Sir, – While reading your report on the Government’s ongoing search for ways to control energy prices, with particular focus on the profits the ESB is currently enjoying (“Coalition looking to accelerate the use of ESB windfall profits to lower energy costs”, News, September 17th), it struck me that there is a simple way to reduce costs considerably to householders by simply allowing them to cut out the middlemen and allowing them to buy electricity directly from the generator, as was the case for decades, a system that provided affordable access to electricity for the vast majority of citizens. Under our present manufactured market arrangement, householders are forced to buy electricity from unnecessary entities put in place to facilitate an poorly thought-out privatisation policy. This has resulted in householders having to finance another layer of profit for the shareholders of these entities and, as we now can see, has also left householders helplessly exposed to cruel price gouging.
As in the provision of other social goods, it is time that the Government looked again at the core driver of its policies and instead of constantly acting to facilitate the profit taker, place the citizens’ interest front and centre. – Yours, etc,
JIM O’SULLIVAN,
Rathedmond,
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