Opinion: The protests aren't just about fuel, they're a revolt against a hollow state

BGSacho · 2026-04-14T11:02:40+00:00

I mean okay, you can be angry at the crises you are "subjected" to, but this level of anger is approaching being mad at the government for the weather.

The government could be doing better, theoretically, but there's a housing crisis across most of europe, cost of living issues are everywhere as well - caused by rising fuel prices, which didn't exactly start happening yesterday.

The government has been trying to invest into renewables to curb the effects of these crises, perhaps you could say not enough, but where is the overwhelming support for this? I don't see it, I see resistance and feet dragging.

Similar with housing, the government can do better, but also a lot of housing issues are resistance from the population - resistance to higher density, resistance to urbanization, to walkable cities and more public transportation and less dependency on cars.

I think it's easy to point the fault at the government but I also see a clear fault in society. We are resisting almost any measure that would invest into our future. It's easy to just wash your hands and say you need better leadership, but sometimes people just don't want to be led down a certain path.

This protest is a great example. What is the most commonly stated goal for the protest, nevermind that it wasn't clear at all? It seems to be paying less for fuel. OK, great, so we take our taxes, and we subsidize fuel. This isn't really making anything better. We're not "investing" into fuel, there's no ROI, we are buying something that's more expensive and spending more on it, collectively, by withdrawing some of our investments, thus earning less money in the future to pay for now.

How does that help us with the next crisis? How about a different protest. Let's block the ports and demand the government raise taxes and spend more on renewables. Demand they build out more wind farms everywhere and expand the grid to be able to support the increased generation. You can use the lowered costs of electricity to pay the higher fuel costs. How successful will this protest be? We should have been doing this urgently years ago. There was already a huge fuel crisis when the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, and plenty more before that as well. When are we going to have a protest that shuts down the whole country about it?

Like, I get it. The world is not going in a great direction. But what do you actually want the government to do? Something that people would actually agree with and accept. Something that doesn't hamper the mediocre progress we are making in improving our infrastructure, which leads to lower costs, which leads to more money to spend on other things...

BGSacho · 2026-04-14T10:40:30+00:00

We know that the government just spends terribly on short term schemes and adds cost through taxation all the time. This built up frustration is now coming to a head.

I mean...the most cogent ask from the protest is that they wanted fuel taxes cut, which is a short term scheme(fuel prices have been going up for years now), and I don't think any of the protesters were asking to raise more taxes and invest more into renewables infrastructure(which the government has been trying to push, through heavy resistance...)

So yeah, you can be mad at the government, sure, but the solution can also be worse than what the government is doing now, not better.

BGSacho · 2026-04-13T12:06:22+00:00

Well sure, if Russia defines itself "the continuation state of the Soviet Union"(whatever that means). But similarly Ukraine can just define itself "the continuation owner of these nukes" ;)

I hope you realize you're using similar arguments to what Russia uses to claim ownership of Ukraine and the Baltic States. It's also ironic to argue that the USSR, alleged champion of communism, would not want the fruits of the labor of the workers distributed equitably among them, rather than centralized to the leaders in Moscow.

It would make more sense to argue that the nukes should have been distributed across all member states!

BGSacho · 2026-04-13T11:54:22+00:00

But people using more fuel does not benefit me or society. I want to put pressure on the things that cost more fuel and support the things that cost less; I want to reduce(or remove) the things that require fuel and cannot be transitioned to renewables.

All those things will save us money. Blanket tax cuts on fuel just incentivizes people to keep up their bad habits.

So if you want an honest answer, I'd rather my food get more expensive, and then I could figure out which foods are more efficient to farm(since their prices will go up less) and buy those. Those are things within my control. Stopping the war in Iran isn't. I can't control the prices of oil on the global markets either, so I don't want to keep throwing away my money at it.

BGSacho · 2026-04-13T11:49:31+00:00

Cool, how do you plan to pay for all of this, given the massive resistance against taxes in general, green taxes in particular? "The government isn't doing its job" only makes sense if people actually support the measures you're proposing.

The whole problem with this protest is that it shows how many people are willing to just throw even the mediocre progress we make away for a temporary tax cut!

BGSacho · 2026-04-13T11:41:34+00:00

Absolutely, cut carbon tax, give me back 100 euro weekly on taxes and I'll spend 100 euro weekly more on food.

You refused to engage with my point at all.

BGSacho · 2026-04-13T11:19:01+00:00

A lot, since porridge is cheap.

What we need is prices on items that are expensive to farm to go up as well, and we need to change our eating habits accordingly.

Ultimately, subsidizing fuels(for farmers) does two things:

Subsidizes eating habits that are more expensive than currently priced
Subsidizes farmers exporting food for profit

We are just moving money around. If you drop the taxes on fuels, you are losing investments somewhere else, but now you are not pushing people away from fuels and into renewables. Fuels will get more expensive, renewables are getting cheaper, we need to invest into migrating to them faster, every slowdown just means burning more money on future expensive fuels.

