Fine Gael TD Simon Coveney has warned that Ireland may be on the brink of further financial disaster. Speaking in NUI Galway on Monday Deputy Coveney said Ireland is on the verge of yet another massive economic crisis and that is because we are totally overexposed by having to import the fossil fuels that actually drive our economy.
He was speaking as part of NUI Galway’s Green Week, which aims to help create awareness of how students and staff can reduce their impact on the environment.
The Fine Gael Spokesperson for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources said that Ireland’s overdependence on oil places the country in a dangerous position.
“At any moment in time there could be a dramatic price hike in terms of oil and what that will mean is that there will be a knock on price increase in terms of gas and coal which will have a devastating effect on the Irish economy, which is already an economy that is too expensive for people to do business here.”
Deputy Coveney was speaking on Fine Gael’s €18.2 billion economic stimulus programme NewERA, which is designed to improve Ireland’s competitiveness. The programme contains proposals on the sale of ‘non-strategic’ State assets such as An Bord Gais and the reform of the country’s communications, water, and energy infrastructure. Fine Gael has estimated that NewERA could generate 105,000 new jobs over the next four years in the planning, construction and operation of key infrastructure projects.
He noted that if he had proposed the stimulus programme two years ago he would have met with stiff opposition: “Unions would have accused me of having a privatisation agenda, other politicians even within Fine Gael, would say: ‘You cannot possibly touch a company like the ESB or Bord Gais, these are state companies, state assets, they can’t be restructured- they are too powerful.’”
However Deputy Coveney said that the current economic climate has meant that people are now more willing to recognise that the radical reform of the country’s infrastructure is needed to aid financial recovery:
“Now because of the cul-de-sac we have been driven down economically, we need to find new ways of thinking, challenge ‘sacred cows’ that nobody would dare touch two or three years ago.”
He suggested one of the key long-term goals of the NewERA programme is to make Ireland self-sufficient in terms of energy production, with the focus being placed on biofuels, water and wind. According to Deputy Coveney the Government spends €400 million per year importing fossil fuels to heat public buildings alone. “Whether it’s the petrol and diesel that drives our cars or whether it’s the gas that drives power plants or the coal or oil that heats our homes, we import them,” he said. “ Ninety-five per cent of all the fuel we use is imported.”
Deputy Coveney believes that Galway has a major advantage in the field of energy however because the city has the best wind consistency in Europe: “There’s a lot of wind blowing across this island. If we could capture it cleverly and cost effectively we could generate a huge amount of our own electricity from renewable resources that are free.”
The Cork South Central TD also commented on recent water supply problems and estimated that about 50 per cent of the water treated in Ireland leaks through pipes before it reaches its destination. “You in Galway know what it’s like to have no water for long periods of time,” he said. “We know now in Cork what it is like as well. For 10 days 22,000 homes in Cork had no water following the flooding.” Under the NewERA programme a new state company would control the water infrastructure. Speaking about the current system whereby 34 local authorities are responsible for delivering water to consumers Deputy Coveney said: “We are actually flushing taxpayers’ money literally down the toilet.”
Deputy Coveney said that because the country experiences so much rainfall Irish people consider water to be free and do not realise that it is a hugely expensive and valuable resource. He stated that the average Irish person uses almost twice as much water as our European counterparts and proposed that an allowance of 80 litres of water per day be introduced, beyond which consumers would have to pay a fee: “Think of it like this, if every time you had to flush the toilet you had to fill the cistern with a bottle of Ballygowan then you might begin to realise how much water costs because water isn’t any cheaper for the State to produce in your tap than it is for Ballygowan to put it in a bottle. ”
