Energy companies will keep “gouging” customers if the Government keeps providing credits to domestic customers, Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said.
Pressure needed to be put on the companies, he added, because they were factoring such subsidies into their costs.
“If you keep [giving] them, then we keep underpinning the gouging,” he said. “If you give €500 every year it will be factored in.”
He was referring to various energy credits for households issued by Government over recent years.
RM Block
Mr Martin was responding in the Dáil to Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald who highlighted reports that energy companies are charging householders three times the wholesale price.
“That’s price gouging, plain and simple; a rip-off, plain and simple,” she said. Ms McDonald said the report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) showed that Ireland has the highest electricity prices in Europe.
“These companies are refusing to pass on the drop in wholesale price to their customers,” she said.
“Big energy companies are making bumper profits on the backs of working households and hundreds of thousands of those already can’t afford to pay their bills.”
Ms McDonald said the Government was showing “deference” to the energy companies. “People have known for a long time that they are being gouged on their energy bills,” but she said the Government was doing nothing about it.
The Taoiseach accused her of always going after “the latest headlines” and asked why she went after the Government instead of “going after the companies”.
But Mr Martin said Minister for Energy Darragh O’Brien had established a national group to look at the regulatory framework governing the pricing of energy.
“We need more renewable energy,” but Ireland is almost 80 per cent reliant on imports and one of the fundamental factors affecting energy prices is the price of gas.
Ms McDonald said the IEA report confirmed Ireland had the highest prices in Europe but the Taoiseach said Ireland had the eighth-highest electricity prices in the EU when adjusted for “purchasing power parity”.
People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy said energy companies “are engaging in blatant profiteering on the backs of ordinary people.”
The Dublin Southwest TD said there were no controls to stop what Mr Martin himself referred to as “gouging”.
Asking what the Government would do to help people this winter, he called for energy credits to be reintroduced.
But the Taoiseach insisted that “we will not be introducing price controls. They failed in the past and they would fail again.”
