I, too, welcome the Little Blue Heroes and the gardaí and commend everyone involved in that.

Listening to the Taoiseach's answers, I wonder if he gets it at all. He was presented with the stark reality people face in terms of grocery prices and he rattled off a list of numbers and inflation rates rather than acknowledging the real difficulties people are facing when they do their weekly shop. I do not know if the Taoiseach even notices or acknowledges the problems people are facing.

Some 70% of people are either very worried or extremely worried about food prices. Will the Taoiseach even acknowledge that? Many families are now spending an extra €3,000 per year on their grocery and shopping bills and prices are still increasing. Anyone doing their weekly shopping recently will have noticed prices again beginning to soar. Does the Taoiseach even acknowledge that reality for people? We are talking about parents who are working really hard all week, and who are going without meals so they can feed their children. We are talking about pensioners who have to leave items behind on the checkout that they can no longer afford. We are talking about families scrimping and saving just so they can get by. No one should be going hungry. No one should be having to skip meals to feed their children and no pensioner should be worried about keeping food on the table. We are talking about the basics here; what it costs just to survive in this country. Buying the essentials of milk, butter, pasta and bread now costs more than it ever has before. The level of stress and anxiety this is causing families is growing.

Soaring food prices are something the Government promised to address. It is now more than two years since the Minister of State, Deputy Richmond, organised his meeting with grocery retailers to discuss runaway prices. What happened was that meeting was a talking shop convened for optics. He turned up, wagged his finger and everyone went home. Grocery prices are higher now than they ever have been, so if the Minister of State thinks that was a success it certainly has not been. We all have suspicions that we are being ripped off and price-gouged in this country when it comes to grocery prices, but there is no way to prove it because we do not have full transparency when it comes to supermarket profits.

People are handing more than €10 billion per year to supermarkets to buy food for their families, so why is there not full transparency about profits? Supermarket chains are not required to publish detailed and full accounts about their profits. Given that people have to buy food, there is no choice in this. Why is this not a requirement for all supermarket retailers and chains? There is a simple answer to this. He could act. I am asking him if he will act to require all supermarket chains and retailers to do this. I do not want diversionary answers here or distractions. It is a simple question. I want him to answer the question.

The question is?

Well, if the Taoiseach were listening, the question was whether is he going to act-----

Am I going to-----

-----to ensure all supermarket chains have to declare their profits in full detail.

First of all, I say to the Deputy that he has a tremendous habit of asserting what I said earlier, which of course I did not say at all.

How would you know? You were not listening.

I did not rattle off any figures when I was answering Deputy McDonald.

Yes, you did.

You can hear him on the record.

I did not. What I said was, I outlined what TASC, the Think-tank for Action on Social Change, said in its publication today. That is not rattling off figures. It basically said that the short-term, once-off cost-of-living packages that we introduced had a very significant impact in helping people to deal with what has been the worst inflationary spiral since the 1970s, which we had after Covid and as a result of the energy crisis resulting from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Those things did happen and there was an inflationary spiral, which we are still experiencing. The Government interventions were probably the most significant across Europe in terms of scale and impact-----

Not true.

-----but they still did not go to meet the enormity of the increases people experienced at the time. Do not say I just rattled off figures. I did not.

You did.

I then went on to say that we had extended the VAT reduction to 9%, which we did. That is not rattling off figures. That is a fact, which has had some impact. I mentioned free-of-charge HRT coming in on 1 June.

HRT is not a grocery.

I mentioned the extension of the free schoolbooks scheme to all students. If you have one income coming in, we all know that every September and every summer, schoolbooks, going back to school and the cost of schoolbooks was the bane of most parents' lives. That is gone, eliminated. The Deputies did not have the good grace to acknowledge that. I do not expect any acknowledgement, but they just ignored that and its impact on household budgets. St. Vincent de Paul has said this has had a significant impact on household budgets. The hot school meals programme has been significant in its impact on children generally, and particularly children from low-income and difficult circumstances where they may not get a meal on their way into school in the morning.

The free public transport will be increased from five years to eight years. This is all expenditure that frees up people's income for other expenditure. We also passed legislation, the food ombudsman Bill, to deal with, engage with and give greater transparency to the entire continuum from producer to shelf in respect of supermarket prices and the income the primary producer gets for food in this country. That legislation was passed and is there. The food ombudsman has been established - it is a different title but it is essentially the same - to deal with the issues the Deputy raised in respect of transparency. That will have teeth.

The Taoiseach did rattle off a range of figures about inflation but did not acknowledge the real hardship people face in terms of grocery prices. I ask him to acknowledge that. Last week, his Government took the decision to lift the pay caps for senior high-paid bankers. Newspapers reported that means, for instance, the annual package of the head of AIB could go from €500,000 to €2 million. Those are the kinds of decisions the Government has taken that may have an immediate effect for people at the very high end of incomes. What has it done about grocery prices and ensuring full transparency on supermarket profits now - not something that is going to happen in the future? Why is there not full transparency now? When will the Taoiseach act on that? Does he acknowledge that the €3,000 per year extra on grocery prices that most households are paying is utterly unsustainable, and that action needs to be taken by the Government now to bring those prices down?

I did acknowledge, and have spoken a couple of times today about, the elevated level of grocery prices and the impact it is having on households. Please do not say I did not acknowledge it. I did. It is the Deputy's standard practice now to make assertions that are not true. Of course prices are impacting on families and households but the taxation measures we took last year in the budget benefited low-income workers and medium-income workers, through both the USC reduction, in particular, and the income tax reductions. We did it in previous budgets as well. Those are sustainable measures to help people cope with what has been an extraordinary period of growth in prices more generally. We had a significant impact on insurance reforms, which we worked and focused on over the past number of years.

Insurance is going up.

Insurance has gone up.

We are looking at every aspect of cost and price with a view to getting prices down.

Does the Taoiseach keep track of even his own bills?

I assure Deputy O'Callaghan that we understand fully the degree to which this is impacting on people, households and families, but we have taken very effective measures. They include ones that even the Social Democrats did not advocate for, such as free schoolbooks, notwithstanding the position that party adopts on so many issues.