More consultation. Why not act?

Why not act? It is because you have are in bed with the vultures. That is the reality.

It is the truth.

The price of diesel is well above €2 per litre at the pumps right across this State, and at many of them it as high as €2.20. I am sure that the Tánaiste has noticed that. It is hammering people who have no alternative to driving. For many people in rural areas, their car is their connection and lifeline. They simply cannot do without it, whether it is going to work or dropping the kids to school. Does the Tánaiste accept that the situation has got worse since the Dáil was recalled? Does he accept that there is now…

I have said it numerous times. We cannot control the international price of a barrel of oil. We cannot control what happens in the Middle East or in the Strait of Hormuz, but what we can control in this House is the amount of tax we apply to petrol and diesel. When people are driving up to their petrol stations and they are being charged €2.20 for a litre of diesel and they need that car and the diesel in their tank to go to work, drop the kids to school, visit their mother or whatever, then that pressure is too mu…

I told the Minister a couple of weeks ago that the Government's plan to reintroduce excise on petrol and diesel was nuts. Putting up carbon tax in two weeks' time in October and then further on 1 November is absolute bonkers. That is why we voted against it. Let us be clear: the Government will get no pats on the back from people for saying "I am not making your lives worse." What people expect from a Government is of course that not to make things harder, but when diesel and petrol prices are high, and the diesel …

Will the Tánaiste answer the question?

If it is to one of the newspapers, the Tánaiste will leak like the Titanic .

He will leak like the Titanic .

If there is a journalist in the corridor, he will tell him everything, but, by God, will he tell the Dáil-----

-----or the people of Ireland who are worried about their fuel bills? If there are any journalists here, maybe we will get an answer to the question-----

Deputy Gould ask me to take this in his absence. Obviously, we have been waiting a long time for the vacant homes tax to be introduced. There was a collection of data and so on. It has been introduced now. We understand that the collection rates are very low. I am asking the Minister for an update. We have the 2025 self-assessed data, but what is the most recent data the Minister has? Have we seen a spike in terms of compliance? What options is the Department looking at for this year? I think we can accept that the…

My understanding, and the Minister might correct me if I am wrong, is that dereliction and vacancy are two different things.

We are talking about apples and oranges here. The Minister is talking about a derelict properties tax. That is fine; a property that is derelict is visibly derelict. We are talking about vacant homes. We are talking about how the whole idea of this tax is to get homes into usage and to penalise people for leaving properties vacant and not using them in the middle of a housing crisis. We have argued time and again for many years with the Government to introduce this tax and to make it stronger and its rates higher. …

The Minister has announced the derelict properties tax numerous times, but derelict properties are derelict properties and are harder to get into use in the system than vacant homes. Of course we need the tax on them - that should absolutely happen - but it is not a case of looking at something else and forgetting about the fact that this tax here, which has been introduced for the last four years, is not working. I still have not heard anything from the Minister that suggests there is going to be any change. He ha…

I have been raising the issue of home heating oil with the Tánaiste over a long period. The reality is that people have used home heating oil right throughout the current crisis. They use it to heat their homes. They also use it to heat their water in order to be able to wash the dishes. Home heating oil is what 700,000 households across the State rely on, and the Tánaiste refused to cut any excise at all from it because all of the excise is carbon tax. I put it to the Tánaiste again that he needs to reduce the exc…

I am asking the Minister to take all the excise away from home heating oil while these prices remain high.

We had the discussion earlier on and the Minister will say it was a Fine Gael Government that did this but there is no doubt, if you look back at the record, that the reason the Government did not reduce any excise duty on home heating oil is because it is carbon tax, which is this Holy Grail. I really do not want to go into a discussion on that, but the Government is moving now. For the first time it is going to reduce the carbon tax. That is good. It is good that the Government has got there, or that it is going …

This again bring us back to the point we are at now, which for a lot of people feels like an emergency. There are things happening in this State that are genuinely concerning from a health and safety point of view. There are mothers and fathers going to the petrol station and filling five-gallon drums with kerosene. I am not sure how good an idea it is to be driving around country roads with five-gallon drums of kerosene in the boot, but people cannot afford anything else. There are plumbers being called out to dea…

The Minister can reduce it all. He can take the cost down by €183 a fill. We published the legislation.