19