Austin Hughes

We are far less unequal in terms of wealth and income.

And that's probably why I'm emphasising these are issues.

We can tackle it because we're in a situation where things are not perfect.

But they're far from the problems, the intensity you see in the US and elsewhere.

So if you deal with it now, it'll be easier.

I'm surprised that Tala is on the Arctic Circle.

It was very cold, very wet last night.

And by the way, Ireland needs to spend an awful lot more on traffic infrastructure.

Two hours from town to Tala just shouldn't happen on a Thursday night.

Yeah, bad news on the inflation front.

And it's been rising steadily, you know, through the second half of this year.

It's still going to be just over 2% for the year, but we're at 3.2% in November.

And I suppose the worrying thing, it picked up from 2.9% in October, and it's that there's a lot of small increases right across the board.

Nine out of the 12 main sort of areas that the CSO looks at showed higher inflation in November than October.

So you have the standout sort of inflation, you know, beef prices up 23.9 percent, coffee 12.4 percent, all those sort of elements.

But really right across you're seeing and significantly as we come into winter and cold nights like last night, energy prices now rising.

Remember, energy prices were down 7.7% this time last year.

They're now up 3.3%.

So people probably feel rightly that things are getting more expensive again.

So not good news.