Truagh Spirit, a social enterprise based in north Monaghan, is sounding the alarm over the soaring cost of food and its devastating impact on essential services like Meals on Wheels.
While rising prices affect everyone, they're hitting older people, low-income families, and community organisations the hardest.
The local service has calculated that their average food spend is up 26.7% compared to the same period last year.
Truagh Spirit Meals on Wheels currently prepare and deliver over 1,400 hot nutritious Meals on Wheels per month. Fiona McCaffrey Jones who is the Manager of Truagh Spirit Community Services, says we've managed to avoid cutting back so far, but the pressure is immense.
The price we charge per meal has not increased since April 2024, and both the Board of Management and Fiona is committed to protecting the service users from further financial strain.
As well as the cost of food prices, there are other cost pressures too, namely VAT at 13.5%. Fiona is calling on the Government to help with the costs involved so that no increase is experienced by the users of the service. She says the concern would be that people would stop using the service if there was a price rise per meal.
"With pre-Budget submissions now being finalised across the sector, we hope this story will help highlight the urgent need for: The Government to take dynamic food pricing into account in Budget 2026 for all community- and voluntary-led Meals on Wheels services, a review of VAT on Meals on Wheels, and increased allocations for Hot School Meals in line with food inflation.
"We’ve all heard about dynamic pricing when it comes to concert tickets — where the price goes up based on demand. Unfortunately, we’re now seeing the same kind of unpredictability in our food costs. As a small organisation with a big social impact, we simply cannot pass these increases on to our service users."
