Dr. Robert Kelly:

I will start and perhaps my colleagues would like to come in and join me. On the Deputy’s first point on energy prices and hedging, I am not aware of any study on the individual hedging strategies. I suspect, although I am open to correction, that individual companies would guard quite closely their pricing strategy and the way they manage their risks. Perhaps it is a question for the individual companies.

I will explain how I think this works. Instead of the energy providers buying at a rate on the market today, leaving them exposed to that, they buy at a future price. That works particularly well, as the Deputy said, when there is a spike. However, the reality is that when you are in the heat of the moment and energy prices have risen and you are thinking about your supply six or 12 months out, you have to make a decision in the middle of the shock on how much risk you hedge by locking in the price six months from now versus essentially going unhedged, where you run the risk that potentially energy prices go even further - or they could decrease. Essentially, it is a commercial decision as to how much to hedge them, like any operator hedging any risk. I do not have detail around the specifics of energy and hedging.

What is true, as the other Deputy pointed out, is that we are not experiencing the same level of reduction that we see across the euro area. That leads to a question as to why we are not seeing that and whether there will be catch-up or whether there is a structural feature, such as, potentially, competition. There are potentially a few answers there. That is an open question that we need to examine further.

If I understand the Deputy’s second question correctly, he is asking whether it would be better to let inflation go quite high and not necessarily provide the supports versus providing the supports to smooth it. Would that be a right way of-----