Fuel Prices: Motion Dail Éireann — 2026-04-14 ============================================================ Michael Collins (II), Cork South-West They fill the drums and put it into the boat and go out for the day and then go back and do the same thing. It is a continuous situation. I also then have those who are out there in the bigger trawlers throughout the country. I have correspondence from one of them. It states: Hi Michael, No word from our leaders. We have serious trouble with diesel. We have burned 2,500 in 24 hours. Our son was out on his last trip for 14 days. It cost him €31,000. It is not possible to keep going at that. We need help now, immediately, not in a month. We have 33 people working, all need money every week. This is the crisis in which people find themselves. They are paying bills left, right and centre. There are reliefs for some of these but people are not sure how to get their hands on them or whether it will be another month or another six or eight weeks. Some of these people are in trouble right now and need those reliefs this very minute. The Minister of State could throw back at me the fact that I did not support the package, but the reason was because the Government has tailored the carbon tax and all the increases in the carbon tax into it. I will never support anything that will hurt the Irish people. The Government has a programme scheduled whereby we can kick the can down the road until October and then hit people with a double, triple or quadruple increase. That is not the way to go. It is not a sign of a caring Government. It is a greedy, grabbing Government that wants projects and that maybe wants specialised projects. We have to look at projects. Some of the projects that can wait have to be sidelined, such as, maybe, the greenways and double cycleways. I was with Noel Thomas in Galway recently. Everyone in every house I visited in the housing estate there was livid about these double cycleways as opposed to single cycleways. They asked where the money is coming from and how we are spending that type of money. It is wasted money as far as they were concerned. --- 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