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This country really has become the rip-off Republic in the last few months and our out-of-touch Government and their highly-paid mandarins are doing nothing to stop it.
The Taoiseach Micheal Martin, Finance Minister Paschal Donohue and the Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers all believe that they are a bunch of geniuses because the economy, against all the odds, is booming.
But the harsh reality is that the people who work their butt off every day of the week don’t feel it in their pockets.
And everywhere you go week-in, week-out prices seem to be rising to insane and unaffordable levels.
Just take the weekly grocery shop. The price of beef, mince, milk, butter and spuds have all gone through the roof.
What was once for me an 80-quid weekly shop is now costing €100, no matter what supermarket I go into. The truth is there is very little difference in prices between all the top food retailers.
The biggest instigator of rising costs is the Government itself. Just take the cost of energy and why are our electricity prices the highest in Europe.
We the people own the ESB yet Ministers have allowed them to consistently raise their prices and then we have to pay VAT on top of it.
The State is talking about reducing VAT for the hospitality sector in the next Budget, when what it should be doing is ditching VAT on electricity.
The Taoiseach and Paschal say there will be no cost-of-living measures in the October Budget to help struggling families – a decision which is a national disgrace.
This country has never had so much money and yet the conservative mandarins who control the purse strings are doing little or nothing to help working families.
But then look at rising motoring costs and why we are still paying tolls on motorways, when each and every one of them have been paid for.
There should only be tolls on newly-built motorways and there is no sign of any new roads being built any time soon.
The great Irish rip-off continues when you even go to a sick loved one in hospital.
Why in the name of God are the HSE and the individual hospitals nationwide allowed to charge car parking fees for people going to the hospitals either as a patient or visitor.
Our Health Service is already getting a record €26.9 billion from the State this year with little or no accountability for how our money is spent.
Last year they took in a staggering €20 million in car parking charges which is another scandal.
A Government with a heart would abolish these overnight but yet the politicians and the useless civil servants won’t allow it. They will tell you they can’t interfere which is nonsense.
But perhaps the biggest scandal of all are the poor people being charged €1,600 to €2,000 a month to rent a house.
They should be given tax exemptions to help cover the accommodation costs because they are being screwed to the wall.
It is far cheaper to own a home if you can save up the deposit to get a mortgage.
I, like most of you, am in complete despair over the housing crisis. This Government and the Minister for Housing James Browne have not got a clue what they are doing.
The State, with all its resources from cash to land, should be building thousands of new council and affordable houses nationwide and it ain’t happening.
They want the private sector to do it when we should be doing it ourselves.
The Mandarins of this world especially in the Department of Housing and Public Expenditure have made an absolute hames of the housing issue over the past decade.
They do not want to cede control to individual local authorities who could get us out of the mess if they are given the money and the resources to do it.
Successive housing Ministers have listened to the civil servants for far too long and have been left running around like headless chickens.
I watched Minister Browne on This Week In Politics on Sunday night and he was poor.
The worst part was he refused to listen to some sensible suggestions from the opposition that could get us out of this housing mess and which have already worked in other countries like France.
So people out there are rightly angry because they know they are being ripped off everywhere they go.
Yet our Government is sitting back, blaming everyone else, and doing nothing to help us. No wonder they are tumbling down in the opinion polls.
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