Dr. Nat O'Connor:

The Deputy has covered a lot of issues and I will comment on two of them. One is that there are many older persons in Ireland who live on a very low income. As many as 44% of those who live alone are at risk of poverty and that is true all over the country but particularly in rural areas. It is certainly something about which we are very concerned.

The Deputy mentioned inflation and the hope, which we all have, that energy prices will come down. It is difficult to forecast where inflation will go to but none of the forecasters have predicted deflation. No one is predicting that, overall, prices will go below what they were last year. Energy prices might go down but other prices are likely to remain elevated. Many of the businesses that the Deputy spoke about, such as butchers and corner shops, will not have passed on the full price of energy. They have absorbed some of the cost over a period. In fact, businesses all over the country will have done that and, as a result, we will see prices continue to increase. That is what the ESRI, the OECD and other organisations will all predict, namely, continued inflation in Ireland next year and the following year. The net point of that is we need welfare incomes to catch up because they have not been indexed against the rise of inflation and we need to index them against average earnings. Although we got €12 on the State pension in January, which is very welcome by many people, the spending power of the State pension will be €23 behind this year what it was in 2020. Therefore, it is really important that the welfare rates are further increased because inflation, while it might settle on the energy side, is going to embed across the whole economy in terms of prices.