Paul Nicholas Gogarty

Overall sentiment: -0.05
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We are moving the focus in the debate towards solutions for people to reduce their energy bills. I welcome this motion. As I said before, we need to be moving towards giving better grants for solar in households, including in the very short term plug-in solar. You can now go into Lidl in the UK and get some of these, which would cut your bills straight away. The focus of much of the debate has been on the short-term pressure and how the Government did not respond enough or fast enough to it. We have said that. I first referenced Ronald Reagan's term "voodoo economics" in 2002, talking about the bubble. I said bubble bubble would lead to toil and trouble, and it actually did with the demise of the Celtic tiger. Money does not fall off trees. You only have a certain amount of revenue coming in and you have to work within those constraints. We have had arguments on different sides of the House about protecting the most vulnerable and where the money should go. The renewables debate is a wartime situation because we are so dependent on fossil fuel imports. The next crisis down the road is going to result in more pain for people. We need to be looking at a wartime situation where we are putting our windfall assets into upgrading the grid and investing in offshore wind, tidal energy, solar and other capacity so that we are net exporters of energy through battery storage and green hydrogen. I am going to say this 50 more times during the lifetime of this Dáil, but we are not actually doing that. We are not ramping up. The Ukrainians could ramp up drone technology because it was an existential crisis for them. It is an existential crisis for the people of Ireland to be so dependent on foreign actors to heat our homes. We need to get real and start putting in that long-term investment.

Sentiment score: -0.05