Irish Retail Petrol Price Analysis

The purpose of this analysis is an attempt to answer the question regarding how abnormally expensive Irish petrol prices are. This analysis is restricted to 95 Octane unleaded petrol. The attached document contains the detailed results of this analysis. Performing this analysis involves gathering data from multiple sources:

• Price of crude oil – normally priced in USD
• Price of unleaded petrol (called EN 228 in the industry) – normally priced in USD
• USD to EUR exchange rates
• Effective excise and VAT rates
• Average selling price per litre

This information has to be normalised across changes in currency type and dates on which the information is available.

The EN 228 standard is defined by the Committee for European Standardisation – see http://www.cen.eu/. The relevant standard is EN 228:2008 - Automotive fuels - Unleaded petrol - Requirements and test methods and EU Directive 98/70/EC.

Similarly, diesel is defined by standard EN 590 EN 590:2004 Automotive fuels - Diesel - Requirements and test methods and EU Directive 93/38/EEC.

EN228 is priced in USD per tonne. A tonne of petrol is about 1,335 litres. (This can vary because the specific gravity of EN228 can vary from 720-775 Kg/cubic metre. A cubic metre is 1,000 litres so 1 tonne or 1,000 Kg represents from 1,389 to 1,290 litres. I have used a value of 1,335 litres of petrol per tonne.)

Excise duty increase in increments over the analysed interval. The Oct 2008 budget increased duty (before VAT) to €0.5088 per litre. Prior to that it was €0.4427 per litre for about three years. And so on.

The price of petrol consists of the following elements:

1. Buy price of litre of petrol
2. Excise duty
3. National Oil Reserves Agency levy of €0.01 per litre
4. Margin added by from retailer and supplier
5. VAT

according to (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 ) x 5. However, the public buy price of petrol is not necessarily the price at which it is bought by retailers. Many retail petrol companies are part of larger entities that have direct access to the raw material and refining resources. But the calculated buy price is still a valid index against which sell prices can be compared. This is the price you and I would buy bulk refined fuel for resale at. Having stated this, the difference between the actual sell price of a litre of petrol at petrol stations and the derived buy price based on the public price of bulk refined petrol should be roughly constant. This is not the case as shown in the following chart (Click on the chart to see a larger version):

The left-hand scale shows the sell price. The right hand scale shows the buy price.

There have been long intervals when falls in the cost price have not been matched by falls in the price charged. Price increases are however passed on quickly. Price reductions are passed on slowly if at all.

So, the answer to the question “Are Irish motorists being ripped off?” is a fairly certain yes. The answer to the question “Are the Government doing anything to question retail petrol prices and ensure savings are passed to motorists?” is a definite no.

20th Century … The Century of …

The 20th century was the century of many greats. The largest population, the largest economic growth, greatest wealth, greatest advances in the sciences and in technology, the development of real medicine, the largest population, the largest number of wars with the greatest losses of life. But in the midst of these firsts and greatests is one that is so overpoweringly depressing and represents such a immensity of unjustified suffering. The 20th century was the century of genocide, mass civilian murder and racial, cultural, national and tribal purgings. The attached list shows just the largest of these events. It is also far from complete.

Starting with what is called the most forgotten mass extinction event of the 20th century – the systematic officially sanctioned casual murder of millions of citizens of the Congo Free State, an event that we should all remember given that it was exposed by our own Roger Casement – the number of mass murder events and the numbers killed increased unremittingly throughout the century.

This lists excludes deaths from events such as famines that were not explicitly man made - so the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s is not listed here – and events such as pandemics and combatants in wars. This list represents the larger events of the murder of civilians purely for their own sake, where even the feeble context of external justification has been removed.

The Turks feature three times: once for the well-known and now much denied Armenian genocide, recalled only because of the probably apocryphal statement by Hitler questioning who remembers the Armenians, to the less known and now long-forgotten Assyrian and Pontic Greek massacres.

Stalin ordered millions to their deaths just to fill quotas with the reasoning that because there must be a certain number of traitors in a given area, that number must be found and killed.

You’d think it would be hard to kill hundreds of thousands of people in circumstances where you are not using military and mechanistic tools and insulated by distance but evidently it is far from difficult. Statements such as “it is inconceivable that …” fall away to irrelevance in the face of the unstoppable sequence of mass slaughter events. The Croatians brutally and physically murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs from 1941 to 1944. The Serbs then revisited this brutality on the Bosnians 50 years later.

It is so hard to tolerate the thought of the accumulated personal pain that these deaths represent.

Critics may decry the world standing idly by as the Rwandan and Bosnian massacres took place. But the world has stood idly by and continues to remain disinterested and uninvolved as these events continue.

The ease with which a society turns from apparent civilisation to gorging on mass murder may seem extraordinary but the reality demonstrates it is so ordinary and routine. The frail restraints of civilisation are so simply snapped and what is then unleashed is appalling. I was going to write unimaginable but again history demonstrates that it can be both imagined and then effected so very easily.

Turnipnomics

Turnipman and Pretty Boy have exceeded all expectations.

The failure of the 2008 emergency budget to address the problem of a bloated, incompetent, inefficient public service is as annoying as it is unsurprising. The Irish public service has been allowed to increase in size and cost, completely out of proportion to increases in the population size and rate of inflation and to the services being provided. This is so grotesquely unfunny. One of the major costs to the economy, a cost that is dead in terms of return or value or productivity, has been left utterly unaddressed.

This is no more than plain cowardice where a collection of petty and small cuts and savings are substituted for one large cut that will really make a difference. No only have the resulting savings not been achieved but the problem of ever increasing and ever more costly public service is left unsolved.

