I was calling round to people's houses in Dublin Central the other night and met a woman who said to me "Everything's going up. My rent is going up" - she is a Dublin City Council tenant - "The price of petrol is going up. Groceries are going up. Everything is going up except for my wages." She is right. Statistically, that is the case. Prices are up almost a quarter over the past five years and people are really struggling out there. The Government's response suggests that it either does not get it or does not care. After housing costs, one in five people was at risk of poverty or lived in relative poverty last year, with over 300,000 people in arrears on and unable to afford to pay their electricity bills. That was before the coming increases hit. The most incredible statistic, which I say over and over again, is the fact that four in ten parents in this country, which is one of the richest countries in the world, say that they are either going without meals or cutting back on their meal sizes so that their kids can have enough to eat it. It is absolutely scandalous. Many of these people rightly went out to support the fuel protests. There was a collection taken in the flats, and they brought down sandwiches, tea and coffee to the protesters to say "Fair play", because they said that someone was standing up to the Government and calling for action on fuel prices. If we look at what the Government has given, with regard to the €500 million package, ordinary people get some benefit in terms of reductions of taxes on petrol and diesel with tiny reductions in terms of home heating oil. There is some benefit now, but that could be wiped away tomorrow by Trump's deepening imperialist adventures in the Middle East. However, the other half of the package is for businesses; it is not for ordinary people at all. The lion's share of those supports will go not to small businesses, which were involved in many of the protests, but instead to the big businesses. That is who the Government is looking out for all the time. The Government often likes to say in here that the Opposition only has criticism and we do not have any solutions but the key immediate answer to the fuel crisis is something we have been calling for well over two years now. We have had legislation for it for well over two years, which is the idea of price caps and is precisely the main demand of the fuel protestors. The problem is the original measures the Government brought in a couple of months ago were wiped out, as we predicted, by the rise in the international price of oil and what has been done recently can be wiped out again. The only way to give people security and to cut across the profiteering we are seeing, for example, on an international scale with BP, which doubled its profits in the first quarter of this year compared to the first quarter of last year, is to do these price controls. That is an immediate measure to give people security and to stop the profiteering taking place. That needs to happen. Workers need to be on the streets to demand that happens and to say we need to have universal measures, not measures that benefit businesses. We need universal measures like price caps, a €500 energy credit to every household and funded by the data centres which are using more electricity than all our households put together and yet are paying half the price of the electricity that ordinary people pay. We also need measures to move us away from reliance on fossil fuels, which is what has put us into this position in the first place, such as free public transport, the rollout of retrofitting, solar panels, free attic insulation and so on. That would move us off the reliance on fossil fuels that the Government has got us into. However, there is a lesson from the protests which is that unless you can cause significant destructive action, if you are not a fast-food giant, a developer or a major multinational like Google, the Government is not going to listen to you. Workers need to prepare for a massive day of action. Preparation for that will start tomorrow at the May Day protest at 6.30 p.m. at Parnell Square in town but that needs to be just the first step towards a major national day.

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