“Stick ‘em up!” That’s what it should say. Instead, the email’s subject line says: “It’s time to renew your car insurance”. The quote is €100 more than it was last year.
“But didn’t the insurers promise us the price would come down after the Government reformed the personal injuries law?”
“The reasons for the increase are numerous and complex,” purrs the soothing voice on the other end of the phone. “You can look around but you won’t get it cheaper anywhere else.”
Brace yourself, Bridget, as the fella once said. Coffee is called for.
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“That’ll be €4.30,” says the lad behind the counter, handing over the cappuccino-no-chocolate. A bowl next to the pay-by-card thingummy wants to be fed “tips”. On the Costa del Sol, the lovely, milky coffee comes in a ceramic cup with an integrated holder for your complimentary ice-cream cone. Total price: €2. The world and her husband know the global price of coffee has shot up, but how can it be more than double the price in Ireland? Torremolinos isn’t twice as close to Guatemala and Colombia, is it?
“Tsk, it’s the minimum wage,” explain those who purport to know.
The legal eagles must all be on the minimum wage. How else to explain the prohibitive cost of going to court? The business lobby ISME reckons defamation actions started in a single year generate €30 million to €50 million in fees for “a small group of lawyers”. That damned minimum wage. Maybe we should start a go-fund-me for the Law Library.
Landlords could do with a handout too. The ones who own trophy commercial buildings are barely managing to put bread on the table. Who else but the low-paid workers could possibly be to blame for making Grafton Street the world’s 17th most expensive rental address? Surely not the pension companies, investment funds, property developers and wealthy families who own the street. Workers’ wages were not the issue when a Circuit Court judge halved the €1. 46 million annual rent Bewley’s Cafe was paying a Johnny Ronan company.
The cost of living in Ireland is nuts. Even nuttier are the reasons supposed to explain it. Take insurance. The Injuries Resolution Board reported on Wednesday that €76 million was saved last year by a reduction in insurance litigation in the courts. Yet motor insurance prices rose by 8.4 per cent in the past year and the Central Bank said last week they’ll go on rising because of increasing claims and vehicle repair costs. But then the Courts Service annual report said this week that awards for damages almost halved in 2024. If you’re not bamboozled, you must be an actuary.
Next, take hospitality. More than 500 restaurants have shut up shop this year. Lobbyists say the antidote is to cut the sector’s VAT rate from 13.5 per cent to 9 per cent. That would cost the national exchequer €545 million, with no guarantee customers could get a mug of tea and a fruit scone for less than Jeff Bezos’s wedding bill. Cafe owner Jamie O’Connell, writing in The Irish Times last year, said the rent of the building accounted for 21 cent out of a – rather modest – €3.50 cup of coffee. The rest of us must have been snoozing when the Restaurants Association of Ireland was demanding the Government do something about that.
Go into a supermarket (please do, Peter Burke, Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment) and try to figure out how the €13.50-an-hour minimum wage can feed a family. According to Conor Pope’s research, a kilogram of chicken breasts priced at €4.99 in 2022 now costs €11. There’s an extra 27 cent on a two-litre carton of milk since last year and butter is the new caviar at €5.49 a pound for Kerrygold.
“It’s a good thing I’m a millionaire,” exclaimed the woman standing beside me as she surveyed the bread shelves. After she walked away, leaving the bread on the shelf, the word “not” hung in the air.
Kenneth Harper, a regular Letters-to-the-Editor correspondent, wrote about his holiday in Cyprus this year. “A decent supermarket wine” was €5.50, a litre of unleaded diesel €1.32 (€1.74 in his home county of Donegal at the time of writing) and a two-bed furnished flat with access to a swimming pool was €850 per month. A survey by Barnardos children’s charity has found that four in 10 parents are foregoing meals or cutting their portions so that their children get enough to eat.
These vicissitudes are not confined to households. High prices for insurance, legal services and commercial rents percolate through the system. It’s no surprise the number of visitors to Ireland is declining. The Central Statistics Office said there was an 8 per cent reduction in visits from continental Europe in April compared with the same month last year. And this when experts tell us holidaymakers are fleeing to cooler climes such as ours to escape the continent’s sweltering temperatures. Laments about “the high cost of doing business in Ireland” have replaced the Celtic Tiger’s “soft landing” and “the fundamentals are sound” audio track of the age.
Ireland is Europe’s second most expensive country. For the luxury of living in it, you might have to sleep in the street, queue on a hospital trolley, despair of your child getting a school place, wait months for a water connection and cough up gold to afford a packet of rashers. Still, the Government refuses to introduce mandatory reporting for supermarkets so we might understand why they’re charging us so much. Remember two years ago when junior minister Neale Richmond hosted a “supermarket summit”. Please, bring your prices down, he asked them nicely. Now grocery prices are rising at twice the rate of general inflation. Good work, Neale.
The Government benevolently doles out one-off payments to subvent the people’s spiralling bills, like some feudal lord riding through the village on his snorting stead, throwing oranges to the peasants. It’s time it got down off its high horse and fixed the causes – the opaque pricing, insurance claptrap, greedy commercial rents and lawyers’ ludicrous fees. These are the costs of doing business in Ireland. Doing the customer is not the solution.
