Why is the cost of most things so high in Ireland?

Sophrosyne said:
I don't have statistics, but the PSO Levy and VAT go to the State.

VAT is charged on the PSO Levy.

In the case of the bill where the electric usage was €15.11, the VAT & PSO Levy amounted to €19.31.
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Does it actually go to the State?
 
Well, obviously, VAT goes to the State.

The PSO Levy is a State subsidy paid for by users of electricity. Information from the CER:

“The proceeds of the levy are used to contribute to the additional relevant costs incurred by PSO-supported electricity generation which are not recovered in the electricity market, in many cases via contracts that suppliers have in place with electricity generators. The policy and terms associated with PSO levy supported plant are mandated by Government in the relevant legislation and approved by the European Commission.

The CER has no discretion over the terms of PSO schemes. The CER’s only role here is to calculate the PSO levy in accordance with Government policy and to help ensure that the scheme is administered appropriately and efficiently. As part of this role, the CER calculates the costs properly incurred under the relevant PSO contracts/schemes to be recovered.

ESB Networks collects the PSO levy from electricity suppliers (paid for by customers) and passes it to EirGrid. EirGrid sends these PSO monies to relevant generators/suppliers.”

The PSO levy was €335.4 million for the levy period that ran from 1st October 2014 to 30th September 2015.

I cannot see any later figures.

I understand that the PSO Levy is to increase from October next.
 
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Ok, so short of an examination by someone like the Comptroller and Auditor General we really don't know how much of that €335.4 is really being used properly. It looks like yet another subsidy paid by urban dwellers to rural dwellers.
One more to add to the list of reasons why ribbon development is a bad idea.
 
Gordon Gekko said:
The fact that professionals are so protected and so overpaid feeds into everything and increases costs across the board.
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galway_blow_in said:
yes and they are so smug in their long established sheltered positions , they see it as the natural order of things that they be allowed gouge
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I often hear people complain in general about the cost of professionals but it seems vague. I would consider professionals to include:
- solicitors
- barristers
- doctors
- dentists
- accountants

Who else would you add to the list? Could we gather some clear examples of the practices/fees that people consider excessive?
 
accountants are not that overly pricey IMO

GP,s in ireland earn more than anywhere else in europe and far in excess of their counterparts in the uk
 
There are no barriers to entry for Accountants as far as I can tell. Plenty of bodies you can sign up to, do the exams and your qualified.

Doctors numbers are regulated through the shortage of places in medical schools.
From a GP perspective, I'm not sure how practices work...do you have to buy out an existing one to get set up? If yes, then thats another roadblock to entry.
From speaking to a young Vet who had to go to Budapest after not getting the points for Ireland, he returned to work for a large practice. He explained to me that you just culdn't go into an area and start working as a Vet, you had to buy out an existing practice.

Barristers/Solicitors...limited number of places each year through Kings Inns/Law Library?

Dentists. Very high points suggest limitied number of students accepted every year?
 
A professional is someone who is a member of a self regulating body and needs to be a member of that body in order to work in that job. You can't work as a doctor without being a member of the ICGP (or whatever) etc. The idea predates the idea of State regulation and is somewhat redundant in the modern world where the State regulates the professional bodies and in many cases the majority of the membership of those bodies comes from outside the profession. To me the notion is elitist and redundant and in effect that's the case anyway now that everyone from Teachers to Nurses to god knows what are now professionals. Rightly so as they are all just doing a job, just as Trade Unions are not for Tradespeople.
Now if we can just stop doctors telling everyone what job they do that would also be great or should everyone insist on being referred to by the title of their job? It seems utterly bizarre, can you imagine being introduced to someone and them saying "Hi, I'm Teacher Mary Murphy."?


As for fees; they market sets the rate (supply and demand). There are plenty of poor barristers. There are no poor doctors. There are few poor accountants. It is strange that people are far more likely to critically assess their accountant or solicitor than their doctor.
 
According to the Indo fees for the oldest profession are €400 an hour compared to €50 an hour in Hamburg or Amsterdam
 
Duke of Marmalade said:
According to the Indo fees for the oldest profession are €400 an hour compared to €50 an hour in Hamburg or Amsterdam
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Supply and demand. It says a lot about Dutch women!
When you make things illegal you make them expensive.
Pot is much cheaper over there as well.
 

As noted earlier though, the market doesn't supply the doctors. There are lots of students who would very much like to become doctors and work in ireland but they are being artificially constrained from doing so by the arbitrary number of medical places available in the CAO system.
We should double the number of places for doctors, but get them to sign up to 10 years public service - or pay back the fees. I believe a similar setup is the case in Canada.
It's ludicrous that we don't have anough doctors and a lot of the small number we do train up immediately emigrate.
 
One third of doctors out of Trinity are foreign students who pay massive fees to train here and most of them would never have planned in staying here. I'm sure the figures for the RCSI is the same or higher.
When Doctors Unions talk about the high numbers of doctors who emigrate and say that the reason for that is contracts or pay etc they are telling lies.
 
Purple said:
You can't work as a doctor without being a member of the ICGP (or whatever) etc.
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You can indeed work as a doctor without being a member of a training body or medical college, the major requirements are just that you have a medical degree and are registered with the Medical Council. Even without specialist training, i.e. after 1 year out of college, it is possible to go on the General Register and then you can work as a non-consultant doctor. There are even some consultants (<100 nationally) who are not on the specialist register.


