Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

I will return to the Deputy’s question around how we are monitoring hedging activity or price development, to put it like that, in the market. We undertake ongoing market analysis. Our team looks at international price drivers, at the indigenous drivers around increasing network charges and we track what is happening with retail prices against the price drivers that we see. We find over time that the retail prices are following the underlying market and network price drivers, but at a lag because of the hedging. We have not seen anything to change that view. That does not require us to go into depth in each individual hedging strategy of each individual supplier but it is more the broader market evolution of prices versus the evolution of the price drivers. If that changes, then we will of course come back and look at what is happening and what action we need to take to ensure that households are protected. This is because we know that there are households which are struggling greatly. We can see this in the numbers but we hear it on the phones when people call in and they are in real trouble. We are very anxious to see this happening also.

The conversations we have with suppliers are challenging conversations based on the data we have in front of us. With the clarity we are giving them, we expect to see this happening. We expect to see what we have always said, which is that the prices follow on from the market trends. We also have been clear to these suppliers that we are not here to be apologists for electricity suppliers in their pricing strategies. Actually, we have been challenging them a little bit about why they are not explaining to their customers a bit better as to where they are with regard to hedging and what customers can expect.

The reason we are trying to explain this is that we are concerned to manage expectation for customers that suddenly prices are going to go back down to where they were because the reality is, as Commissioner Gannon has pointed out, that wholesale prices are still about double where they were. It is coming down slower than we would all like and it will not come down to the level it was before. That is just the clarity we are trying to provide to customers. It is important because the customers who are in debt now really need to be actively seeking support in order that they are not in a worse position when we come into next winter.

That is why we are also reviewing the customer protections for next winter because our concern is that we will still need customer protections for the customers who are in debt now. That is where we are.