Home Heating Oil (Emergency Mineral Oil Tax Reduction) Bill 2026: Second Stage [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-22
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this Bill. People Before Profit is happy to support it. We would go further. We think price caps - and we have said this for some time - need to be imposed on home heating oil, petrol, diesel, electricity and gas. Our proposal is to bring the price of kerosene back to €1 per litre by imposing price controls that would eliminate the nearly 70% increase that 700,000 households in this country have had to endure as a result of Donald Trump's actions. Shame on people in this House who celebrated and supported Trump and who have refused to apologise - I am not talking about Sinn Féin in this regard - for doing so. People in this House have supported the policies of this man. Those policies will result in every household in this country having to endure higher fuel and energy bills this winter, as they have done for the past year.
The supposed friend of the small person turned out to be the friend of the oil magnates, billionaires and oligarchs. While other people were concentrating on what he was saying about whiskey when he was here last weekend, they should have heard what he said about oil and about going to war against Venezuela in order to get its oil. He also encouraged us to buy the American weapons that were so successfully deployed in taking out the President of Venezuela in order that America could grab that country's oil and profiteer from it. The Americans are profiteering while ordinary people are suffering because they cannot pay their bills or, in the case of those who rely on home heating oil, experienced a 70% increase in the cost of heating their homes thanks to Donald Trump and the Israeli regime. The Government should not unload that cost on the people who can least afford it.
Carbon tax is a regressive tax. The ESRI said a few things today. The one thing it categorically stated is that the tax is regressive. There is no getting away from that. The people who hurt most as a result of carbon tax are those least responsible for the cost-of-living crisis and least able to bear the increases that are happening. The Government should tax the profiteers. DCC Energy made €740 million in profits last year. It is a major supplier of kerosene in this country. It can afford to take a bit of a hit. Let us make it and the other energy companies, the electricity companies, the oil companies and the data centres pay a little more tax. We should make them pay some tax, and we could give a break and put price controls on energy and home heating oil.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-22