Ireland’s Cost-of-Living Crisis: A Pay Rise Won’t Fix It

By Raquel Noboa

Listening to the commentary around Ireland’s public service strikes, I keep coming back to the same thought: We are talking about pay, but the problems people describe are housing, electricity, childcare and the cost of putting food on the table.

People are working, contributing and doing everything they were told would give them a decent life. Yet that decent life feels increasingly out of reach.

I understand why they want a pay rise. When the bills arrive, you need money to pay them. Public service unions have explicitly linked their demands to living costs and purchasing power lost to inflation.

But I think we need to ask for much more.

Why are we putting so much energy into earning enough to afford the next price increase, and so little collective pressure into making the essentials affordable?

A pay rise can help today, but it cannot, on its own, fix the systems that keep swallowing our income. Imagine getting an increase, only to see the extra money disappear into rent, electricity and childcare. Your payslip looks better but your life feels much the same.

How many times are we prepared to repeat that exercise?

Bord Gáis Energy: Privatisation and Price Deregulation

Take Bord Gáis Energy: On 30 June 2014, its sale to a consortium led by UK company Centrica was completed. Centrica acquired the gas and electricity supply business; other consortium members acquired other parts of the business. Ireland’s gas network remained in State ownership.

On 1 July 2014, the very next day, household gas price regulation ended. Bord Gáis Energy no longer needed the energy regulator’s approval to change those prices. The regulator said its competition criteria had been met.

Those dates deserve attention. They do not, by themselves, prove that the buyer caused the regulatory decision, nor does that sale explain every electricity bill we receive today. But the change was significant: direct approval of household gas prices gave way to suppliers setting their own prices, with competition expected to protect consumers.

That is a public policy choice, and we are entitled to question how well it serves us.

The concern for me is accountability. When an essential service becomes unaffordable, who has the responsibility (and the power) to put that right?

Telling a household to shop around cannot be the full answer.

Ireland’s Electricity Prices Should Concern Us All

Eurostat’s figures for the second half of 2025 put Ireland’s household electricity prices at the highest in the EU: 40.42 cent per kilowatt-hour, compared with an EU average of 28.96 cent. That is approximately 40% higher, including taxes and levies.

That comparison should provoke serious public questions.

Why is the gap so large? Which costs can Government influence? How will investment in our energy system translate into affordable bills? What protections should people have when competition fails to deliver?

We deserve clear explanations and measurable action.

Energy keeps homes warm, food safe and businesses operating. People cannot simply stop needing it because the price has become unreasonable. As someone working in sustainability, I also want the transition to cleaner energy to improve everyday life: Warmer homes, lower energy needs and affordable clean power should be benefits people can actually feel.

Part of the answer is demand. We looked at what a growing data centre sector means for the grid in our blog on AI and electricity in Ireland.

How The Cost of Living Deepens Inequality

The same increase in an electricity bill lands very differently in different homes. One household absorbs it, another cuts back on food or leaves a room unheated. The same is true of housing, a person who owns a home outright and a person trying to rent one can have similar salaries and completely different levels of security.

That is why the number on a payslip tells only part of the story.

What matters is what remains after the essentials are paid for, what matters is whether you can save, deal with an emergency, or plan a future. When some people can build wealth while others spend almost everything simply getting through the month, the conditions are there for inequality to deepen.

I do not accept that working harder should leave people feeling permanently less secure.

What Ireland Can Learn From Madrid’s Education Protests

On 14 October, teachers, students and families took to the streets in Madrid demanding better resources for public education. Their demands included pay and working conditions, alongside smaller classes and better support for pupils.

What struck me was the wider purpose: defending the quality of a service that the whole community depends on.

There is a lesson there for us. A teacher needs a fair salary, they also need a home within reach of their school. A nurse needs fair pay, they also need affordable childcare and reliable transport. A pensioner, an unpaid carer or someone unable to work may never benefit from a public sector pay agreement but they still need to heat their home.

A campaign for affordable essentials gives all of those people a shared reason to stand together.

Let’s Make The Demand Bigger

I would like to see workers, unions, parents, pensioners, community groups and businesses unite around a wider demand: make a decent life affordable.

That means sustained pressure for affordable housing, accountable energy pricing, accessible childcare, reliable public transport and properly funded public services. It means asking Government to show how its decisions will reduce the pressure on households, and checking whether those promises become reality. It also means refusing to let this become a public sector versus private sector argument. People across both are facing many of the same bills.

Fair wages belong in this conversation, but so do the prices we have to pay to live.

My challenge is to all of us: when the next pay agreement is reached, will we consider the job done?

Or will we keep organising around the deeper problems that brought people to the picket line in the first place?

At Fifty Shades Greener, we see social and environmental sustainability as connected: people need affordable homes, energy and services to participate in a greener future.

We can’t change Ireland’s electricity prices from our desks. But if energy bills keep landing on yours and you’re not sure what you’re looking at, our Energy Made Simple course walks you through kWh, tariffs, standing charges and what to do next, in under an hour.

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