There seems to be a pattern but anyway. Irish households are being ripped off in their energy bills. Even the Taoiseach has acknowledged it. Last week at the joint committee, we were told that price gouging cannot be ruled out. The ESRI called for a fresh inquiry into our sky-high energy prices. We introduced legislation a few years ago to stop this, but we were ignored, and since then there are record numbers in arrears, price hikes across the board and vital supports such as energy credits withdrawn and ripped aw…

I thank the Minister of State for the reply. I agree to some extent with him that it is a commercial issue. Obviously all the energy companies have a responsibility to their shareholders not only to have the same amount of profit but to have an increased amount the following year and the year after that. I agree with the Minister of State that hedging is an issue. The Government can see that prices do not come down as quickly as they go up. He said that energy costs in Ireland are the 12th highest in Europe, but wh…

It certainly is not market failure for the energy companies because they are making huge profits. We have called since 2023 for a dedicated hedging monitoring unit so that the regulator can oversee and regulate hedging because the energy companies need to be held to account and to justify the increase in prices. The regulator must also treat energy as a public good. In the coming months, we are going to see an extra €1 tacked onto bills to invest in the grid. Price review 6 also has worrying price increases coming …

Ireland is wasting over €400 million every year on surplus energy. The programme for Government says that legislation could be enacted to divert surplus renewable energy to homes that are in fuel poverty. The amount being wasted has jumped from over €250 million in 2023. I ask the Minister of State to outline a timeline for the delivery of the diversion of wasted energy to the households that need it the most.

I thank the Minister of State for the reply. As I said earlier, the figure for wasted energy was €250 million in 2023 but it is now almost half a billion euro. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of households are in debt and energy poverty has reached record levels. Approximately €1.3 million worth of energy has gone down the drain today. This would have heated 390 million water tanks but that 1.2 GW of power was lost forever. EnergyCloud has a model to divert this waste into a public good. It has a concept an…

The reality is that there are difficulties with our grid, which is very constrained. Investment in the grid must take place, which the Minister of State mentioned in response to the previous question. However, the cost of that should not be borne by ordinary householders but by the State and by larger energy consumers. A big part of the problem is that data centres are taking up almost one third of Ireland's energy. The surge in energy demand from data centres has already led to housing not being delivered. One suc…

I want to talk in the few minutes I have about some capital projects in Kerry, which badly need to be progressed. In a county like Kerry, with 13 blue flag beaches, mountains, lakes and coastline that are the envy of many, unfortunately we have a major structural deficit. In order for people to reside in their own home areas, we need a massive injection of funding to bring us up to a level that is taken for granted in some of those other counties. Yesterday, I was in Castlegregory, where I met Pat Barry and John Bu…

-----but there is still no sign of it. Would the Minister ever get that published so that the people can have answers and be included in the scheme, and so that the children who are at risk of heavy weight gain and an awful lot of other difficulties are not further punished by having to pay for their own medical reports? If they are in the scheme, they do not have to pay for it. It is inexcusable that they have not been included in it to date.

I am glad the Minister has recognised that there has been confusion, a lack of clarity and three different types of scenarios in the way this money has been dispensed. I received an email from one constituent informing me that on her last visit to the chemist to pick up her 80-year-old mother's prescriptions, she was informed that the blister pack charge would be increasing to €7.50 per week from 1 January 2026. She was shocked at the extra €5 per week, an increase of 200%. She said that she currently pays €10 a mo…

The Bryan MacMahon hall at Scoil Réalta na Maidine in Listowel, which is named after the former principal and writer, was built around 1960. Its roof is in a bad state at the moment. There is no internal membrane in the roof and no felt inside the slates. Plaster has fallen in from the attic and there is significant mould and woodworm due to water ingress and a lack of insulation. It needs a total overhaul. The school was refused funding under the emergency works scheme two years ago and was recently unsuccessful i…

