Mineral Oil Tax: Financial Resolution Dail Éireann — 2026-08-28 ============================================================ Ivana Bacik (LAB), Dublin Bay South I wish Senan Molony well on his retirement. He might even miss us all in here when he has departed. The recall of the Dáil before the planned first-phase restoration of excise duty was inevitable. It was predictable, and so the silly season August shadow-boxing was over before it began. It comes as no surprise to us that the sham fight was brought to an early close. We all know why we are here. It is because the Government parties of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the so-called Independents feared the return of mass protests this week. It was hard to see, indeed, how the Government could have allowed the first phase of these cuts to end in the same week that schools return and commuter traffic ramps up. We understand why the decision has been taken but let us be clear that the decision to delay the restoration of the cuts in no way makes up for the Government's failure to protect PAYE workers from the cost-of-living crisis. The decision today does not undo how the Government sold out working people in favour of fast food chains in last year's budget, a decision that was, incredibly, cheer-leaded by other Opposition parties. The Government chose to use its tax base to favour private interests rather than indexing personal tax rates, bands and credits. Many PAYE workers who get a pay rise this year are likely to be worse off than they were last year because of that decision. That is the reality of the Government's promise to make work pay. As prices surge, hard-pressed families forgo the essentials because the Government has never invested adequately in universal public services, building decent homes, developing public infrastructure, tackling the climate crisis and tackling our over-reliance on fossil fuels. People in Ireland have been living with the consequences. It is no wonder the cost of car ownership has become a political football. Not alone are energy costs high but Government decisions on the cost of groceries, housing, the inadequacy of public and active transport and the lack of a real right to remote work have unleashed acute financial pressures that households feel every day. It is not just households here. There is a universal refrain from tourists and returning emigrants who cannot believe the price of things in Ireland and are always surprised that they cannot get a train to or from Dublin Airport. How many people in Ireland are still far too dependent on fossil fuels - petrol and diesel - because the programme for Government slashed expenditure on sustainable transport in favour of "roads, baby, roads"? The Tánaiste spoke of a green transition but we do not see the evidence for it in the decisions taken in the budget. The Labour Party is clear that continuing excise cuts indefinitely would be an inefficient, expensive and untargeted way to support struggling families. We know the Parliamentary Budget Office, the ESRI and others have shown that the benefits of this cut favour the better off. The reality is that the Government has failed to build any alternative or any better safety net for struggling families. We know low-income households spend a larger proportion of their income on energy, home heating oil, petrol and diesel, but this cut in excise will only be the same for them as for everyone else. Already, more than 500,000 households are in arrears on their electricity and gas bills. We know energy prices are surging despite the vote likely to happen today. While families struggle with their bills, the elephants in the room, literally, are the data centres that soak up what renewable energy capacity we do produce, leading to further price increases and threatening energy security. Let us be clear about that too. While we will support the measure today as a measure that will support families, we recognise, and the Government also needs to recognise, that the budget provides an opportunity to do more to support hard-pressed families and to provide some sort of structured and developed plan to help households through not just this winter but future winters. What we need to see is a plan for targeted energy credits, as the Labour Party has sought. We need to see targeted support for home energy upgrades, to give people a real chance at the green transition the Tánaiste spoke of. We need to see real commitments to ramp up solar power capacity for the massive swing to EVs that is required so urgently. We need to see a commitment to tackle the cost-of-living crisis through the indexation of tax bands, again as the Labour Party has sought. We need to see a cap on the cost of childcare, set at €200 a month. We need to see real, tangible measures that would give working families real breathing space and real certainty to plan for the future. Our political system was able to develop a Covid wage subsidy scheme overnight to save jobs and businesses. That system must be capable, with the right political decision-making, to ensure the targeting of relief for households most in need of a breather. A Government with the resources to spend billions on subsidising fossil fuels essentially should be able to afford to address the systemic problems that are driving inequality and exacerbating the climate crisis. The Government has money aplenty but no vision. The real problem with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is that there is no vision. They talk of prudence, but their annual budgets are a work of fiction. What we have seen are massive overruns being papered over with Supplementary Estimates, averaging €2 billion each year. The public finances are being treated like Fine Fáil's and Fine Gael's personal piggy bank, not as a tool for building a better society. They offer cash and short-term, stopgap solutions like this every time, without asking themselves what the problem is. The problem is a Government without a vision. It is without a vision to change this country and take the real and necessary climate action to tackle the climate crisis, and without a vision to tackle inequality and build a more equal society to support those in disadvantage, in energy arrears and in a housing crisis. The Tánaiste is hearing from people around Ireland. He knows this. They cannot afford to cover the basics. They are facing high rents, high bills, high childcare costs and inadequate public transport, and he expects them to be grateful for another untargeted subsidy for fossil fuels that may barely keep pace with inflation. We know that one in three older people living alone is at risk of poverty. We know that more than 95,000 children are growing up in a household that cannot afford everyday items. They deserve long-term, strategic policies to raise the social floor and tackle inequality. The Government has the money to do this. To date, however, we have seen no mission from this Government bigger than merely putting out fires and no vision other than buying the short-term support of interest groups and papering over cracks in the system. The need to extend the excise cuts today is a symptom of a wider problem, namely, a failure by the Government to plan ahead and to develop the vision to tackle the real problems facing households across Ireland. We need to see a vision to tackle inequality, the cost-of-living crisis and the climate crisis. We are currently lacking that from the Government, and we need to see it. This budget should be a wake-up call for the Government. The Labour Party will put forward an alternative vision in our alternative budget, on which we look forward to a fuller debate in the weeks and months ahead. --- 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