Mary Regan

So that's a total cut of 7.4 cent when you're taking the March announcement as well.

And excise on diesel by another 10 cent.

So bringing the total cut there to 32 cent a litre.

That was the main gist of the measures announced.

And that'll be extended now as due to run out at the end of May and then allow run out at the end of July.

Yeah, so the kind of Easter weekend or the Good Friday or whatever, those couple of days, the week before these protests began, the government was saying that this is an initial package, the one they had announced, and that we're keeping it open to review.

They said we're not ruling anything out, so there was always the potential...

that they'd go back.

And actually they were engaging at that point with what they call the stakeholders, the representative groups of all the different organisations, with the view to changing things if that became necessary.

But that message, as you said, seems to have not come across.

That sort of, you know, bear with us, stick with us, we're going through a process here.

They never got that message across.

Well, I suppose what they would say is that they were going to respond to whatever was happening internationally in the global situation and keeping in touch with the stakeholder organisations.

That message didn't get through.

So there seems to be this kind of big breakdown now and it's what came to the fore and what was kind of bubbling over in the past week or so.

In the communication or the message between the government and the people, as it were,

And this comes at a time when this coalition is spending a huge number on communication advisers, on press advisers, people whose job it is to get the message across.

And also at a time when they have what they would regard as stakeholders, that they're engaging with the IFA, all the various representative groups.

But it seems that what was meant to sort of build a communication or a messaging bridge between government and people has actually maybe instead acted as something off a buffer.

And maybe TDs and maybe ministers, always in this country, we had that sense that TDs were very accessible.