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What the opposition has been demanding is more or less the same as in 2022: it wants universal once-off payments for households to sweeten the bitter pill of expected big increases in electricity and gas prices.

The hikes in gas prices have not happened yet but given the tit-for-tat attacks on gas fields in Iran and Qatar last week, we can expect to see our bills go up like a rocket in the next few weeks.

There were a couple of things that the government did in 2022 that it doesn’t want to repeat. It gave payments of €200 to households to help with energy costs. It also reduced excise duties on petrol and diesel – 21 cent for petrol and 15 cent for diesel – to try to bring the price per litre down below €2.

The difficulty was that it didn’t specify any time limit, and the changes became open-ended.

Once-off payments became a regular feature in budgets for three years, and it took almost as long before the reductions in excise duty on petrol and diesel were phased out.

All told, the exercise cost the Exchequer a couple of billion euro, and ministers for finance since then have certainly not wanted to repeat it.

It should be noted that since 2022, both fuel and energy prices have remained very high in Ireland—up to 60% higher than they were before the outbreak of the Ukrainian war. People are already hard-pressed to meet their energy bills.

There are many people who don’t realise that some 300,000 households are in arrears when it comes to energy bills—and that’s even before the latest conflict kicked off at the end of February.

So, on Tuesday, Tánaiste and Minister for Finance Simon Harris announced a package worth €225–230 million, some of which will have immediate effect.

The big measure that will have an immediate impact, of course, is the cut in excise duty – 20 cent on a litre of diesel and 15 cent on a litre of petrol.

Unless wholesale prices fall very rapidly, that still won’t bring diesel below €2 a litre, but it will certainly help to lessen the sense that prices are simply extortionate at the moment.

There will be a little more relief this week, when a temporary lifting of the levy for the National Oil Reserves Agency will reduce the price of both diesel and petrol by a further two cent.

The Government needs to put primary legislation through for this but it is being rushed through the Dáil and the Seanad.

The second major element is a targeted measure: the fuel allowance will be extended until the end of April, which will definitely help lower-income households in Ireland.

There is also the diesel rebate scheme for the road haulage industry, which is very necessary.

I was listening to Ger Hyland of the Irish Road Haulage Association last week talking about the costs per individual lorry. He said it was costing €600 a week extra – around €30,000 per year per lorry.

In a time of crisis, it’s very important that we keep the wheels of industry turning, and an important component of that is ensuring that goods are transported around the country in an efficient and timely manner.

In a time of crisis, it’s very important that we keep the wheels of industry turning, and an important component of that is ensuring that goods are transported around the country in an efficient and timely manner.

When you think about all the lorries on Irish roads, you can see the significant impact this will have on the sector.

So it’s no surprise that the rebate has been applied and has indeed been backdated to January.

In a time of crisis, it’s very important that we keep the wheels of industry turning, and an important component of that is ensuring that goods are transported around the country in an efficient and timely manner.

Where will it all end? It’s impossible to say.

At the moment, there seems to be a slight reprieve in the US onslaught (Israel has continued pounding Iran with bombs, what else would you expect?), with hopes of a détente in the conflict. But even if it ended now, there would still be downstream consequences for several months at least.

The Strait of Hormuz has effectively been blocked for a whole month. There has been extensive damage to infrastructure in Iran and surrounding Gulf countries, and it will take months – perhaps even years – to repair it.

So we are likely to see, at the very least, a short period of continued pressure on oil supply and, consequently, on prices.

It could be mid-summer before prices begin to fall. And even then, as we’ve seen before, prices were already much higher than they were before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

An unfortunate consequence of all this is that when prices rise, they rise quickly — but when circumstances improve, they fall slowly and rarely return to pre-crisis levels. Perhaps that’s a cynical view, but I don’t expect this time to be any different.

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There are a few banana skins for the government this week. The opposition has been calling for universal payments since late February. Even the party furthest to the left, People Before Profit, has called for this, notwithstanding the fact that even the richest people in our society – people who frankly just don't need the money – will benefit from this as well. It's a total contradiction.

The other problem with once-off payments is the expense. There were three payments of €200 per household in 2022, which cost a total of €1.3 billion, and three of €150 per household in 2023 which cost €1 billion.

And even when the payment was reduced to two of €125 in 2024, it still cost €500 million. Those payments were only part of an overall package which cost even more.

So it's no surprise that the opposition this week accused the government of reneging on its promises and of skimping.

Harry McGee is political correspondent of The Irish Times

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