Charlie Weston

We have terribly expensive electricity in this country and we're very dependent on fossil fuel.

So those issues will take a long time to play out.

Yeah, Matt, we're back up there.

This is a position we don't want.

We don't want to be at the top of this league of shame, but there's new figures out from Eurostat, which is the European Statistics Agency, and it shows that Irish energy prices, Irish electricity prices,

are the highest across the European Union.

That's followed by Germany and Belgium, but we're the top.

And it probably means that the average household here in this country is paying about €480 a year more for their electricity than the average across the European Union.

Union prices here are about 40% higher.

So, I mean, this is just, you know, so annoying.

And a big chunk of that, Matt, is it's not the tax because that's reduced.

The VAT rate is temporarily reduced to 9%.

A lot of it is grid fees, the heavy investment that has to be put into the grid to connect up data centers, to put wind farms on, you know, on,

into the system, you know, to cover that, the poles, the wires, the substations, the pylons, that whole cost.

And that's a huge part of your bill.

It could be anywhere between 40% and 50% of your bill, which is probably about €800 on the average bill.

That's a big element of it, Matt, a huge element of it.

And this has actually been recognised recently.

I've been hearing comments from the Taoiseach.

I wrote a story a couple of weeks ago saying that there was a new EU document out to try and get countries to grapple with high energy costs.