Sinn Féin has called on the Minister for the Environment to urgently appear before the Oireachtas Climate Committee amid concerns of energy blackouts this winter.
Darren O'Rourke said that Minister Eamon Ryan must answer questions over "serious concerns about the prospect of electricity blackouts and runaway energy costs this winter".
The party's spokesperson on Climate Action said that the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU), EirGrid and the Minister should all appear before the committee "in advance of the Dáil's return".
The Government has commissioned a review of energy supply, prompted by widespread concerns over blackouts this winter.
"I think people would perhaps have expected an earlier warning system in relation to some of this that is materialising," Taoiseach Micheál Martin said in Bantry, Co Cork yesterday.
However, an expert has branded that remark as "strange".
Dr Barry Hayes told RTÉ's News at One that recent system alerts over possible outages on the national grid should not be a "cause for panic".
The Principal Investigator in Power Systems Engineering at University College Cork said that "the risk to our security of our electricity supply shouldn't come as a surprise".
"These issues have been developing and have been flagged over a number of years," he added.
Issue was 'ignored', former ESB head claims
The potential shortage of energy supply has "nothing to do with the war in Ukraine", the former head of ESB International has said.
Don Moore said that while the war was "unpredictable", the issue has come to the fore because a shortage in supply has been ignored.
Speaking on RTÉ's Today with Claire Byrne, he said that crisis "first emerged into the public last October", but that it had been "ignored", amid hopes "that it would go away".
Mr Moore said that Eirgrid had originally identified an anticipated gap between supply and demand in 2017, when the Commission for Regulation of Utilities was "tasked with encouraging developers to build new generation in the Irish system."
He said that this process failed because the terms offered were not attractive to developers.
Earlier, Fianna Fáil MEP Billy Kelleher warned that demand will outstrip energy supply and this could pose a risk to the security of the State.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Mr Kelleher said that the introduction of a million electric vehicles in the coming years will create a "huge increase in energy demand".
He pointed to a "policy failure right through the entire system", and said urgent action is needed if there is to be enough energy this winter.
