Today, the Central Statistics Office, CSO, published its latest property price index. I am sure the Tánaiste has seen the headlines. House prices have risen yet again quite significantly, but one of the interesting details in the CSO report is that the price of apartments has skyrocketed. The price of apartments in January was up 9% State-wide on the same period last year. Excluding Dublin, they were up an astonishing 12%. What that means, of course, is that for the people who invariably end up renting many of those apartments, rents are going to be higher. Tomorrow, the Residential Tenancies Board will publish its latest quarterly report and we are going to see, again, very significant impacts on rising rents. That is before we start to see the real impact of the Government's market rent reset. Those renters, as well as those people struggling to or who will eventually be able to buy homes, have to heat those homes. They have to feed their children. They have to access childcare and education. On every one of those indicators, the cost of living is getting increasingly unbearable. We hear in our constituency clinics, as I am sure the impressive number of the Government's own backbenchers behind the Tánaiste today also hear in their constituency clinics, that the scale of the cost-of-living crisis is having an impact on people that we are finding impossible to cope with because solutions are simply not being offered by the Government to address them. What my colleagues have done today is something very simple. There has been a very dramatic increase in the price of petrol, diesel and home heating oil that is impacting on huge numbers of working people, including working people on low incomes or those on modest or low pensions. We have given the Government a very simple, straightforward and immediate way of alleviating for an emergency period that enormous cost burden at a time when every other set of costs people have are rising. We come into these Private Members' motion and legislation debates week after week and we are accused of not having alternatives or solutions. This is one that is based on a similar intervention squeezed out of Government following Russia's unjust invasion of Ukraine. I cannot for the life of me understand why the Government is not simply saying "Yes" to this and that it will work with Sinn Féin because what is needed by the people we represent and the people the Government represents, and whose best interests it says it has in mind, is action, and they need it now. This motion would make a huge difference in these issues impacting on those families and single people. I urge the Government to rethink its position and support the motion.

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