I welcome the supports for ordinary people in this motion, but they do not go far enough. People are really suffering. They cannot afford food, rent, or childcare. There are 500,000 people who are in arrears on their electricity and gas bills. We need more than once-off cost-of-living payments and temporary excise cuts. We need a radical transformation of how this country is run. Instead of the Ireland for the rich we currently have, we need an Ireland where people come before profit. We are not going to get that from this Government or from right wing Independents. Noticeably missing from the motion is anything to do with rents. Rents are one of the biggest costs for very many people. They are going up at a record rate and the motion has nothing to say about it. Independent Ireland might come back at the end and explain why rents are missing. Is it because it is a party is made up of ex-Fianna Fáilers that represents the landlords, just like Fianna Fáil does? Is it because Independent Ireland would prefer people to blame immigrants for the housing crisis, rather than the landlords who profit from the crisis? People Before Profit want price caps on energy to give people certainty about costs. To do that we need to bring our energy system back into public ownership and run it on a not-for-profit basis to provide permanently low-cost, renewable electricity to every household in the country. We need massive public investment in offshore wind and solar. We need free retrofitting and solar panels for every household that needs it, including plug-in solar for renters and free, frequent and fast public transport. We also need to stop building data centres. Again, there is nothing in the motion about the data centres that are currently using about a quarter of our electricity and driving up energy costs for everyone. The Government wants to build even more. It wants to pretend they will somehow save the tech jobs in Meta, Covalen and Oracle that are being decimated as we speak. One bit of the Government’s countermotion that really stands out is the acknowledgement that "fossil fuel dependence, especially imported fossil fuels, is a major economic vulnerability;". I agree but this morning’s EPA report shows the Government has no interest in cutting fossil fuel dependency to protect us from the climate and cost-of-living crises. It is going to miss the 2030 emissions target by more than half and possibly by three quarters. A pathetic 4% reduction in emissions from agriculture, which is our biggest-emitting sector, is projected with existing measures. Given Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael prioritise profits above all else, you would think they at least might take action on the economic risk of being faced with having to pay up to €26 billion as a consequence but no chance. The climate Minister is back to openly admitting he is going to break the Government’s own climate law after claiming it was taken out of context when he first said it over Christmas. It is nearly June and there is still no climate action plan for 2026 and no date for when it is going to be published. Is that the vital political leadership the Taoiseach bloviated about at COP30 in Belém? People should be very angry about this. The Government’s failure to get us out of fossil fuel dependency is costing us thousands of euro on our energy bills, destroying the climate and is going to cost us billions of euro in climate fines that could have been spent on transitioning to low-cost renewable energy.

Sentiment score: 0.01