The war in the Middle East is in its sixth day and the price of oil and gas is continuing to skyrocket. People are now being charged absolutely extortionate prices for home heating oil. The Tánaiste saying he is going to monitor the situation and keep it under review is of absolutely no use to people facing big bills right now. The increases are absolutely outrageous. How are elderly people on pensions supposed to pay these extortionate costs? This includes vulnerable people and those with medical conditions. They need to be able to heat their homes. They will be going cold either because they are rationing their heating or they simply cannot afford to fill their tanks. Families with young children who are already struggling to get by are also feeling rising panic. They do not have a spare €500 sitting in their bank accounts to heat their homes. They are already living day to day, with every cent in their budget accounted for. What they are now seeing is an avalanche of price rises coming towards them on everything from groceries and childcare costs to energy bills, and they get virtually no support from the Government. Instead, all the Government seems to do is introduce measures to push up prices even further and make their lives even harder, such as the recent changes to rents that are causing soaring rent rises in new tenancies. On Tuesday, the Taoiseach was clear that price-gouging is going on. Yesterday, the Minister, Deputy Chambers, accused companies of profiteering. That is all we get from this Government - empty words and meaningless rhetoric but no action or meaningful support. We are now told that the Minister, Deputy Burke, is hauling in representatives from energy companies for a meeting. This echoes the infamous supermarket summit in 2023. Back then, the Minister of State, Deputy Richmond, talked tough about putting manners on supermarket chains. He called a meeting with them and promised that prices would come down. What actually happened? He turned up, wagged his finger and went home. Nothing changed and prices continued to soar. The meeting was nothing more than an exercise in optics, something the Government could say it was doing when, in reality, it was sitting on its hands, just like it is doing today. We are now in an extraordinary position where we have a succession of senior Ministers talking about profiteering and accepting that price-gouging is going on but, in the next breath, saying they will not take any meaningful action. A review by the toothless consumer agency is not going to cut it when people have bills to pay today. The Social Democrats have proposed a fully costed, targeted €400 energy credit that would provide some relief to people. The Government has refused to adopt it. Will the Tánaiste now change his position and introduce this measure?
Sentiment score: -0.03
Tá díomá mór orm le freagra an Tánaiste. Tá níos mó agus níos mó daoine nach féidir a gcuid billí a íoc. A total of 320,000 homes are in electricity arrears before these prices increased in the past few days. That is the scale of the problem we are facing in the country. What the Government is doing is not addressing that. With regard to the fines being issued and the CCPC, when was the last time it issued a significant fine to a large company? It has issued small fines to small companies and retailers around price information, but when has it issued fines in the millions of euro for this kind of price-gouging that is going on? When has it taken that kind of action? People are faced now with a serious issue as to how they will heat their homes and where they will get the money to do so. The Tánaiste saying that the Government will monitor the situation and keep it under review is of no use to them. They need the Government to act now. Will it take action for people who cannot heat their homes because of the electricity arrears they are already in and these huge increases in the past few days?
Sentiment score: 0.02
Some 320,000 households are in arrears.
Sentiment score: 0.00