Richard Boyd Barrett: Reclaim Energy, End Price Gouging

Well thanks to Sinn Féin for bringing forward this bill on electricity regulation and People Before Profit are 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 the energy price hikes and the price gouging and the profiteering of energy companies. So the idea that there would be a body and legislation that would monitor price gouging, price levels is an admirable idea and we're happy to support it and certainly see it go to the next stage. I have to be honest and say I think we need to go a lot further though than this. I mean there's immediate stuff which has been talked about and Church and Fine indeed would agree and others have articulated about energy credits, about the cuts that were imposed in the budget this year but this is obviously an attempt to deal more structurally with the whole issue of price hikes and profiteering and price gouging. Now I think we have to say that while it would be good to monitor it and we need to monitor it and it has provisions about the protection against unfair pricing and so on, it's still predicated on a privatised and deregulated market, this bill. Now I believe the problem is the privatised deregulated market and I think any fair assessment of what has happened to, if you look at electricity, it's absolutely clear. In fact I find it and I said this to John Fitzgerald today and surprisingly he agreed with me in our committee or to some degree, I'll be careful about that, to some degree agreed with me. I find it grimly amusing that when you go back to 2011 when Eamon Ryan finally deregulated, fully and finally deregulated the Irish electricity market, read what he said. He said competition is going to be good for the consumer, we're going to have competition in the market and prices are going to go down. The consumer is going to benefit. This process had started under Fianna Fáil, I think Mary O'Rourke was the minister back in 2001, then Noel Dempsey, where, I can't remember all the names of the legislators, legislation, the Electricity Supply Amendment Act in 2001, which removed the not-for-profit mandate of DSB. But Eamon Ryan finally removed all regulations on price in 2011 and it was all based on private business, competition, deregulating the market will benefit the consumer, because competition don't you know leads to prices going down. What happened? The exact opposite happened. The exact opposite happened. All the market claptrap and dogma didn't produce prices going down, didn't benefit the consumer, they went up. They went up almost immediately. Profits for DSB went through the roof and have consistently continued to go through the roof since then and all the other energy players and prices for the ordinary householder. So we went under a regulated market which was not-for-profit where DSB controlled the market, lowest electricity prices in Europe, deregulated, privatised, highest electricity prices in Europe. That's what happened and it's obvious isn't it when you look at the profits that are being made that that is the problem. So we need to take that sector back under into public control. Not because it's a good idea coming from the lefties but because that's where it worked. We had it before and it worked and we shouldn't have fixed what wasn't broken because we had good electricity prices. ESB was a fantastic company but then a market dogma and claptrap was introduced and we have paid a bitter price for it. And ordinary people as a result are half a million people in arrears for electricity and gas. That's where it ends. But super profits for the energy companies. So let's go back to what we used to have which was a company which had a not-for-profit mandate and where there wasn't massive profiteering. I also believe we just need to introduce energy price controls because you see we have it and we don't even need new legislation for this. Fianna Fáil, for all the criticism I have of them, they brought in legislation, the Consumer Protection Act, which actually empowers the government to impose price controls when there's an emergency. Now why on earth did they bring it in? They brought it in presumably because they thought sometime we might need it. But they've never used it and they refuse to use it. Even though this is a definition of an emergency in terms of the cost of energy. It's a definition. It's a war going on and prices have gone through the roof because of a war and people can't pay their bills because of a war and the price hikes that have made energy unaffordable. Why on earth do we have something on the statute books that was designed for exactly that situation but we refuse to use it? So we should impose the price controls that that consumer protection legislation empowers the government to use. They won't do it because they seem to think it's okay that people are profiteering off the cost of living misery that ordinary people are suffering. Or maybe it's commitment to market dogma or both. But it's failed us.