Finance Bill 2026 [Certified Money Bill]: Committee and Remaining Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-07 ============================================================ Sarah O'Reilly (AON), Agricultural Panel I move recommendation No. 3: In page 6, to delete lines 56 to 67, and in page 7, to delete lines 1 to 4. I support all of the recommendations to this Bill put forward by the Opposition. Recommendations Nos. 3 and 5 to 7, inclusive, speak directly to the cost-of-living crisis facing every single family across the country. At what point does the Government accept that people cannot afford any more? Every week, I meet people who are working hard and doing everything right but who are worse off than they were five years ago. One woman contacted my office after she had paid her electricity bill because she did not know how she was going to afford the week's groceries. We ended up having to get vouchers from the Society of St. Vincent de Paul for food that week. People who work hard 40 hours a week should not have to rely on charity to feed their children. That is the reality for thousands of families across the country yet the Government's response is to make fuel even more expensive. In effect, it is really a tax on people who are working. The current plan is to increase the price of diesel by 34 cent a litre and the price of petrol by 29 cent a litre by the end of the year. Farmers, agricultural contractors and hauliers came out in force to protest because their businesses, which provide their livelihood, could not survive under the conditions at that time. It was because of their collective work that the Government had to reduce excise duty. The Government had no choice but to listen because the level of public outrage was too much for it to ignore. The Government cannot continue this cycle of hiking up prices, forcing people out onto the streets to protest, before introducing temporary reductions. It is not a sustainable policy. As I have said before, given the amount of money the State wastes without even blinking an eye, I actually think it could do with less money. The Government should take the burden off people and learn to manage its finances more prudently. The Government seems to believe everyone can simply buy an electric car. The reality is that most families do not have €40,000 or €50,000 sitting in a bank to buy an EV. They are not the best thing in rural areas. Even if they did have the money, public charging costs have risen to a point at which, in many cases, it is now more expensive to charge your electric vehicle than to fill a vehicle with petrol or diesel. For many people, particularly in rural Ireland, driving is not a luxury. The Minister of State should know that. It is how people get to work and bring their children to school. They cannot simply leave the car at home because the Government tells them they should. All that happens is that they pay more for what is a necessary aspect of their lives. It is a punitive tax on those who work. We now get to the carbon tax. We were repeatedly told that this is essential because it funds climate action yet the responses to Aontú's parliamentary questions have shown that hundreds of millions of euro collected in carbon tax have not actually been spent on climate measures. From 2020 to 2023, €247 million of money collected went unspent. This money was taken out of the pockets of people who cannot afford milk and butter only to be left sitting in the Government's coffers. At the same time, families who have been approved for SEAI grants are waiting two or three years to get works done. This is not because there is no money but because there are not enough qualified workers to carry out the retrofits. The Government keeps increasing the tax even though the money is just sitting in a pool unused and unspent. That is why recommendation No. 7 is so important. It simply asks the Minister to examine the Exchequer implications of abolishing carbon tax and to identify alternative ways of funding climate measures. It is a very modest proposal. We have to explore alternative options to fund retrofitting, especially when the money is just piling up. You cannot tax people into changing their behaviour when there are no realistic alternatives, particularly in rural Ireland. It is easy to pass legislation increasing the cost of heating a home or filling a car but it is not easy for families to absorb these additional costs. --- 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/seanad/2026-07-07/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:09+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-07