Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There is also the energy credit, with another €200 being knocked off people's bills in March. Research by the ESRI and others has shown that for a lot of people, these measures largely or fully insulate them from the cost-of-living crisis but I absolutely acknowledge that is not the case for everyone. Certainly when it comes to deciding what we do in the March, April and May period, we will have regard to the fact that we need to target those who are suffering the most.

To be very frank, I do not think price controls are a good idea. They have been used in the past in Ireland but they did not work very well. While the Government can cap what retailers can charge for a certain product, it cannot cap what the retailer has to pay to get that product. Where price controls and price caps are introduced, it often leads to shortages. We might find, if we introduced a price cap of 120 cent per litre for petrol or diesel, for example, that we just have no petrol or diesel because there is no margin there for the retailer. That is often one of the problems with price controls. Another problem which we saw play out in the UK when it introduced energy price caps was that the Government just had to keep increasing the caps because the wholesale cost of energy kept going up. I do not think it is the panacea that some Deputies have suggested.

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