Cost of Living Issues
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-10
============================================================

Pearse Doherty (SF), Donegal

I accept the Government did all those things; that is a statement of fact. However, if the Minister thinks that people are not worse off this year than they were last year, he is living in a bubble and that is the problem here. The facts are clear. As I said, energy is just one example where 303,000 people cannot pay their bills and that is only electricity. Another 170,000-plus cannot pay their gas bills. Prices are going through the roof. The Minister talked about how the Government had put up rates. It is also putting up rents with the rent-hike Bill. Electricity bills have gone up. The Government put up college fees. It has put up taxes on petrol and diesel. It put up the tax on the family home. It is planning to increase taxes on home heating oil. Insurance premiums are up. Car insurance is up. Home insurance is up. Health insurance is up. Public liability insurance is up. The Government has completely failed to be true to the promise it gave in the election campaign to reduce childcare costs. It abandoned workers when it promised them it would provide them tax cut, but instead it was developers who got the multimillion euro tax cut. The Government based all this on inflation rates that are now 50% higher than it had projected in the budget. It has got this wrong. People are struggling and people are suffering. A cost-of-living package is desperately needed. The Minister and his colleagues need to get out of the bubble they are in and recognise where ordinary people are at.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:36+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-10