“We are approaching the point (if we’re not already there) where we can justifiably claim that competition has failed,” says Labour energy spokesperson Ciarán Ahern.
Winter has been on Craig Ivers’ mind all summer, he says.
Ivers lives with his mother in Ballymun, and on Thursday he said he worries how they will get through it, given the soaring energy costs.
“At least in the summer, you can dry your clothes on the balcony. You didn’t have to put the heating on much,” he says.
For Cathy Hislop winter has been a year-round worry also, she said Thursday.
She lives with an autoimmune disease, scleroderma, which manifests itself in several ways, says Hislop, who also lives in Ballymun.
It has caused pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). She is oxygen dependent and has a machine that is meant to run all night.
“It eats the electricity. I’m meant to be on it every night, but I couldn’t afford it every night,” she says.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, natural gas prices shot up across Europe, including Ireland – and along with them, electricity prices. Energy companies, meanwhile, were reporting hundreds of millions in profits.
Years later, Eurostat figures show gas and electricity prices have come down, but remain higher than they were before the war – and in Ireland, they remain higher than the European average. And still, energy companies are reporting hundreds of millions in profits.
With winter coming, some energy companies have announced a new round of price increases. Energia put its electricity prices up 10.9 percent, Bord Gáis Energy (BGE) says it’s putting its up 13.5 percent, and SSE, 9.5 percent.
And there’s nothing to stop them from raising their prices even further. In some jurisdictions, energy companies have to go to a regulator and make a pitch for why they need to increase prices and by how much, and the regulator makes a call.
That still happens in Northern Ireland, for example. But Ireland has given that up, fully deregulating the electricity market in 2011, and the gas market in 2014. Now, some say it’s time to reverse course, and bring back price regulation in Ireland.
“We can’t keep letting these energy companies get away with such brazen profiteering,” Labour TD Ciarán Ahern, the party’s energy spokesperson said recently.
Does the government plan to bring back energy price regulation? “Price setting by electricity suppliers is a commercial and operational matter for the companies concerned,” a spokesperson for the Department of Climate, Energy and Environment said by email on Wednesday.
Re-regulation might help in the long term, but it wouldn’t help soon enough to ease the burden of high energy prices this winter.
In the shorter term, the government should reverse its decision not to give electricity credits this winter, re-think a plan that would increase network tariffs to fund infrastructure improvements, and reverse the 2025 carbon tax increase, says Sinn Féin TD Pa Daly, the party’s energy spokesperson.
“At a time when the cost of living has never been higher and more and more people are stretched beyond their limit, it is unbelievable that the government would choose to make this worse,” Daly said.
The government is “keenly aware that energy has been a big driver of costs across the economy”, and is working on addressing this in a range of ways, the department spokesperson said.
Hislop, who lives in Ballymun, says she also suffers from Raynaud’s syndrome, an offshoot of her scleroderma, which affects blood flow to the extremities.
It leaves her very susceptible to cold temperatures.
She is always conscious of using the heating, and relies as much as possible on hot water bottles and wearing layers.
“Do I want to be warm and healthy, or do I want the electricity and be able to breathe at night? You’re trying to weigh it up. It’s just ridiculous.”
Hislop says she knows many people have similar worries, but for some it is compounded by underlying conditions.
It’s a running joke with her friends and family that she goes into hibernation for the winter, she says.
“We’ve had cold winters where I wasn’t able to get up out of bed, because I wouldn’t be able to put the heating on for the whole day,” she says.
Hislop is eligible for the Fuel Allowance, which pays €33 per week between September and April.
Does that cover her bills? “No, not even close,” she says. So she economises.
If she gets too cold, the Raynaud’s causes very bad pain in her hands, toes, ears and nose, she says.
“Winter is an absolute killer. I don’t think people realise how bad it can get for the old, for the sick,” she says.
Hislop wants to know why energy prices haven’t come down in Ireland as much as in other parts of Europe.
“We’re being hoodwinked,” she says.
Even as Ivers and Hislop worry about putting on their heat this winter, energy companies’ financial reports show they have been making hundreds of millions in operating profits.
Energia reported an operating profit of €239 million for the year ending 31 March 2025, down from €305 million in their fiscal year ending 31 March 2024. It’s raising its prices.
Energia has not responded to a query sent Wednesday asking why, given these profits, it hasn’t reduced electricity prices for its retail customers.
Centrica, which owns Bord Gáis Energy (BGE), reported an operating profit of £549 million in the first six months of 2025, down from over £1 billion in the first half of 2024. BGE is raising its prices.
Centrica has not responded to a query sent Wednesday asking why, given these profits, it hasn’t reduced electricity prices for its retail customers.
SSE reported an operating profit of £2.4 billion in their fiscal year ending 31 March 2025, about the same as the previous fiscal year. It’s raising its prices.
“This price change is due to rising network and operator charges outside of our control, market volatility, and higher cost of doing business are the main factors behind the price increase,” an SSE spokesperson said.
“Following this price change, our tariffs remain competitive in the energy market,” she said.
ESB, which includes Electric Ireland, reported an operating profit for the first six months of this year of €424 million, up €5 million from the same period the previous year.
