I thank Sinn Féin for introducing this Bill on electricity regulation. People Before Profit is happy to support this, which is a serious attempt to address the issue of the energy price hikes and the energy poverty that has resulted from those as well as the price gouging and profiteering of energy companies. The idea that there would be a body in legislation that would monitor price gouging and price levels is an admirable one and we are happy support it and see it go to the next Stage. I have to be honest, though, and say that we need to go a lot further than this. There is immediate stuff, which I am sure Sinn Féin would agree with and that others have articulated, about energy credits and the cuts that were imposed in the budget this year, but this Bill is obviously an attempt to deal more structurally with the whole issue of price hikes, profiteering and price gouging. It would be good to monitor pricing, and we need to monitor it, and this Bill has provisions on protection against unfair pricing and so on, but it is still predicated on a privatised and deregulated market. I believe the problem is the privatised, deregulated market. If we look at electricity, what has happened is absolutely clear. I said this to Professor John FitzGerald today in our committee and, surprisingly, he agreed with me. I will be careful to say he agreed with me "to some degree". I find it grimly amusing to go back to 2011 when Eamon Ryan fully and finally deregulated the Irish electricity market and read what he said. He said that competition was going to be good for the consumer, that we were going to have competition in the market and that prices were going to go down. He said the consumer was going to benefit. This process had started under Fianna Fáil. I think Mary O'Rourke was the Minister back in 2001, and then Noel Dempsey. The Electricity (Supply) (Amendment) Act 2001 removed the not-for-profit mandate of the ESB. Eamon Ryan finally removed all regulations on price in 2011. It was all based on private competition and how deregulating the market would benefit the consumer because competition leads to prices going down. However, the exact opposite happened. All the market claptrap and dogma did not lead to prices going down and did not benefit the consumer. The prices went up almost immediately. Profits for the ESB and all the other energy players went through the roof and have consistently continued to go through the roof since then, as have prices for ordinary householders. We went from being under a regulated market that was not for profit, where the ESB controlled the market and we had the lowest electricity prices in Europe, to being deregulated, privatised and with the highest electricity prices in Europe. That is what happened. It is obvious when you look at the profits being made that that is the problem. We need to take that sector back into public control, not because it is a good idea coming from the lefties but because it worked. We had it before and it worked, and we should not have fixed what was not broken. We had good electricity prices. The ESB was a fantastic company. Then, a market dogma and claptrap were introduced and we have paid a bitter price for it. Half a million ordinary people, as a result, are in arrears on electricity and gas. That is where it ends, with super profits for the energy companies. Let us go back to what we used to have, which was a company that had a not-for-profit mandate and where there was not massive profiteering. I also believe we just need to introduce energy price controls. We have them. We do not even need new legislation for this. Fianna Fáil, for all the criticism I have of it, brought in legislation, the Consumer Protection Act, which actually empowers the Government to impose price controls when there is an emergency. Why on earth did Fianna Fáil bring it in? It did so presumably because it thought we might need it some time, but it has never used it and it refuses to use it, even though this is the definition of an emergency in terms of the cost of energy. There is a war going on and prices have gone through the roof and people cannot people pay their bills because of it, and there are the price hikes that have made energy unaffordable. Why on earth do we have something on the Statute Book that was designed for exactly that situation but we refuse to use it? We should impose the price controls that that consumer protection legislation empowers the Government to use. The Government will not do it because it seems to think it is okay that people are profiteering off the cost-of-living misery that ordinary people are suffering, or maybe it is a commitment to market dogma, or both, but it has failed us.

Sentiment score: 0.11