This compounds another longer-term issue, the oldest, most oil-dependent homes are also the least efficient ones. The same release shows heating oil use peaking in homes built between 1967 and 1999, at 38 to 52 per cent, and falling to near zero in anything built since 2015, since new-builds are overwhelmingly electric or heat-pump heated and rated A. Roscommon and Leitrim, two of the most oil-reliant counties, also carry the country’s highest share of G-rated homes, its worst rating band, at 11 per cent each. A litre of oil buys less warmth in an older, draftier house. Rural households are dealing a significant price rise in home that already took more energy to heat.

The way oil is bought further adds to the issue at the household level. Gas and electricity are metered and billed monthly, so a price rise is spread over time, and if the price falls you get that benefit in your next monthly bill. Heating oil is typically bought as a single tank fill, paid in one go, usually in the autumn, and that fill now costs roughly €700 more than it did this time last year. A household on gas absorbs rising prices a little at a time, spread across a year of bills. A household on oil get hit with the rise as a single lump sum, often at exactly the point in the year, now, when money is already stretched by other costs such as back-to-school and pre-Christmas costs.

Further, we should also consider who lives in these rural houses heated by oil. Age Action Ireland has estimated that roughly half of older people nationally, and a higher share again in rural areas, heat their homes with oil. Separate CSO figures, cited by the charity ALONE this year, show 45.6 per cent of older people living alone would have been at risk of poverty last year without cost-of-living supports, the highest rate of any household type measured. Academic research on fuel poverty across the island has found older people are over-represented in older, less efficient homes, and less likely than the general population to have attic or wall insulation or double glazing.

While the latest national CPI figure is 3.7% this increase is not felt equally across the country. It is concentrated by geography, in counties with no gas network, and by age, in older households who may be least able to afford it. If the Government are considering a support package modelled on the “average” household across the country in the upcoming budget, then where it is most urgently required may be missed. It might be more complicated and not as popular across all voters, but if there is to be an allocation in the Budget to help those most in need due to these pressures then it is worth targeting it where it is most needed.