I agree, but that is a cultural issue. Older people in particular will insist on using titles. I absolutely never use titles for anyone - whether prince or pauper I use their first name or nothing at all - but I do understand why people like to call others by titles. For many it's seen as a way of giving respect and being polite.

There are psychosocial reasons too: it can be a way of reinforcing the clinical relationship, as doctors still have to perform many intimate and sensitive examinations and procedures, and some people find it easier to deal with this if they are more distant from the doctor.

Fewer and fewer doctors use their title now, most prefer 1st names. Many docs will now say "Hello, my name is John Smith, I'm the specialist kidney doctor".


The market sets the rate, but what if the market is dysfunctional? We have a volatile and distorted public system which is heavily subsidised by private insurance. We also have a private sector which makes hay off the back of the public system's failures. Having consultants straddle both systems can lead to significant conflicts of interests.

I would like to see the data comparing pay of doctors, barristers, accountants at various levels. I suspect it is not as clear cut as many think.
 

That is incorrect. Intern (1st year doctor) places have increased by 50% from 488 in 2004 to 733 in 2017. The Fottrell report said we need over 700, so we are at the target. We have more medical students than ever, the majority of whom are Irish. It is now almost impossible for a non-Irish graduate to get on a training scheme because we have so many Irish doctors coming out of medical schools. In fact, in 2016 there were Irish medical graduates who could not get intern places. So the bottleneck is not with medical schools.

To be able to train a doctor clinically you need to have a minimum number of clinical sites and patients. You can't learn orthopaedic surgery from a book, you have to do the procedures. If the hospitals are cancelling lists and closing theatres for financial reasons then there are far fewer patients available to operate on. This also leads to longer waiting lists, so when those patients finally arrive for surgery they are older, sicker, and more likely to need a senior doctor treating them. And then a significant percentage will have private insurance, so the consultant will have to do the procedure. This all means less experience for the trainees and Ireland has one of the longest training schemes in the world - so that is an actual bottleneck.


If you don't believe the unions, have a read of a recent paper from Irish medical schools: https://human-resources-health.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12960-015-0003-9

Doctors emigrate because they are paid better abroad, have better working conditions, and are treated better. The same for nurses. If you ask them to pay back fees, you will just be encouraging them go to Aus or NZ or USA or Canada where they will finish their training more quickly and be better paid at the end of it.

Speaking to friends who have done Blackhalls and Kings Inns, there seem to be huge barriers. The Blackhall exams for solicitors are outrageously and unnecessarily difficult. After Kings Inns, barristers who have connections (family or business) have a good chance at succeeding, but the rest make very meagre living in the first few years.

I have friends/family working as doctors, dentists, barristers, retail, architect, farmers, solicitors, builders, journalist, accountants, teachers, nurses, gardai, HR, civil service... they all have very different levels of education, very different lifestyles, even within job areas. A friend of mine is a GP and can only afford to rent a small studio apartment in Dublin, she has very little savings. Another friend is an IT engineer, just bought a Tesla. Friend who is an accountant, also renting small apartment, drives an 06 Fiesta, has modest savings.

I would love to see some worked examples where some professional fees are clearly unwarranted and where that professional is getting rich as a result. We can't address issues based on hearsay or imagined situations.
 

Good to see things have ramped up... I think though we are suffering a legacy somewhat of the under-training as it will take time for these additionals numbers to have an impact.

And the point of asking them to pay back fees is that you would only do so if they didn't work in Ireland for X years. So it would be a disincentive to emigration.
 

i grew up in rural ireland , if you had a routine of doing your shopping in super valu every week , were you to make a change and instead go to tesco , you were not met at the door by someone telling you to go back to super value , different story with the GP clinics operating in the general area , if you were registered in a particular practice but decided you didnt care for the doctor there , were you to ring up the GP clinic six miles over the road , more often than not you were refused an appointment and directly told to go back to where you were registered , whatever about cities , in rural parts GP,s had an unwritten contract with each other that they would not " steal " each others patients , they all more or less had the same fees too
 

If I had to choose between your suggestion of (1) fee-free education in exchange for 10 years mandatory service in a public hospital or (2) a €150,000 loan which I could pay back by going to USA, finishing my training in 4 years, work in a better environment, and be paid twice what I would get in Ireland, then I would be hugely incentivised to emigrate.
 

far from a deregulation of the GP sector happening , those GP,s in the sheltered field went in heavy a few years ago with their spin machine , they smelled a threat to their protected gig and we were subject to endless sob stories in the news about how half of them could barely put bread on the table , this despite the fact that GP fees never dropped a red cent after the crash , the worst was the blather about having to pay staff , rent and electricity bills , yes because mechanics , hairdressers , bakers , corner shop owners , they get electricity and rent for free
 

So why wouldn't you just go to the USA today if it's such a better deal, sounds like you are going to go? Seems like it would not be possible to incentivise it more...

It could be 5 years in public hospital or 10 years working in the state (public or private), each year worked in Ireland takes 10% or 20% off the balance.

I wouldn't single out medical students per se, but anyone whose training has cost the state > €100,000 and there is a shortage of qualified people in that area should have some sort of clawback.
 
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