Fuel Prices: Motion
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-14
============================================================

Pearse Doherty (SF), Donegal

This Government is not acting and is not listening. It was dragged to take action by public anger and by pressure, because people could not take any more. Even now, after all that, what has been brought forward falls far short. As if that was not enough, the Government is turning its fire not just on the protesters but also on the media. We have had a Minister question RTÉ’s coverage of the protests. That is, as has been said by others, a sinister intervention. It is an attempt to lean on journalists, to second-guess editorial decisions and to signal that coverage of political protest should somehow be policed. That strikes at the heart of a free media. We have been here before in this country and Sinn Féin suffered the consequence of it. The Minister seems to want to bring us back to the days of section 31, when Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael censored our political party and prevented us from being allowed to even talk on the national airwaves.
This crisis is not about media rows, however. It is about ordinary people. It is about those who have no choice but to drive to work, who are trying to heat their homes today and who are struggling with the wider cost-of-living crisis. They needed decisive action and real relief. They are not getting it from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. When Ministers quote the figures relating to today’s package, they need to understand one thing. They need to understand that for the people living through this crisis, those figures do not change their reality. They do not change the pressure in a meaningful way. They do not match either the scale of the crisis or what is needed. This is why today’s amendment from Sinn Féin matters. It is because the Dáil has a choice to accept a late, limited response that leaves people behind or to demand real action and leadership that meets the scale of this crisis. The Government failed to act when people needed it. It is now refusing to act at the scale required.

---

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/2026-04-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:07+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-14