Jim Power

We're 40% above the EU average.

The average cost of household electricity, 40.42 cents per kilowatt hour.

And I stress again, 40% above the EU average.

And we really, and I've heard people in the industry come out talking about economies of scale and

purchasing power etc etc but um to me the bottom line is ireland is just so dependent on imported fossil fuels to generate electricity um it's it's it's an absolutely mad situation and you could be generating all of your electricity through wind if you just simply built enough offshore exactly wind over the last 20 years yeah

So it's indicative of policy failure.

There's no doubt about that.

Ant Nelson Ireland snubbed the unemployment rate in April at 4.8%.

I'm a little bit worried about Irish statistics at the moment because

There was massive revisions to historic labour market data in Ireland yesterday.

And initially, the March unemployment rate was reported at 4.7%.

It was revised up to 5% yesterday and has fallen to 4.8% in April.

It's a little bit confusing, but I guess the bottom line is that the Irish labour market is still...

pretty healthy.

We also got the end April Exchequer returns for Ireland.

I'm not going to go into much of the detail here other than to say that if you exclude the

Apple tax payment that was made in the first four months of last year, if you take that out of the equation, adjust for it, tax receipts in the first four months up by 1.1 billion, 4.2%, income tax up 5.7%, VAT up 4.5%.

So those tax revenues are indicative of an economy that's still doing pretty okay.

And actually, the other more concerning bit is the fact that gross voter government expenditure up 8.9 percent with current spending up 9.3.

Social welfare, health continuing to drive strong growth in current spending.