Ellen Coyne

Yes, and I suppose, obviously, I'm sure there's listeners who would be annoyed at that prospect, but I'm sure there's others who have gone through very optimistic SEI assessments of their home only to find that something like a heat pump or indeed the cost of a new electric car is well beyond their reach.

So if the government is trying to help the people hurt most, that's probably where its focus is.

And I think Simon Harris also made a concession that obviously this issue

is all being prompted by the US-Israel war on Iran.

But even before that, he's kind of saying that energy prices in Ireland were already too high.

So this is something that maybe should have been considered before now, but maybe it's better late than never.

Well, I was asking someone about that yesterday and they were kind of saying it's not really tethered to this budget, but I suppose just given that this is an urgent political issue that is obviously biting right now, I would imagine that this is something they would want to move forward sooner rather than later.

He has literally just asked officials to start looking at this.

So they'll be looking at it through the tax group within the Department of Finance and also through available capital, really burning through that surplus at a rate of knots at the moment.

But yeah, for this to have any political effect, it would have to be soon.

Ellen Coyne is a political correspondent at the Irish Times, but her new book, well, it's about a different type of politics.

It's about the politics of an organisation.

It's called Dirty Dancing, the book, which of course is a play on a very famous movie from the United States of the 20th century.

Ellen Coyne, tell us about your interest in Irish dancing and about the scandal which hit Irish dancing in recent years.

Well, to just confess, first of all, I had zero interest and in fact, zero knowledge of Irish dancing before this kind of landed in my lap.

Did you not do it as a child?

Well, only in the compulsory way that all of us do, but the very rudimentary set dancing.

I was nowhere near the glamour that you'd see in the INAC down in Clarny every February, like the gowns and the sparkle and probably most relevantly to me, the sporting prowess that's involved.

I just didn't really have that.

So it was never troubled by the world of Irish dancing until October 2022.