Jack Horgan-Jones

Now we're going to be 9, something like 9 billion.

So people are seeing these headline figures.

They're seeing the ongoing, the boom getting boomier in the FDI sector, but they are feeling that,

Much more pressure on their household finances, you know, being able to meet the cost of living day to day.

And that is the political dynamic.

Reminds everyone of the vulnerability of those corporation tax figures.

But meanwhile, the government has this huge surplus and it looks to be – and there's an interesting spread on this –

across page six and seven of the Mail on Sunday, where John Drennan has the political read of the week in that paper.

And they're talking about a plan that seems to be in gestation in the Department of Finance with Fine Gael leader Simon Harris, which is looking to kind of structurally adjust the way electricity bills are taxed in Ireland.

It seems to be, it's quite nascent, so we don't have a huge amount of data, but what John is writing about is

seems to be basically stripping away a lot of the taxes that are levied to pay for the grid and renewables and so on at the bill level and shifting the focus of paying for that from the consumer of electricity to the exchequer and therefore structurally lowering the price of energy to consumers in a way that the government has not done so far.

The easiest way is to levy the punter.

But this piece in the mail kind of reflects some of the conversations I've been having with people in government across the last little while, where there is a growing sense of doubt that the model that Ireland has, and I'm not an expert in energy markets, so I'll hold back from pronouncing on exactly how it works.

But certainly what people are saying to me is that the model that Ireland has, whereby you pay for energy,

the transition through higher costs on consumers, but even though proportionally they may be lower on large energy consumers than they are on households, that's not structurally appropriate for a world where you've shifted to a higher cost of energy and electricity.

And if that's lasting, you might need to look

Yeah.

And I think that this all derives from Europe to an extent.

I think that it's a European approach to dictate the cost of electricity by reference to gas.

And when you have a lot of gas in your system, particularly when it has to kick in in a peaking capacity to make up for your renewables when the sun's not shining or the wind's not blowing.