Windfall Tax on the Excess Profits of Energy Companies: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-30
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

I thank the Social Democrats for bringing forward this motion. What does it tell us about the sort of society and economy we live in that while most people are really suffering, with over 300,000 people in arrears and almost half of parents saying they are struggling to put adequate food on the table for their children, the electricity companies are making record profits? It tells us that the cost-of-living crisis is not a crisis for everyone. In fact, it is an opportunity for those at the top. The cost-of-living crisis, like the housing crisis and the health crisis, is really a robbery of ordinary working-class people and a transfer of wealth from the many to the few. That is what the cost-of-living crisis is about. How can we have record profits in electricity company after electricity company when people are struggling to afford electricity unless something is fundamentally wrong in how the whole society and economy is based? What is being prioritised are these companies' profits and not the needs of people to light and heat their homes and so on.
In 2023, under pressure from us and others, the Government did introduce a windfall tax. It was an inadequate tax and did not go far enough, but it raised nearly €500 million. It was then abolished. The record profits, however, have continued and have now accelerated in the context of Trump's imperialist wars in the Middle East. We have gone from having the cheapest electricity in Europe to having the most expensive electricity. The motion makes the point that on average Irish households pay almost €500 more than their counterparts across the EU. How on earth did that happen? The answer is simple. It is liberalisation. The privatisation and marketisation of our electricity system is the reason we are paying so much for electricity.
In the meeting of the artificial intelligence committee yesterday, I asked the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, CRU, if it thinks it is fair that ordinary householders pay twice as much per unit of electricity as data centres pay. The people struggling with the cost-of-living crisis are paying twice as much as those making massive profits, including some of the biggest corporations in the world. The answer was that this is liberalisation. It is yet another reason to oppose liberalisation, which has meant that prices have been going up for people and a slow and not a rapid energy transition. It means that the ESB, for example, which made almost €400 million in profits in the first half of this year, cannot legally use that money to reduce prices for ordinary people because it is set up on a for-profit, commercial mandate where it has to pretend it is just another private company operating in the market on a for-profit basis.
We need windfall taxes and price controls, but what we fundamentally need to do is to reverse the process of liberalisation and privatisation. We need to reconstitute the ESB on a not-for-profit basis and renationalise the energy system so we can prioritise a rapid transition to renewable energy and provide affordable electricity for ordinary householders.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-30