Financial Resolution No. 2: Mineral Oil Tax Dail Éireann — 2026-03-24 ============================================================ Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West The ESRI did not say that. I will get the Minister of State the exact figures by the time I finish. The Government's budget - people can check it online - hit disabled people and the lowest income groups the hardest. Let me say what the Government should have done and what we are in favour of doing. We should cap prices. We should give people certainty: €1.75, as was contained in our Bill, for petrol and diesel. Only a price cap can give certainty and security to car-dependent households. The way you do that is you cap the price and then adjust the tax as necessary to ensure that petrol and diesel can continue to be supplied. Then we need to expand the remit of the CRU to investigate petrol and diesel prices and send inspection teams to verify prices at the pumps. We need fuel companies to open their books to the CRU, and those found to be profiteering should be forced to contribute to the price caps by an amount equal to their excess profits. We need universal credits. The Government should just immediately get €500 back into the pockets of ordinary householders. It is the most immediate way to give people relief. That can be funded by a levy on the data centres. The data centres are now using more electricity than all households in this State combined and they are paying half the price for it. Let us fund it in that way. Yes, let us give an extra month of fuel allowance, let us give an extra payment, a double payment, on all social protection payments as targeted measures. Then let us invest in getting people away from fossil fuels. I heard the Taoiseach earlier say that LNG and so on were not contradictory to moving away from fossil fuels. Of course they are. That was the latest demand of Trump at the White House: we want to sell more LNG. The warning signals came and the message should have been heard in terms of Ukraine but it was not. The western world did not do anything to get away from fossil fuels. In this country we have continued on this track of reliance on fossil fuels. The result is that every extra unit of power added by wind has been swallowed up by the data centres, and Micheál Martin wants to go even further with them. No more data centres. Let us make public transport free. Let us invest in retrofitting to get off our reliance on fossil fuels, which is what makes us so exposed. --- 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/2026-03-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:03+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-24