Cliff Taylor

And just on the point of the cost, the public sell of this is that we're going to get clean, cheap energy.

It may be clean, but we've yet to see how cheap it will be.

Well, it's part of the energy mix now around Europe.

Big LNG imports into the UK.

One of the problems with Ireland is we don't have anywhere to store LNG, or nowhere to store large amounts of anyway, and there's...

been talk of this facility in the channel estuary which the government are now trying to accelerate but as with everything in ireland it seems to that's going to take some years to come on stream and there's a private proposed private facility down there as well the state floating lng was announced some months ago and kind of with trumpets and this was a big step forward energy security my understanding is that when they went to look at it the delivery date was a good way in the future like as in four or five years into the future

even with a boat in terms of planning it, putting the necessary infrastructure in place, the connections and all that.

So I think, you know, LNG is part of the energy mix around Europe and Ireland is going to, Ireland will import it indirectly and to some extent directly as well, but we've nowhere to store it in large amounts.

So the stuff coming down the pipe from Britain, you know, as you say.

Here we go.

It's about as good as we might have expected at 3.6%.

And I suppose, again, looking back to the last time inflation took hold in 2022, there was already a bit of an uplift because of COVID.

And then the energy prices were added on top of that after the Ukraine war.

And prices went mad, peaking at, I think, 8.5%, 9% annual rate.

So, you know, we're not in that kind of territory now.

3.5%, 3.6% is troublesome for the government for sure.

It's going to ease into wage increases, it's going to lead to more demands from the public sector unions and it could go up further over the rest of the year.

Now I suppose there's two factors to watch.

in trying to judge what's going to happen.

One is, of course, what happens in the Middle East, what happens to oil prices.