I welcome the opportunity to speak on preparation for any type of future impact on our State. The one we had recently was obviously the ongoing fuel crisis related to Trump's illogical and downright dumb actions in the Strait of Hormuz and the way the United States and Israel are attacking the Iranian regime. It is an admittedly corrupt and murderous regime but that is not how you topple dictators, and we are suffering the consequences. Five years before that, we had to deal with the Covid pandemic. Ten years before that, we had a massive economic downturn, which successive Governments were responsible for making worse before we had to take those necessary but harsh measures that hurt a lot of people at the time. In general terms, we are in a period of boom again, although there have been warnings about the impact of AI on jobs and, as the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council says every year, our overdependence on a very small cohort of foreign multinationals. We have revenue right now that needs to be spent strategically but we do need to spend that money. There are several areas I wish to deal with in my brief amount of time to make a contribution. A recent interaction of mine was with the Taoiseach during Leaders' Questions, when I mentioned the issue of food security. What if we had some form of naval blockade or another global pandemic that impacted the supply of food to this country? I laid out a scenario in which our shelves would be seriously impacted within a couple of weeks. Long term, even though we have enough beef and dairy to supply 32 million people with, that is not a runner in terms of sustainability. In addition, without the imported feed and without the nitrate, our production capacity in that unhealthy way would be damaged. I mentioned issues like having a strategic food reserve, including being able to increase our tillage for strategic purposes, diversification into the likes of fava beans, which can be used for all sorts of protein, and making sure that, like the Netherlands, which is way ahead of us, we can actually react. The same thing relates to our oil reserves in the short to medium term. We should not let them go down or leave them in the hands of a private operator because we would be vastly stuck if the supply were to stop entirely. As regards the medium term, we heard the Minister, Darragh O'Brien, today try to wangle his way out of why we are not doing what we should be doing in terms of meeting our climate emissions targets. We have so much potential in the next two or three years to create that self-sufficiency. I note that the Minister did say the private wires legislation is coming. That will enable people who can have solar panels on their own houses to store the energy in batteries in those houses. It will also hopefully mean that when we are trying to encourage more people to go with EVs, and when they are in the newer housing estates operated by management companies, they can put a cable under the ground and get their domestic tariff. You can tackle climate change by still allowing people to drive. I am a firm believer in giving options for cycling and for public transport but in many areas in my constituency there are parking wars because people have no option but to drive. You give them somewhere to park and make it hard to get around in the immediate environment to encourage other modes of transport but you create sustainable communities by giving people different options. The key to giving people options is having energy self-security. While we have some progress in offshore wind, there have not been any new contracts for many years. We have some movement on solar but we have absolutely nothing on tidal or wave. We are way behind, laggards, compared with the likes of Denmark. Those two technologies might be in their infancy but we should be at the forefront in developing them. We should be identifying deepwater ports for this type of technology in order that with battery storage and green hydrogen conversion - and the best rate of this is 60% of overall power production - we are self-sufficient in energy so we have capacity to make revenue from data companies and export to the grid through France and the UK. There is a massive good news story as part of a global effort to reduce climate emissions but even if we are doing our bit and no one else is and things will get worse down the line, we need that food security and that energy self-sufficiency for whatever world faces us. We need to look at the money we have and spend it strategically now, borrowing if necessary, because we might not understand it right now but we are facing a wartime situation in terms of climate and future shocks around the globe.

Sentiment score: 0.03