I had a look at petrol and diesel prices before I came into the Chamber. The Circle K on Belgard Road in Tallaght is charging €1.85 per litre for diesel and €1.84 per litre for petrol, even after the two rounds of VAT and excise cuts. A year ago, the average price for diesel was €1.76 and for petrol, it was €1.68. There is, therefore, still a big additional cost for ordinary people. In my constituency, many people are basically forced to drive because public transport is so bad and inadequate. It depends on where they are going, obviously. The least the Government should do during the fuel crisis - it should have done it a long time ago but it should do it now - is abolish fares for public transport and put on a load of additional buses so the service is made frequent and reliable. The other thing we need is to have price caps on petrol and diesel, so that every VAT and excise cut we see is not swallowed up by price increases. People need certainty that prices will not go any higher than €1.75 per litre, which is the price cap in People Before Profit's emergency price controls Bill. We first introduced that Bill during the previous energy crisis. It is even more important now when oil prices are so volatile and every day is bringing different news about when or if Trump and Netanyahu's illegal war will finally end. The Finance Bill is only a drop in the ocean compared to the worsening cost-of-living crisis people are facing every single day. It is not only motorists who need help with rising costs. It is everyone who is forced to cut back on their weekly shop. It is the four in ten parents who say they go without or with less so their kids can eat properly. It is everyone who cannot pay rents that the Government has decided should go higher and higher in order to attract in more vultures to resolve our supply problem, ultimately some day long into the future. It is everyone who is behind on their energy bills, hundreds of thousands of people, because prices are the highest in Europe. It is disabled people who had about €1,400 cruelly taken from them in the most recent budget, despite the Government having billions of euro in surplus. Now, we have the ESB announcing another 8% increase in electricity and gas prices. People are at the end of their tether; they just have not got it. They cannot be bled dry by the Government, landlords and energy companies any longer. The rip-off off has to stop. Apart from the electricity price increases we are seeing - we saw a report last week from Friends of the Earth - it is because this Government is beholden to big tech. It is because the Government has laid out the red carpet for big tech and their data centres to use as much electricity as they want. We heard this morning in the Joint Committee on Artificial Intelligence that we are potentially on track to reaching the point where data centres use as much electricity as the rest of the economy and the rest of society combined. They currently use well over 20% of electricity, but we are on track to them using 50% of electricity in this country. That is pushing up prices for ordinary people in this country who have already paid hundreds of euro as a consequence of that. The Government likes to defend this position with unfounded, ridiculous claims in terms of jobs. It has been trotting out a KPMG report claiming 870,000-odd jobs are related to data centres. The report counted every job that uses cloud computing, thereby fundamentally missing the point of what it is for something to be in the cloud. It means it can be accessed anywhere, which means there is no benefit to it being around the corner from us or even in the same country, as opposed to being somewhere else. It is interesting that the Government used to answer questions in the past about how many people are directly working for data centres. Five or six years ago, however, it simply stopped answering questions about that. It just refused to answer that question and instead talked about all the people who benefit from the data centres. However, if we read what comes from the data centre lobbyists themselves, they let the cat out of the bag. There was an article in The Irish Times in December of last year in which Tom Parlon, the representative of the data centre lobbyists in this country, spoke about them directly employing 1,800 people. How many jobs are lost as a consequence of the data centres and the use of AI to replace jobs? We have seen that in Covalen and we are seeing it elsewhere in the economy. More jobs are being lost as a result of these data centres than are being added. We need to tackle this. A serious plan to tackle the cost-of-living crisis simultaneously involves tackling the climate crisis. It means trying to reduce energy usage instead of expanding it, having no more data centres, getting people out of cars into free and frequent public transport and having a nationalised, not-for-profit electricity system that drives investment in renewables. With that comes price controls so that we give people certainty while the transition takes place. The other thing that has to happen is a fight for higher wages. A few weeks ago, I introduced a Bill that would guarantee apprentices and young workers are paid at least the national minimum wage. That should not sound like a very big ask and it is should not require legislation. Right now, craft apprentices are being paid as little as €7.67 an hour, which is €6.48 less than the national minimum wage. We have a national minimum wage that is inadequate and is recognised not to be the living wage and then we legally say that young people - those under the age of 20 - and apprentices are legally allowed to be paid a lot less than this inadequate minimum wage. On what planet are people meant to survive on €7.67 an hour? A first-year motor mechanic wrote to me after I introduced the Bill, saying that he is working 40 hours a week on €6.20 an hour. He is expected to pay for his own tools with only a €250 tool allowance. He points out that to even get an apprenticeship in most trades, you have to have a driver's licence, so he has to pay extortionate insurance on top of car loan repayments. He is walking away with €250 a week and is left with only €120 after bills. He says that "taking into account the rising cost of living and the expenses of day-to-day life, it's nearly unbearable and as a worker, I feel disheartened and it's hard to get out of bed in the morning some days." On top of this, he says "the greed of trade employers in Ireland is sickening". I could not agree more. That greed and the dismissive attitude of this Government towards young workers are directly contributing to the housing crisis because it means there are not enough skilled construction workers to build the houses that we need. There are not enough skilled mechanics to run the bus service properly. A lack of mechanics is the main reason that Dublin Bus and Go-Ahead constantly give for ghost buses and cancellations. Another 20-year-old apprentice wrote to me to say: The lack of young lads and women going into trade is because of the terrible pay that every employer in Ireland's paying them. I'm looking to move out of home and buy or build a house but I can't afford to do so because I can't get a mortgage from the bank because I'm an apprentice and making far less than the minimum wage. The situation of young workers and apprentices sums up the cost-of-living crisis for many people in this country. Wages are far too low and the cost of living is far too high. What is the Government doing in response? The Low Pay Commission recommended abolishing subminimum wage rates for young workers back in March 2024. That was after we had proposed a Bill to abolish these rates for young workers in the Dáil. It passed Second Stage. The Government placed a timed amendment of one year on it, the year passed and the Government said we needed to look into it. The Low Pay Commission looked into it, as did the ESRI, and it recommended that they be abolished. The Government then promised to look into it but then about a year ago, it said it was not going to do anything on it until 2029. It would not make a decision and we do not even have a commitment that it will abolish these incredible, exploitative subminimum wage rates in 2029. We just have a commitment that the Government is going to think about it in 2029. In the meantime, more and more employers are using subminimum pay rates as a loophole to avoid paying the minimum wage. The number being paid less than the minimum wage has gone up from 20%, or one in five in 2020, to 30%, or almost one in three young workers being legally paid less than the minimum wage. Now we have Fianna Fáil TDs talking about bypassing the Low Pay Commission altogether and using a different mechanism to set the minimum wage that gets rid of any benchmarking with the public sector or multinational pay rates. The only reason to do so is to keep the minimum wage artificially low in order that bosses can make even bigger profits. It is obvious from how this Government is treating workers that it thinks it can do whatever it wants and workers will not fight back. However, the fuel protests show that when people power takes it on, the Government is weak and can be forced to crumble very quickly and give concessions. The reason the hauliers and transport operators are getting a bailout in this Bill is that they forced it out of the Government through militant protest. The lesson there for the trade union movement is that politely going into pay talks over and over and playing by the rules is getting it nowhere. The Government has proved it will only listen to militant protest. That is what workers need to do. They need to get organised into trade unions and they need to fight within those trade unions for militant action for above-inflation pay rates to ensure they are not left behind and put in a position of deeper and deeper deprivation as a consequence of the cost-of-living crisis.

Sentiment score: -0.13