Mineral Oil Tax: Financial Resolution Dail Éireann — 2026-08-28 ============================================================ Cian O'Callaghan (SD), Dublin Bay North The Social Democrats are supporting the extension of the excise reduction. With petrol and diesel prices pushing back towards €2 a litre, loading on another hike next week would be too much for people to absorb. People are already put to the pin of their collar. They simply cannot keep up with constant price increases but, make no mistake, this extension is not a plan. What we are seeing is a Government that is lurching from crisis to crisis, coming up with emergency measure after emergency measure - measures that cost the taxpayer billions but do not last and do not fix anything. The deferral of these excise duties will be adopted, and rightly so, but this Government has no answer for the day after this deferral ends. A Minister was on the airwaves last week stating that supports would stay in place until there was some levelling out and a return to normality. What if that does not come? What if these prices are the new normal? Is this Government seriously waiting for Donald Trump to come to his senses? Is this really its strategy? Suggesting that when Trump gets a drubbing in the midterm elections, he will have some sort of road to Damascus conversion is complete fantasy. This is Alice in Wonderland stuff. The cost-of-living crisis goes far beyond the price at the pump. The ever-increasing cost of housing, groceries, childcare and electricity has made paying for the basics a nightmare in this country. A constituent recently contacted me to share her struggles, a story that will sound too familiar to people all over the country. She said: I'm one of the carers who is struggling on a social welfare payment because, unfortunately, my husband lost his sight. I'm not entitled to fuel allowance because I have adult children still living at home. I'm not even entitled to a primary medical certificate because blind people are exempt. I have to struggle day to day to keep the wolves from the door. Today's extension represents another sticking plaster that is needed because of a chronic failure to deliver and will not address the root causes of this crisis. It is a cheque written straight into a market we do not control, with nothing durable left behind. It does not need to be like this. There is another option. The Government could fix problems instead of throwing money at them. I will give one concrete example of how this would work. One million homes in this country are suitable for solar panels but fewer than 100,000 have them. A household with solar panels will cut roughly €450 from its electricity bill this year, next year, the year after and every year, no matter what chaos Donald Trump throws at us. The Social Democrats' Solar for All plan would double the grant to €3,600. It would restore the battery grant, put solar panels into the warmer homes scheme free of charge and increase supports for businesses as well as finally clear the way for plug-in solar. That is money that would be spent once and keep paying households back year after year. The Social Democrats are voting for this measure because people need relief and they need it now, but the Government has lost control of the cost-of-living crisis and the public are paying for it. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are caught in a doom spiral of haphazard emergency measures that do nothing to address the root causes of the crisis, and unless that changes, we will be back here soon voting for yet another temporary fix. People need more than panicked emergency measures. We cannot control what Donald Trump will do, we cannot control what happens in the Strait of Hormuz and we cannot control the price of oil on the international markets, but what our Government can do is invest in solar and renewables, break our dependence on fossil fuels and drive down energy costs for households. --- 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/2026-08-28/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-31T01:00:52+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-08-28