Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The recently established Cost of Living Coalition is calling people out onto the streets on Saturday, 18 June, for a national demonstration and day of protest to demand a comprehensive, urgent and radical package of measures to address the cost-of-living crisis that is absolutely crucifying workers, pensioners, students and people on low and middle incomes. It will be a protest against the Government's spectacular failure to address the cost-of-living crisis.

Today, we have more evidence of the Government's failure in this regard. EUROSTAT has indicated that we are facing inflation of 8.3%. This means that the value in purchasing power terms of workers' wages, pensions and incomes will drop by more than 8%, meaning real cuts in income for the people who can least afford them. Then we have the Taoiseach warning of a new era of high energy prices. That is on top of a 42% increase in energy and heating costs for ordinary people in the past year alone.

Against this background of a cost-of-living crisis, the Government acts like a helpless, innocent bystander that can do absolutely nothing about it. The Government is not going to do anything before the budget, and it is totally unclear whether it will do anything at all. That is why people are coming onto the streets.

Even the crisis in Dublin Airport is linked to this problem. In a word, the problem there is that the DAA, which has executives on total packages in excess of €366,000, expects the security workers it hires to operate on rubbishy flexible contracts for €14 an hour. When they cannot even plan and will not even know what hours they will have and, therefore, what income they will have in a week's time, is it any wonder that the DAA has difficulty recruiting people? The chief executive overseeing this is on a package of €366,000 a year. That is the problem in the context of the bigger crisis we face.

More than 600,000 people in this country are suffering deprivation and there are hundreds of thousands of workers are on low pay. However, spectacular profits are being made by the energy companies. Last year, Energia's profits were up 46% and the ESB's were up to nearly €700 million. Even Boris Johnson, a Tory, can introduce a windfall tax on the profits of energy companies to try to get some revenues to protect ordinary people from the cost-of-living crisis, but this Government will not do what even Boris Johnson is doing - and, my God, he is no left-winger. When is the Government going to bring in emergency measures in respect of housing costs, the slaughtering of people's incomes and a cost of living that is crucifying ordinary people? What is going to be in that package? So far, the Government has done nothing.

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