Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2025-12-16 ============================================================ Mary Lou McDonald (SF), Dublin Central We have had price hike after price hike. As I said earlier, not a glove has been placed on any of these gouging companies. Some 1 million households will face higher bills this Christmas. Over 300,000 households are in energy arrears. A so-called affordability task force has done absolutely bugger all to achieve affordability for those households and struggling families. We have a Government that is prepared to sit back and let households suffer. That is what I hear. Nobody is contesting the need for investment in the grid but the Government needs to accept the reality of what is happening in households right across the land as we approach Christmas. The reality is that working households, and let me emphasise that I am talking about working households, cannot meet their bills. Today, they wake to the news that in fact those bills will be increased again. I ask the Taoiseach not to offload this to some task force. What will he do to ensure that those bills can be met, that they are reduced and that families can have an affordable life again? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-16/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:28+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-16