For the best part of a year we have been in a small dispute with our electricians over fees.

There have been emails, there have been phone calls, and there have been those long cold silences between two parties who each quietly believe the other one is the eejit. 

Then last week, like a comet that swings past every few decades, they returned to finally certify the job and test the system.

There was a clipboard, there was a meter, and there was a young fella at the fuse board making that sharp intake of air sound which, in this country, costs about four hundred euro a breath.

Anyway, they signed it off.

Polite words were exchanged. There were envelopes involved. Get out and never come back, I thought.

This morning we woke up to a dead house.

The light switches were out.

The boiler had no way to burn the gas.

The fridge had stopped humming and the router dead in the corner.

Not only am I writing this column without caffeine - something that the NUJ outlaws - I just had to perform the heart-breaking task of informing the kids that the internet was gone.

Now I am not a qualified electrician, as anyone who has watched me struggling to change a lightbulb will testify, and I am making no accusations whatsoever.

It may be just a coincidence that a system which had been running away happily decided to die the very night after it was officially declared to be in perfect health.

These things happen, like.

But it does feel a bit like a doctor giving you a clean bill of health and you collapsing in the car park on the way out.

The irony is that we have spent this entire year as a nation worrying about energy.

The Strait of Hormuz, petrol and diesel soaring and tractors blockading motorways.

And yet when the lights finally went out in our house, geopolitics had no hand, act or part in it. 

This was a purely local job by a couple of morons.

Somewhere a man is nervously getting into his van to rush across town to face me and I am writing this column on a laptop with 36 per cent battery.

Pray for him.

Budget is stone-deaf

A few weeks ago I wrote here about the proposed €100 culture voucher for 16-year-olds, the Irish answer to the French pass Culture.

Well, I am sorry to report it has gone the way of my fuse board.

The culture card didn’t make it into Budget 2027, it was merely a glint in Patrick O’Donovan’s eye, a passing fad like Tamagotchis. 

The National Youth Council of Ireland has described the whole thing as tone-deaf when it comes to young people.

I would tend to agree.

Teenagers will have to fund their own culture the traditional way, by pestering their parents for a lift to the cinema and then asking to be dropped around the corner due to the cringe factor.

The rest of the budget was a subtle attempt to keep everyone happy but which has had the opposite effect.

Social welfare goes up a tenner and the minimum wage rises by 79c to €14.94 an hour.

One pensioner described the €3 increase to the living alone allowance as a joke. 

Experts would point you in the direction of France, where an austerity budget and crumbling schools have the youth out on the streets.

In fact, there is nowhere in Europe handing out the sort of sweets and trinkets our government is.

Simon Harris insisted the budget put the country on “a path, a trajectory, a way forward”, which is three ways of saying the same thing but he’s got to sell it somehow.

But the line of the week went to Ivana Bacik, who called it a Kit Kat budget from a TikTok Tánaiste.

Ouch.

O’Donovan the fall guy

Speaking of things being switched off.

Media Minister Patrick O’Donovan, having failed to get his €100 for teenagers’ culture, then made a last-minute decision to cut RTÉ’s State funding by €20m, and warned that the Government will renege on the three-year funding deal agreed with the broadcaster in July 2024.

The barrage of abuse and criticism aimed in his general direction by the Sunday papers and radio discussion panels would make anyone wince.

And it smacks of a little political naivety that in a budget that made nobody that happy, he managed to volunteer himself as the fall guy.

Raffle route a non-runner

A story in the Irish Independent caught my eye this week and stayed with me since.

It featured a father in his late 30s, renting in Dublin city with his partner and their toddler.

They were evicted once already when a landlord sold up, and somewhere along the way he convinced himself that a house raffle was a more realistic route to a front door than a mortgage. 

He only copped how much he’d spent, around €1,500 over two years, when a mortgage broker asked to go through his outgoings.

This is something the banks are now looking for, apparently.

Is it any wonder that people are feeling stuck?