Windfall tax on energy ‘super-profits’ could generate hundreds of millions, Taoiseach says

A planned windfall tax on the “super-profits” of energy companies could bring in “a couple of hundred million euros” to be used to help families with energy costs, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said.

The Fine Gael leader made the remarks on Tuesday ahead of a Cabinet meeting at which Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan is to brief Ministers about how the Government plans to bring in a such a levy. The idea of a windfall tax was first mooted last year amid the surge in energy prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mr Varadkar said it would be introduced through two pieces of legislation “so that we can get it done quicker”.

The first Bill, he said, would deal with windfall profits by fossil fuel companies and the second, which will come after the Oireachtas summer recess, would cover the profits made by firms generating wind energy.

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“It will allow us to generate a couple of hundred million euros in additional taxation, which we can then use and ringfence to help families with the very high cost of energy at the moment,” he added.

Data centres

Separately, Mr Varadkar was asked for his response to new figures published about data centres and how they used as much electricity in Ireland last year as urban households.

The roughly 75 data centres in operation consumed 400 per cent more electricity in the final quarter of last year than they did in the same period in 2015. The Irish Times reported on Tuesday that the Coalition is set to resist calls from the Opposition to halt data centre growth despite their energy consumption increasing by 31 per cent.

Mr Varadkar said the Government has published a policy statement on data centres and that there are already restrictions on building new ones in places.

“There has to be – but we need to bear in mind two things,” he said.

The first, he said, is that more than 100,000 people work in tech industries in Ireland, their jobs are dependent on data centres and the companies involved contribute tens of billions in taxes. As a result, he said, data centres are “an important part of our economic infrastructure.”

[ Data centres Q&A: How big a drain are they on Ireland’s energy grid? ]

The second, he went on, was that data centres should be powered by renewable energy. “That’s why we’re putting so much into wind energy and solar and also crucially that they have backup power generation.”

Mr Varadkar said that in the unlikely event of a shortage of electricity supply, data centres have their own backup generators and “can actually contribute to the grid in an emergency rather than taking from it and that’s what we’ve put in place”.

Women of honour

Meanwhile, the Taoiseach said a meeting he and Tánaiste Micheál Martin, who is Minister for Defence, had with the Women of Honour group on Monday was a good one.

The group, which was the first to raise allegations of sexual assaults and a range of other abuses in the Defence Forces, has published its own proposed terms of reference for an inquiry into how such cases were handled. They have said the statutory inquiry proposed by the Government is too limited, and that a full tribunal is required.

Asked about the meeting, Mr Varadkar said: “One of the things that they very much said to me was that their experience was that they’ve already gone through various complaints procedures that were private and behind closed doors, and that’s why they felt the need to go public in the way that they did and that’s why they want a public inquiry.”

He said he understood the argument but the Government also has to listen to other survivor groups, including serving Defence Forces members and representative organisations. “We’re going to hear what people have to say in the round,” he said, adding the Government wants a statutory inquiry that works and ideally “doesn’t take too long”.

Mr Varadkar said he had been “involved in setting up inquiries to get to the truth thinking they’d be over in six months or a year” but that some are going on six or seven years later.

“So there’s a number of things we have to take into account but we’re very serious about this,” he added.