Mineral Oil Tax: Financial Resolution
Dail Éireann — 2026-08-28
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Paul Lawless (AON), Mayo

Postponing a bad decision does not make it a good one. Families do not need a stay of execution for six weeks. They need certainty. In rural Ireland, fuel is not a luxury; it is a staple. It brings families to work, children to school and elderly people to appointments. The price of fuel does not stop in terms of the cost at the pump. Every lorry delivering to a supermarket carries the price of diesel onto the shelves. That is what the Government is doing. It is driving the cost of inflation across this country. We in Aontú warned the Government against the approach of locking Irish taxpayers into incremental increase year-on-year, multiple times per year, driving the cost of fuel irrespective of the cost of a barrel, irrespective of the cost of inflation and irrespective of the crisis that is happening in this country. That is why we are here today. The Government has had to recall the Dáil because of a poor taxation policy on fuel. It is time for the Tánaiste to wake up and to realise that locking the Irish taxpayer into incremental increase year-on-year, despite the reality on the ground, is wrong. It is time for him to wake up, to see that and to end this. He talks about certainty. Six weeks is not certainty for a business. Six weeks is not certainty for a family. I am asking him today not just for this temporary stay of execution but also to scrap the increases in relation to fuel during this extraordinarily difficult time for families while the cost of a barrel of fuel is rising exponentially. We can protect our environment without impoverishing the people who live in it. Climate policy should make greener alternatives affordable and not make ordinary lives unaffordable.

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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