In contrast to the other big energy companies operating in Ireland, ESB is mostly state-owned. When it makes profits, it returns millions to the state in dividends. Electric Ireland announced it is lowering gas prices for customers by 4 percent.
Why doesn’t it lower prices further, rather than making these profits and returning them as dividends to the state? “As a State company, once dividends, taxes and interest are paid, all of ESB’s profits are reinvested in network and generation infrastructure, an ESB spokesperson said on Thursday.
For the previous couple of years, after prices spiked, and as they remained higher than before the war, the government was helping ease the burden of winter energy bills by transferring hundreds of euro directly to electricity customers.
But Finance Minister Paschal Donohue, a Fine Gael TD, has said the government’s not going to give everyone electricity credits again this year – instead, it’s looking at targeted supports, for the people who need it most.
The Fiscal Advisory Council, the Central Bank, and ESRI have all warned about the government’s increasing spending in recent years.
Daly, the Sinn Féin TD, has called on the government to give electricity credits again this year: three credits of €150 each, “to ease the enormous burden on households”.
Likewise, Ivers, living with his mother in Ballymun, said the electricity credits should be going up, not going away, he says. “We’re a wealthy republic; this shouldn’t be happening.”
Ivers said he and his mother aren’t eligible for the Fuel Allowance to help cover energy costs this winter, because he’s on Illness Benefit.
Even as profitable energy companies like Energia, BGE and SSE raise their prices, and the government withdraws the energy credits, it is also making moves that could increase households’ energy bills further.
The state-owned electricity network operators ESB Networks and EirGrid went to the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) and asked for an increase in network tariffs to help fund billions in infrastructure investment over the next several years.
This CRU reviewed their pitches, came up with a plan called “Price Review Six”, in which it proposes giving the operators most of what they asked for, and put this out for a public consultation, which recently ended.
Under the plan, the average annual increase for a typical domestic customer’s network tariff would be between €6 and €16, the CRU says. This would pay for things like facilitating more electricity connections to the grid, making the grid more resilient to survive storms, plugging in planned offshore wind farms, and more, it says.
Daly, the Sinn Féin energy spokesperson, has called on the government to “ensure that the draft decision of Price Review 6 is not implemented in its current form”. He wants to see more of the cost of these upgrades put on large energy users like data centres, and less on households, he has said.
Rather than pass these costs on to consumers at all, the SSE spokesperson suggested on Thursday that the government could choose to pay for them.
“While the government determines grid development, direct government investment in infrastructure could eliminate these charges from customer bills and lower consumer costs,” she said.
In the longer-term, Ahern, the Labour Party energy spokesperson, says it’s time to rethink Ireland’s free-market approach to energy companies.
Since deregulation in 2011 and 2014, the idea has been that the CRU works to ensure there’s sufficient, fair competition in the market: lots of energy companies clamouring for households’ business.
This, the theory goes, should lower prices. For example, while others are raising prices, Electric Ireland is lowering prices. If customers now flock to Electric Ireland, other companies watching on should, in theory, lower their prices to compete.
To make this system work as well as possible, the CRU is planning a public relations campaign reminding households of the potential savings they can get by shopping around and switching suppliers regularly.
But Ahern says this system isn’t working well enough.
“We are approaching the point (if we’re not already there) where we can justifiably claim that competition has failed and that the Minister should be seeking to exploit the exceptional circumstances provisions in the EU energy market rules that allows for price regulation in order to protect consumers,” he said recently, by email.
Indeed, the CRU Commissioner Jim Gannon told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Climate, Environment and Energy on Wednesday that its data show customers’ arrears on their energy bills are trending at historically high levels.
And a spokesperson for the Society of St Vincent de Paul (SVP) said on Thursday that “Seeking help with energy costs is among the highest reasons people give when seeking help from SVP.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Climate, Energy and Environment said that the government is “keenly aware that energy has been a big driver of costs across the economy, and that price rises over the past number of years impacted almost all householders and businesses”.
“Thankfully, prices are not as high as their peak in late 2023,” they said.
To tackle the still-high prices, though, the government has established a “cross-Government Energy Affordability Taskforce”, chaired by Fianna Fáil TD Darragh O’Brien, “to identify, assess and implement measures that will enhance energy affordability for households and businesses, while delivering key renewable commitments and protecting security of supply and economic stability”, he said.
It’s working on an “interim report, including measures to support customers in Winter 2025/2026”, he said.
The government has also extended the 9 percent VAT rate on gas and electricity – down from 13.5 percent since 2022 – which “will save households approximately €26.60 on electricity and €20.28 on gas between May and October”, he said.
Also, O’Brien, the Minister for Climate, Energy and Environment, has “written to suppliers to gain an understanding of measures they might introduce to support households this winter, and will meet with suppliers later this week”, the department spokesperson said.
Partly funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
Four aid agencies explained how they are still helping people in Gaza, despite the obstacles.
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But it’s on the way, says Fergus O’Carroll, the council’s senior executive parks superintendent for the area.
“Solicitors play a vital role in the administration of justice and any threat to them is an attack on the legal rights of every person,” said a Law Society spokesperson.
