Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-03-19 ============================================================ Simon Harris (FG), Wicklow It will be on Tuesday. The Deputy said Tuesday, Wednesday or whenever, but there is quite a lot of clarity from Government in relation to that. We intend to bring forward an appropriate intervention at our next Cabinet meeting, which will be on Tuesday. Work is under way in relation to that right now. As recently as the past hour or so, the Minister for energy and transport met with the Irish Road Haulage Association. It was a very good and constructive meeting. The association outlined to him some of the challenges its members, who are a critical part of our economy and our supply chains, are facing. We will work through some of those thoughts and proposals in the coming hours. The Government is absolutely clear that there is real pressure on families and businesses. People are feeling it at the pumps and in the cost of a fill of oil. As I confirmed last night, we are finalising what we believe to be an appropriate intervention for the areas in which there is the most acute pressure and challenge. In the Sinn Féin proposal, there is no talk about the fuel allowance. That is rather interesting, given that the people who are most at risk of fuel poverty really rely on that support. There is significant international volatility. I was reading about what the Italian Government is considering doing today. It is talking about doing it for just 20 days. This is because governments right around the world, and I presume oppositions, are not able to predict where this conflict in the Middle East and the Gulf is going to bring the global economy. As I said last night - I reiterate it today - any measures that the Government takes next week need to fulfil two primary objectives. They need to ensure that assistance can be applied quickly and that we keep the space to adapt the response, should that be required, in the weeks and months ahead. We need to be honest that there is very little certainty in terms of where this conflict will go and what the economic impact could be, particularly when we consider that the length and depth of the conflict is such an important aspect. The Government has already taken a number of actions. We have increased the fuel allowance to €38 per week. This means that the fuel allowance is now worth €1,064 per year to households. We are also expanding it in order that more people can qualify. Just last week, thanks to the intervention of the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Calleary, we expanded the fuel allowance to ensure that 50,000 families on the working family payment can benefit. This has been backdated to January, with many families getting lump sum payments of up to €308. Some 50,000 real people have benefited. We live in a country where over 470,000 households, or over one quarter of all homes in Ireland, now qualify for the fuel allowance. We have also reduced VAT on gas and electricity to 9% out to the end of the decade. We are supporting over 500,000 householders, many of them pensioners, with an allowance of €420 annually towards their gas and electricity bills under the household benefits package. It is not correct to say that we are doing nothing. In fact, this year alone we are spending over €486 million on fuel allowance, €317 million on the household benefits package and €640 million on retrofitting. That is €1.5 billion on just those three measures alone. I heard Deputy Doherty's interview on radio this morning. When he was asked where all the money was going to come from, his answer was that we should just take it out of the surplus. He knows that if you keep taking things out of a surplus, it becomes a deficit. I also heard the Deputy say that the State is making a fortune on this and that it is estimated that it took in €38 million in taxes in one week alone as a result of these fuel costs. That is the annual cost not a weekly cost. Revenue estimates the cost at around €3 million per week. Accuracy is important, figures are important and getting this right is important and that is exactly what this Government intends to do. --- 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/2026-03-19/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:45+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-19