Beidh mé ag roinnt mo chuid ama leis na Teachtaí O'Hara, Ní Fhearghail, O'Rourke agus Newsome Drennan. I have come from the committee the Minister mentioned and apologise for being a couple of minutes late. Workers and families across the country are being hammered by soaring energy costs and it is happening on this Government's watch. Despite all the promises made before the election to protect workers and families from further increases in energy bills that were already eye-watering, the opposite is being done. F…

Energy is not just about power; it is about sovereignty, security, just transition, the future we leave to our children and fairness to communities. I come from the county of Kerry, which has 15% of the turbines with only 8% of the land mass. I saw the troubles over the years when what Deputy Fitzmaurice described as vultures came in and there was a lot of division in communities. In Sinn Féin, we stand for ending the rip-off and cutting household energy bills, for delivering true Irish energy independence and not …

I wish the former Minister, Deputy Donohoe, all the best. The Government is developing a new diaspora strategy. The Coventry Irish Centre has been supporting Irish immigrants since 1953 and it continues to do that in welfare, health, befriending and helping people with passports. It has supported 500 survivors of residential institutions since the 1990s. However, it has no permanent home and has had to move five times since 2015. In the new strategy I ask the Tánaiste to include a provision whereby all of the great…

Last night, the Government had a chance to vote for measures that would cut the cost of living. Instead, it stood firm and decided to continue the rip-off. The irony of the Government putting statements out the day after it rejected the very measures that would have brought down the cost of driving and haulage for SMEs should not be lost on anyone here. I cannot say that I am looking forward to the excuses. For the Government, today's debate is a box-ticking exercise that allows it to lip service to a problem it is…

Mercosur is a rotten deal for people and for the planet and it must be rejected. The Government of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the regional Independents, including the Healy-Rae brothers, is selling out Ireland, abandoning our farmers and signing a blank cheque for environmental degradation and destruction the world over because there is no doubt this is just the beginning and it will put the farm families out of business. They are rolling out the red carpet for imports, packed with banned pesticides, hormones and a…

From the eye-watering price of petrol and diesel to the spiralling cost of insurance, drivers are being hammered with skyrocketing costs at every turn. I ask the Minister of State if he will defer the January 2026 toll increase and if he will make a statement about it. It is a clear political choice from Government, the Ministers and all their supporters. Will the Government have the same courage of its convictions as it did before the elections, when the Minister himself called for the toll charge increases to be …

I hear the Minister of State's response but it is very disappointing because he, the Government and the Minister over in Brazil are trying to wash their hands of it. However, the general public and the voters will see right through this because during the last general election campaign, the Minister himself called for the toll hikes to be scrapped. Has there been a change of mind since then or was it never really meant by the Government? Was it another broken promise in the run-up to the election? Denying responsib…

The Minister of State has not answered the question about deferring the tolls and whether the Government is going to do that. It has the power to do it and there are other measures it can also take to cut the cost of living and the spiralling costs for drivers. We outlined these in a Private Members’ Bill last week, which we will be voting on tomorrow evening. The progress that was spoken about in the response last week is as absent as the countermotion, which was supposed to be issued last week, but which never ma…

If the Minister for Transport was here, I would ask him to report on the scheme for the free travel for five- to eight-year-olds. I would also ask him to report on the roll-out of the scheme. This has been heralded for a long time. I do not know how much money was spent on it or what testing was done but there have been problems with it. We have had complaints that the cards do not actually work. There seems to be problems on both Bus Éireann and Iarnród Eireann services. What is the Government doing to address the…

It is true we in Sinn Féin support this measure but it has to work in practice. I agree it is good there have been 25,000 cards and agree on the gathering of data to ensure public transport is available to more children and citizens into the future. However, the roll-out has not been going to plan. First of all, it took about a year to get it off the ground and the scheme was not officially launched until September. Even worse, some of the cards required to access the scheme do not work. Parents have contacted us t…