The potential savings available if both the size and the cost of the public service were reduced is very substantial. These are enduring savings that will make a large contribution to the country’s overall long-term economic welfare.

In the years 1990 to 2007, the population increased by 23.77%. Over the same interval, the numbers in employment in the public service increased by 35.03%. The direct salary costs of the public service increased by 217.20% while the Consumer Price Index increased by 66.34% in those years. See this for a more detailed analysis.

If both the numbers of public servants and their costs increased in line with population growth and the Consumer Price Index, the increased cost over the years 1990 to 2007 would have been 105.88%. Note that this does not assume that any efficiencies and economies of loading or scope or scale would have been achieved. Instead the increase was 217.20%, more than twice what would have been expected, without efficiencies being achieved.

What did we all get for this abnormal expansion of the public service? Has the quality of services doubled? For example, has twice as much crime been solved or has crime reduced by 50%?

The cost per so-called public service per head of population increased from €1,612.09 in 1990 to €4,131.57 in 2007. That is an increase of 156.29%, well over twice the rate of inflation.

A family of four people now pays €16,526.28 for the privilege of having a public service. Does that represent anything like value for money? Not a fucking chance. What does your average family get for this huge expenditure? Bear in mind that this is just the salary costs and excludes all the other public service costs. This is just the cost of administration and management. Everything else is extra that you and I also pay for.

In the midst of this offensive joke of increasing public service costs over the last 19 years and especially over the last 11 years, Fianna Fail inserted public service pay benchmarking which has lead to a greater inflation of public service costs. Benchmarking was meant to deliver efficiencies but it has promoted and magnified manifest inefficiencies.

During an interval when productivity of the general population increased, that of the public service decreased while their cost also increased disproportionately. Put simply, there are more public servants doing less and costing much more than ever before.

We truly get the government we deserve. In the absence of a competent opposition, Fianna Fail has relinquished control of the country to public servants who have spinelessly allowed their numbers and costs to balloon without control.

Why We Voted Against the Lisbon Treaty - Episode 212

So when did:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has strongly criticised the Irish Government's unilateral action in providing a blanket State guarantee to Irish-owned bank.

At an emergency summit of the big four EU states in Paris at
the weekend, Dr Merkel said she was "not amused" by the scheme and called on the European Central Bank and the European Commission to engage in an early dialogue with the Government on it.

"We need a consolidated and coherent approach and we also have to see that the way we are proceeding naturally does not impact negatively on other member states," she said at the end of a summit held to propose ways to shore up confidence in the banking industry.

Germany on Sunday guaranteed all private bank accounts
and negotiated a 50 billion euros ($69 billion) bailout deal for Hypo Real Estate AG as Europe's second largest economy sought to ward off financial crisis.

become:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has announced a bailout plan for Hypo Real Estate.

The Finance Ministry and private banks reached a deal late Sunday to infuse an additional line of credit worth up to 15 billion euros ($21 billion) into the embattled real estate giant, expanding on an earlier 35 billion euro ($48 billion) bailout plan that would have found the government and private banks splitting the bill.

The earlier deal fell apart Saturday when Hypo announced that a consortium of unnamed financial institutions had backed out. That prompted banking executives and lawmakers to convene in the capital for feverish talks toward the new deal they unveiled late Sunday.

The new package includes the original 35 billion euros
($48.4 billion) plan with the government paying up to 27 billion euros ($37 billion) of that sum and banks funding the remainder as a line of credit.

The Tyranny of the Proper Noun

When I was growing up in Ireland during the times of the low-level civil war in Northern Ireland, I remember the ambivalence that I always felt when the announcement of the death of a person was made on the radio on television. If the person was described as a Catholic there was always the sense that the person was totally innocent and a random victim of Protestant terror. Similarly when the person was a Protestant, there was a sense that this individual was less than innocent and culpable to some degree in his death. It occurred to me that the presence of the proper noun in the description of the victim brought the prejudice of the listener to the fore. The death of a person on my side, however spurious an association, was a greater tragedy than the death of someone on the other side.

The public announcement of the death of a person is modified by the inclusion of the proper noun. This modifies the event in the mind of the observer. Their natural, however slight, handenness means their interpretation of the event moves to that direction.

Try removing the proper noun and describing the events in terms of the uncoloured facts when you next read or hear about a death in such circumstances.

Remove the proper nouns from a sentence such as “A 17-year-old Palestinian youth was shot dead by Israeli troops in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank today.” so it becomes “A 17-year-old youth was shot dead by troops in a refugee camp today.” How does this change your perception of the event?

Dinna ninna ninna ninna ninna nah Turnipman Turnipmaaaaan

It is hard to take the man seriously when he has a turnip for a head. Enough said.

Sisters of Smuggerhood

Today’s word describes the state of being a smug mother who can variously drive an enormous SUV or cycles with their child in some form a plastic seat at the back. The former drive slowly, badly and stop anywhere using their hazard lights that magically makes their car no longer an obstacle. The latter breaks lights and makes illegal turns with the child precariously vulnerable. I can cycle my bike the wrong way into oncoming traffic with my low carbon smugprint baby behind me because I have given birth. GIVEN BIRTH. Do you understand?

In each case the cloak of reproduction and the shield of procreation renders them impervious to any criticism. I have reproduced. The future of the entire race is in the back of my car/dangling from the back of my bicycle. I have a right to do this. My womb has flowered. Seed has burst forth.

Fuck you, you smug fuckers. When octopuses reproduce they do so once and their young devour them. Your brats should feed of your saggy corpse.