The cost of living is rising at an alarming rate right across the board. Middle- and low-income households cannot keep up, particularly households on below €75,000. Those on €50,000, €60,000 and €70,000 used to be counted as being well-off. They are not now. Rents, mortgages, electricity, gas, motor fuel, food, health insurance and much more have all increased, not by single figures, but by double-digit figures on every hike. Meanwhile, wages and incomes have increased by 1% or 2% or not at all. In the case of housing, rents are skyrocketing due to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael's decision to remove the rent pressure zones, however meek they were. A lot of us on this side of the House wanted them nailed down tighter. The fact is their removal means double-digit increases are happening. Rent for a two-bedroom unit in County Laois has gone up by 34% in one year. Mortgage repayments are now higher because the overall capital sum being borrowed to keep up with galloping house prices is increasing. In Laois, there has been an increase of 12%, 13% or 14% in one year. Electricity and gas prices are increasing today by 8% on top of all the recent increases. Home heating oil is up 50% or 60%. Motor fuels have increased. We had better not forget about health insurance. Health insurance, which families, households and individuals are forced to get because we have not got Sláintecare yet, is going up two and three times a year. These are huge increases of 6%, 7%, 8% or 9% each time. At the same time, public money is being wasted. State projects have cost overruns. That needs to be curtailed. I will always argue for projects but we have to get value for taxpayers' money. We have IT systems that do not work. Construction projects that finish at double their budgets. There are layers upon layers of management and bureaucracy in public bodies that should be rationalised and streamlined. All of this and much more needs to be history. The Department of education has framework agreements for school projects, including school extensions. To provide an example, a two-classroom autism spectrum disorder, ASD, unit with an all-timber outside finish cost €2.7 million. Another unit 30 or 40 miles away, which I can show the Minister of State and have brought to the attention of the Department today, cost €2.05 million. It is completed in brick, is a bigger unit and has the ancillary rooms and everything else in it. These framework agreements need to be re-examined. I hope that the Minister of State and the senior officials are listening to what I am saying because this is an important issue and I hope it is brought to the attention of the Department of education. These framework agreements need to be looked at. There are a whole lot of measures that we need to take, but an immediate step would be to extend medical card cover until we get Sláintecare. Sláintecare, and the public health system it envisions, has to be prioritised. In the short term, we need to extend medical card cover to ordinary workers and families who cannot go to doctors to get medical treatment because they cannot afford to. That will help all of those who do not have medical cards but cannot afford health insurance. We need to bring in a windfall tax to be imposed on the large energy companies, including the wind farm owners where there are high profits, once profits go over a certain amount. That money should be used and ploughed into retrofitting for middle-income families who do not qualify for the free scheme and cannot afford to match the funding for the other schemes. There is an opportunity here. The people in the middle are caught. If someone is on social welfare, they rightly get the free scheme for fuel allowance. People under €75,000 are caught because they cannot afford the retrofitting or the electric car. The minimum wage needs to be increased to a living wage. We need to reintroduce the rent caps for each county. We need to speed up the retrofitting of households, including with solar panels. We need to scrap the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, CCPC, as it stands or else reform it. In my time here, I have heard and seen reports from it and it is a toothless tiger. It has turned out to be useless. Last year, €9.5 billion in excess was given out but nothing happened for workers. Nothing happened to the taxation of middle-income workers, those people on between €20,000 and €70,000. They got zero. The Government should not forget about them this year. It should adjust the tax bands to favour those low- and middle-income workers and not miss the opportunity again.

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