THE NUMBER OF households in Ireland in arrears with their gas bill has topped 100,000 prompting Bord Gáis to say it will start installing pre-payment meters in middle-income homes.

The company’s corporate affairs director Larry Donald has told TheJournal.ie that people across Ireland were suffering with high utility bills:

“We are getting people from right across society who are experiencing difficulty paying bills,” he said and emphasised that the electricity meter was an option for anyone looking to manage their debt.

Of its one million customers, 10 per cent are unable to pay their bills according to Bord Gáis. The company will now start adding to the 30,000 customers already on pre-payment gas meters in Ireland.

The plans began to be formulated in 2008 as a result of high oil prices at the time and the anticipation that energy prices would eventually rise as a result.

Donald said that the utility industry had acted on a “credit model” over the last number of years and that this did not suit everybody.

He said using pre-payment meters must be seen as a perfectly normal option within society.

Bord Gáis installed well over 600 meters in February alone and Donald added that he expected that number to grow over the coming months to a point where it would be installing over a thousand meters a month.

He emphasised that meters could be installed free of charge and there was no change to the tariff, which remained the same whether you pay by bill or pre-payment meter.

According to the Irish Daily Mail, the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) has also said that 150,000 of its customers are in trouble and the that it will increase the number of pre-payment electricity meters in homes in Ireland.

The electricity company said that they currently had around 24,000 homes on old-style pre-payment token meters but was planning to introduce new electric pay as you go meters over the next 18 months.