Paul Murphy: Demands Price Caps and Mass Day of Action

Thanks, Ciann Comhairle. I was calling around to people's houses in Dublin Central the other night and I met a woman who said to me, everything's going up. My rent is going up, she's a council tenant in Dublin City Council, the price of petrol is going up, groceries are going up, everything is going up except for my wages. She's right, that's statistically the case in terms of prices are up almost a quarter over the past five years and people are really struggling out there and the government's response suggests they simply either don't get it or they don't care about it. You have one in five people after housing costs being at risk of poverty or living in relative poverty last year. We've over 300,000 people in arrears not able to afford their electricity bills and that's before the coming increases has hit. The most incredible statistic that I say over and over again is the fact that four in ten parents in this country, one of the richest countries in the world, four in ten parents saying that they are either going without meals or cutting back on their meal sizes so that their kids can have enough to eat. It's absolutely scandalous and many of these people rightly went to support the fuel protests. They did a collection in the flats and brought down sandwiches and tea and coffee to the protesters to say fair play because they said someone's standing up to the government, someone's calling for action on the fuel prices. But you look at what the government has given, out of the 500 million euro package about half of it ordinary people get some benefit from in terms of the reductions of taxes for petrol and diesel, absolutely tiny reductions in terms of home eating oil. So some benefit now that can be wiped away tomorrow by Trump's deepening imperious adventures in the Middle East. But the other half of the package is for businesses. It's not for ordinary people at all and the lion's share of those supports will go not to small businesses who were involved in many of the protests but instead to the big businesses. That's who the government is looking out for all of the time. And I mean the government often in here likes to say that the opposition, we only have criticism, we don't have any solutions. But the key answer for example, the key immediate answer to the fuel crisis, we have been calling for for well over two years now. We've legislation for it for well over two years, which is the idea of price caps, which is precisely the main demand of the fuel protesters. Because the problem is, I mean the original measures that the government brought in what a couple of months ago, they were wiped out as we predicted by the rise in the international price of oil and what has been done recently can be wiped out again. The only way to give people security on the one hand and to cut across the profiteering that we're seeing, for example on an international scale with BP who doubled their profits first quarter of this year compared to the first quarter of last year, the only way is to do these price controls. That's an immediate measure to give people security and to stop the profiteering which is taking place. That needs to happen and workers need to be on the streets to demand that that happens, to say that we need to have universal measures, not measures that benefit businesses, but universal measures like price caps, like a 500 euro energy credit to every household funded by the data centres who are using more electricity than all our households put together and yet are paying half the price of the electricity that ordinary people pay. And then measures to move away from reliance on fossil fuels which is what puts us into this position in the first place, like immediately free public transport, like rollout retrofitting, solar panels, phreatic insulation and so on to get us off the reliance on fossil fuels that the government has gotten us into. But there's a lesson from the protests and that the lesson is unless you can cause significant disruptive action if you're not a fast food giant or a developer or a major multinationals like Google, the government's not going to listen to you. So workers need to prepare for a massive day of action. The preparation for that will start tomorrow at the May Day protest half six at Parnell Square in town but that needs to be just the first step towards a major national day.