Leaders’ Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-09-24 ============================================================ Jennifer Whitmore (SD), Wicklow I thank the Tánaiste and I welcomed hearing the Minister talking about battery storage. It would have been better if the Government had not removed the battery storage grant in 2022 when Ukraine was invaded. That would have assisted. A lot of people have put in solar, but there are many hundreds of thousands of people who cannot afford to do it. It is those people who are really struggling. It is the low-to-middle-income earners who are finding it hard to move away from fossil fuels because they are not getting enough support from the Government. Rather than throwing good money hand over fist at these short-term, emergency, temporary measures that are incredibly costly and leave us with nothing to show for them at the end of the day, it would be better if all those billions of euro given in energy credits previously were actually doing their job and we did not have nearly 330,000 people in arrears on their electricity bills or 188,000 people in arrears on their gas bills. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:50+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-24