Whose fuel crisis is this anyway? For some of us the drastic rise in oil and gas prices because of the insane war on Iran causes serious stress. For others, it causes deep distress. Yet in political terms the stressed matter. The distressed? Not so much.
I’ve been writing here recently about the State’s learned helplessness. But consider an even more paradoxical condition: learned ignorance. By which I mean the construction of official knowledge in such a way that some things are deliberately unknown. Studied unawareness is a governing principle.
An obvious example of learned ignorance is the refusal to calculate in State budgets the long-term cost of not doing vital things – not eliminating child poverty, not decarbonising our economy, not building necessary infrastructure.
But this willed obliviousness extends to short-term crises as well. It is very much at work in the Government’s flailing response to the harm Donald Trump’s war is doing to the poorest Irish households right now.
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The rise in energy prices affects everyone. There’s plenty of pain to go around. But the misery is, as always, greatest for the people who have least money. When you’re living hand to mouth, an oil crisis is a jerk to your elbow. The choice between eating and heating becomes all too real.
We have, though, a political economy in which the only currency is the decibel. A government that has no real overall strategy responds to the needs of whoever can shout loudest. And that means, conversely, that those who can’t make themselves heard cannot be seen. Good policy is turned upside down: the more you need Government help, the less likely you are to get it.
To operate like this, the obvious must be rendered invisible. When it comes to energy poverty, the Irish policy system has a brilliant way of achieving this. It defines a family as being in energy poverty if it spends more than 10 per cent of its disposable income on energy. This is not in itself a great measure – it misses out, for example, the old age pensioner who spends almost nothing on heating her home because she is afraid of running out of money for food.
But in any case: how does the State know how many households spend more than 10 per cent of their income on energy? From the Household Budget Survey. And how often is the Household Budget Survey taken? Every five years. Lucky, aren’t we, that energy prices are famous for staying stable over five-year periods?
A far better way of measuring this form of deprivation is the EU’s SILC (Survey on Income and Living Conditions), which is collected every year in each EU country, including Ireland. It asks people to report on, among other things, “inability to afford adequate warmth”. Their answers are available in something much closer to real time. But the State chooses not to use them to guide its policies.
[ Energy poverty: ‘I am basically on the breadline. I never have the heating on’Opens in new window ]
This is like having a doctor who monitors your chronic conditions but ignores your acute symptoms. Not surprisingly, much of the official diagnosis is simply wrong.
The slow and infrequent method on which the State chooses to rely shows that fuel poverty is quite stable over time: it affects one in 10 Irish households. But the annual measures it ignores show what common sense would tell us: that not being able to heat your home is a condition that is hugely affected by short-term energy shocks.
The State deliberately chooses not to pay attention to the distress caused by these shocks. As Andrés Estévez and Miguel Tovar Reaños, the authors of an excellent and urgent report published by the ESRI last week, put it, “it misses shorter-term shocks and fluctuations that are central to understanding how households experience energy poverty. This not only constrains analysis but also limits the State’s capacity to make timely decisions in response to energy shocks or crises”.
The data the State largely ignores show that, in 2024, 14 per cent of Irish households reported being unable to afford adequate warmth or pay their utility bills in full, while almost a third of households experienced some form of “energy affordability challenge”. Those affected are carers, people with disabilities and long-term illnesses, single parents, people in low-income jobs paying high rents and people living on their own with only the old-age pension to support them.
These are the citizens who need help most urgently – they don’t have any cushions to absorb the shock. But, sadly for them, they also don’t have HGVs. And one might guess that a majority of them also made the foolish choice to be born female.
The most disgraceful thing about their plight is how easy it is to alleviate. According to the ESRI report, a household can be lifted out of energy poverty for €9 a week. That’s less than the price of a pint of Guinness in some of Temple Bar’s tourist traps.
[ Ireland’s moment of truth in the energy crisis is fast approachingOpens in new window ]
It’s also a lot less than the cost of the Government’s knee-jerk Late Late Show approach – one for everyone in the audience. The recent universal €250 electricity credit cost the Exchequer about €575 million in total, spread thinly across all 2.2 million domestic electricity accounts. The cost of a payment targeted at the 770,000 households most in need would be just €370 million a year.
This is a relative pittance – less than half the €755 million the Government has committed to tackling the energy crisis since the start of the Iran war. For context, the Government is giving hauliers a subsidy of €1,350 per vehicle. The subsidy that would keep a family out of fuel poverty would be €480 a year.
And no, I’m not suggesting that farmers and hauliers and coach hire operators don’t need help. The point, rather, is the wilful disregard of those who need it even more. It takes a well-trained official mind, a mentality shaped over many decades, to lead a government to conclude that a big truck needs three times more public money than a pensioner does.
