Maeve McTaggart

We hear that many, many times.

And particularly, it seems to, and you would hope maybe that they would learn their lesson from the weeks before the fuel protests where they said that they had actually been already looking at a second package the whole time.

That didn't actually trickle through to people.

You would hope that just the communication is there at this point.

because these groups, and it's interesting, you're seeing it now in the boy elections, particularly in Galway West, these fuel protests do seem to be

helping to kind of blossom some people's candidacy in Galway West, that this isn't going away.

And you would wonder if there isn't action taken, if people who seem to come under more pressure during the summer months, what's to say that there wouldn't be more protests, more pushback?

People really seem to be coming to the end of their string in a lot of measures, particularly on home heating oil.

As you're looking at, you know, the excise is juicy again.

The carbon tax has been kicked back again, the increase in the carbon tax.

But, you know, it's a pushing back of these conversations rather than a resolving of them.

Particularly when you see this real public awareness of how much money is in the bank in this rainy day fund.

You know, even coming up to these by-elections now as well, I've heard a couple of candidates reference the Apple tax money.

There is this wider awareness in the public and in the opposition that we have all this money in this rainy day fund.

People are already saying it's raining.

I know Michael Healy rained.

But not to quote Kerry Mann, but people are really looking at all of this money, wondering where it's going to go.

I think people particularly looking after the last budgets where such a huge proportion of that package was dedicated to reducing the VAS.

I think people are reluctant, I think, to hedge their bets on this next budget, particularly after there was a little bit of disappointment in the last one with the lack of indexing the tax bands.

All of this are wondering whether October will do the business.