Áilín Quinlan: €1.23 a litre fuel? My husband almost leapt out the window

“How much did you say a litre of petrol cost again, over there in Gran Canaria?” I asked.

The price of petrol is the kind of thing my husband notices and deems worthy of comment; don’t get me wrong, I’m not a spoiled, empty-headed flibbertigibbet who doesn’t know or care about the price of anything.

All the same, the prices on offer at a roadside petrol station are not the things that make me gasp on the very first day of a long-awaited holiday, when I’ve just been released from a plane jammed full of heat-hungry Irish, when someone else is driving me through gorgeous scenery under picture-perfect skies, alongside sunlit azure seas and stunning coastal views with temperatures in the early to mid-twenties.

The week’s holiday was my idea. Anywhere, anytime; after three years of long covid-induced stasis, nothing and nobody will stop me getting on the road again.

But anyway.

The point of all of this is that, en route to a remote, quiet, seaside village along sheer roads offering dazzling beautiful ocean views, the thing that made my husband gasp was a roadside petrol station offering petrol at €1.23 a litre. He almost leapt out the window.

At the time I hardly noticed. I was numbly staring at the sheer actuality of a real, huge, blindingly yellow sun in a clear diamond-bright sky, my mind disbelievingly lingering on the promise of outdoor warmth and cloudless blue skies for a whole week. Swimming. Eating outdoors. Walking in a tee-shirt and shorts. No lashing rain. No freezing winds. No mud or dark clouds, no desperately grim skies.

At home, the heating still had to be on a lot, despite the fact it was well into March. We were still regularly firing up the solid fuel stove of an evening (having, thank the Lord of Small Things, an older house with the privilege of real fireplaces), the laundry was still having to be mostly dried inside, the garden was ratty and shrivelled-looking, our daffodils still hadn’t blossomed, and the herb bed looked doleful and wretched, despite sheltering all winter under plexiglass lids.

Anyway, none of that is the point. The point is, at the time, I just rolled my eyes. It was only a week or so later, at home, when I noticed the price of a three-litre container of milk had suddenly leapt to €3.55 from €3.25, that I remembered the petrol price sign in Gran Canaria.

I thought about how a cup of coffee had been about €1.80 there compared to what – nearly €4 a cup in Ireland depending on where you buy it?

The way you could get a really decent meal for two for under €50.

I thought about how a check on bonkers.ie had revealed we could save more than €400 by switching to a different energy provider.

How the energy bills of Irish consumers have now increased to an average of €500 a year more than that for people living in many other EU countries.

And how the miserable, freezing weather costs you a fortune - even when you layer up and keep physically active - in terms of keeping the house tolerably habitable.

I thought about an article I’d read that said a 750ml container of Hellman’s Mayonnaise cost €6 in a shop in Louth and the equivalent of just over €4 over the border a few miles away. How the cost of the average weekly grocery trolley is said to have increased by more than a fifth since the winter of 2021. That’s not even five years!

I recalled how a friend of mine recently cancelled a trip to a conference in Dublin.

The first time she went online to check the price of spending the night in a no-frills hotel, she was quoted €88. Alas, she didn’t book straight away. Four days later, the price for the same room had risen to nearly €220. Add that to train fare, meals, and that was the end of the trip.

I recalled how someone confided that during a trip to Edinburgh she’d squirreled away several packets of ibuprofen and paracetamol in her luggage, because they were a fraction of what they cost in Ireland.

“I know. It sounds mad,” she said a bit sheepishly.

She’d had a dreadful flu before Christmas, she said; the worst ever, and the price of paracetamol and ibuprofen in her local chemist, on top of the antibiotics and the doctor’s fee made her head spin.

“When I saw what they were charging over there compared to home, I bought a packet of paracetamol and ibuprofen every time I went into the supermarket.”

Back to the roadside sign with petrol at €1.23.

It’s €1.88 per litre here.

I asked a few people what they thought about that.

About the fact that on a hot, near desert island 90 miles off the coast of Africa with a ginormous tourism industry hosting some four million tourists annually, a place where they seemed to have to import nearly everything at presumably great cost, petrol was still €1.23 a litre.

How do they do that?

And here in Ireland, off the coast of Europe, it was €1.88.

Oh, everyone said, it’s inflation.

Oh, everyone said, the cost of living is just so much higher in Ireland.

Oh, everyone said, the cost of rent drives everything up. The lack of competition. High government spending. The cost of spiralling, the cost of every kind of insurance, mobile phones, the internet, VAT.

“Ah,” everyone said, “it’s just complicated.” Is it?