Mineral Oil Tax: Financial Resolution
Dail Éireann — 2026-08-28
============================================================

Ruth Coppinger (PBP), Dublin West

It is absolutely farcical to reconvene the Dáil for one hour over one aspect of one issue which the Government mistakenly thought would be okay, on which it has been proven wrong. It has not reconvened the Dáil to discuss back-to-school costs facing families this very week. They cannot wait for the budget in a month's time. One in four parents is already borrowing to put their kids into school this week. The Government has not reconvened the Dáil to discuss college fees pending next week, the highest in the EU, or for the 50,000 students who cannot find accommodation or the many in homeless accommodation.
I want to talk about electricity costs. They are still the highest in the EU, rising while data centres guzzled resources during the summer heatwave. Wait until people find out that up to €400 of their electricity costs is because the Government has thrown Ireland open to data centres. Civil servants have told the Government this. It has added up to €400 to electricity costs for householders. They have told the Government it is houses versus tech and the Government has chosen tech. The Government has an open-door policy for billion-dollar companies like the data centres and billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg coming to buy a castle in Ireland. Donald Trump, of course, the architect of the cost-of-living crisis, will get the red carpet rolled out by this Government, with €20 million, I believe, to be paid for security for that. The Dáil will have no say over that either because it will happen before it is reconvened.
The Government underestimated the scale of this crisis. It is completely out of touch. We have the highest electricity costs, third level fees, childcare costs and very likely the highest healthcare costs in the EU as well. Most GPs have put their prices up to €70 over the summer. The Government is doing nothing about the cost-of-living crisis. One-off measures are not going to work.

---

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