Fuel Protest (Read MOD NOTE on first post)

Spare a thought for retailers in all of this.

Should these poor farmers and contractors continue to be out of pocket, sales of Helly Henson jackets will plummet.

We are right around the EU average because there’s an artificial inflation of EU fuel prices through EU mandated minimum on excise duty, the carbon border adjustment mechanism and ETS2. As well as our own vat on top. The only place in the world where you’ll pay more for petrol than in the EU is Singapore.

Rightly or wrongly, we have the highest price for fuel because of EU mandates and laws designed to make people choose alternative green fuels.

There will come a time in the near future where the EU will have to ask themselves if we are the “world leaders” in these initiatives or if we’re pissing against the wind and regulating ourselves into irrelevance.

Precisely.

I grew up on a farm and my family are still farming. Anyone who knows anything about farming knows that there's always work that needs doing such as feeding animals and doing admin. There's just no time to go clog up Dublin to virtue signal. If they actually cared about the price of fuel, they'd be blockading the US embassy or Doonbeg. It should be patently obvious that the Irish government has little control over price surges caused by events on the other side of the world.

Mad that the Gards havent set the bats to whomp yet.

Im not in favour of a police state or anything but theres a happy medium between police state and pushover state.

So the war Trump started had no effect on the price of fuel? Understood.

You're a Trump fan.

I think these protests are ill-judged and I hope the blockade is ended soon.

However you can't win a political battle by trying to go around the issue with saying the other person is a bad person. You know you have people going on about how some guy has a drink driving conviction from 2007. It's irrelevant because the issue is about what it's about, it's not about whether Christopher Duffy or whoever is perfect or even good or drove drunk once.

We've seen this political tactic before. It was meant to stop Donald Trump from becoming President, twice, and it failed, twice. Donald Trump is President right now and all the energy spent huffing and puffing about him as a person could have gone into an effective political strategy that targeted his actual political weaknesses.

The blockade will not end because people suddenly find out that Conor McGregor supports the blockaders. There are hard limits to 'guilt by association'. It's weak sauce really.

But since this is people's favourite thing to do this post won't stop them so continue on, I suppose.

I didn't express clearly enough. My fault, sorry. What I meant is that Quantative Easing's effects on asset inflation ( the current monetary system brought in response to the 2008 crisis) has created a mismatch between asset inflation and wage inflation which won't abate. (By printing cheap money which inevitably flows into fixed assets.)

Yes monetary inflation is continual throughout history but we've entering an inflation trap that will impoverish ordinary wage earners relative to asset owners. Since we cannot go without some fixed assets - especially housing, since we all need somewhere to live - that is going to be a problem.

Oil embargos are an extra irritant feeding into the problem.

You may disagree with analysis but I hope I've explained it adequately.

I'd agree with you that not every mistake someone makes is relevant, plenty of mistakes can be moved on from, but the lad calling for tax breaks and better conditions for farmers who has multiple animal cruelty convictions behind him and tax judgements of over €500,000 against him shouldn't be within an asses roar of negotiating anything in my opinion

Want to be taken seriously - put serious people forward maybe?

real farmers livestock will starve over the actions of these fake farmers

Theres real world knock effects currently happening because of this.

Its an absolute disgrace that its being allowed to continue.

The connection, as I see it, between QE and housing is abstract and indirect but bear with me for a second.

QE continues to suppress nominal bond yields across the board creating (relatively) cheap money. With a weakening(-ish) dollar it means the wealthy will continue to borrow cheaply at low interest and, following on from that, search for assets to park their money in.

While this doesn't strictly mean that they will park their money anywhere in particular, in practice housing and farmland are logical choices since they will not only retain their value but imo they reflect monetary inflation better than non-fixed assets where there is greater scope for artificial price suppression.

In theory they could put their money into industrial metals, and Central Banks are buying up gold, but private investors are pumping the real estate market and the stats confirm it.

There is no particular mechanism connecting wages to the rises in asset prices ensuring they rise together. Ordindary people then get a shock when rent inflation and house price inflation outpaces their income. IMO this will continue on. Obviously I don't have a crystal ball but I also don't see what will 'break the cycle'.

As a solution I would limit foreign investment in Irish based property but that is a discussion for the Accommodation and Property forum and it would create a new set of risk factors.

If a foreign navy was blockading Irish ports it would constitute an act of war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade#Act_of_war

If domestic actors are just demonstrating how they feel for a day, then that is a simple demonstration, fully acceptable in a democracy. If they are engaged in a blockade, it becomes an act of rebellion. The fact that they think they are justified, does not change that.