Except it’s the customers who are being held up. Finally a report confirming what we all expected and certainly what I and many others have been suggesting for a long time now. Irish customers are having the mickey taken out of them by petrol stations operating within the Republic. According to this report petrol is roughly 11% more expensive in Ireland than the EU average and diesel is up to 20% more expensive in Ireland compared to the EU average. Anyone who has been following the price of fuel at the pump since 2004 when all the hype over oil prices formally hit the consumer market will know that there is next to no linkage between the price of oil and the price of fuel at the pump. If there was we would have been paying over Eur 2 per litre of petrol in March of this year considering oil was more than two and a half times the price per barrel as it was in 2004 when petrol was roughly 95.9 c per litre (Waterford City figure). This is yet another example of the Irish being ripped off and the government doing nothing about it. The fact that diesel is so much more expensive than the EU average comes as no surprise given the recent increase in diesel engines on the road for both environmental and economical reasons. Didn’t take the fuel companies long to figure that one out! source: Irish Times