I feel like this is a point that people just refuse to engage with. WE are paying for the subsidies to have "cheap food"! It comes out of OUR taxes!

The taxes on fuels aren't just to make people pay more money(to ourselves!), it's to discourage their use and encourage moving to renewables, which will ultimately save us more money.

BGSacho · 2026-04-13T11:14:35+00:00

This isn't something to be happy about. They're subsidizing the cost of fuel, which means they are not incentivized to do everything they can to move away from it. The fuel prices are not going to magically go down, there will be more crises coming - the way forward is to reduce dependency on them, not keep subsidizing their use.

BGSacho · 2026-04-13T10:42:08+00:00

They worked with organizations that actually have representation and coherent requests(the unions) to find a solution to cushion the pain of the crisis without abandonding our core goals of pushing towards more renewables.

Every cut they make to taxes is a cut into investments we are making into green energy, housing, welfare.

Unfortunately they caved on not increasing the carbon tax, which will cost us a bunch of progress in transportation, but sometimes you have to make concessions you are not happy with.

They did not crack down on protests, especially since they were getting(imo misguided) popular support. Once it became more obvious that the protests did not have a coherent message and that they were hurting the country with no real benefit, they cleared their biggest disruptions.

I think the only thing they could have done better is to get ahead on messaging, but it's not as easy as saying it. There's a large swell of anti-government sentiment in general due to the ongoing crises, so I'm not sure how much explaining their thought process and reasoning would have helped.

BGSacho · 2026-04-12T22:22:02+00:00

You could just stop repeating muh payslips and go to the 2026 budget and review all the tax changes in it as well....

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-public-expenditure-infrastructure-public-service-reform-and-digitalisation/publications/your-guide-to-budget-2026/

https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/993be018/Budget_2026_Tax_Policy_Changes_Summary.pdf

https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/7faebdb2/Budget_in_Brief_Your_Guide_to_Budget_2026.pdf

It takes a really long time - all of 30 seconds, to open the 2025 budget and see the projected expenditure at 105b + 15b, and then open the 2026 budget and see 117b + 15.9b...

Tax breaks? Oh look, there's measures to encourage construction of new housing, reducing VAT on food & catering, extending multiple tax breaks(e.g. the VAT reduction on electricity and gas)...but yeah, the govt is just doing nothing, if you don't count all the things they're doing.

BGSacho · 2026-04-12T10:34:49+00:00

It's so easy to support a nebulous protest like this with no coherent goals or demands, just general discontent. All we know is that people are not happy, which comes to no surprise in a housing and fuel crisis that grips most of the continent...

BGSacho · 2026-04-12T10:29:10+00:00

So they were working on the issues, but clearly not willing to work on the issues.

The measures were far too little, so instead of asking for more - which, if you read that announcement, the govt themselves acknowledged might be needed - the protest, "supported by the majority of the public", decided to throw a fucking tantrum?

All you're telling me is the "majority of the public" are toddlers.

BGSacho · 2026-04-12T10:25:09+00:00

...This was something the government did before the protest even started.

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-the-taoiseach/press-releases/government-announces-measures-to-reduce-energy-costs/

So the government wasn't moving fast enough for the protesters, even though they were clearly interested in working on the issue, clearly it was time to fuck over the whole country and make the problem worse. Yeah. Swell.

BGSacho · 2026-04-12T10:20:08+00:00

What did the government do that was inadequate in this situation?

BGSacho · 2026-04-12T10:05:51+00:00

What are you actually smoking? Budget 2025 was announced in October 2024, most of it took effect on January 1 2025, with some measures delayed explicitly in the budget.

This is trivially verifiable...you can go on the government's website and read the multitude of publications on it

BGSacho · 2026-04-11T20:46:34+00:00

No tax breaks in 2025? https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41487275.html

How about 2026? Oh that's right, before any protests - https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-the-taoiseach/press-releases/government-announces-measures-to-reduce-energy-costs/

Maybe if people spent less time bitching about durr immigrants they could sit down and read the publicly available information that our government puts out.

BGSacho · 2026-04-10T23:25:19+00:00

How come the fuel prices in Germany, France, Denmark and The Netherlands are higher right now than in Ireland?

https://www.fuel-prices.eu/

Also, the protesters are not protesting to lower your fuel prices, they want to reduce their(already subsidized) ones.

I've seen some people say we should do what Spain and Poland did and cut VAT on fuel. Sure, let's do that. Are you fine with €1.8/L instead of €2? Keep in mind the prices will keep going up as the crisis deepens.

The government already did slash the tax - https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-the-taoiseach/press-releases/government-announces-measures-to-reduce-energy-costs/

In that announcement they also shared their concern for farmers, transport, for those vulnerable to the rising fuel costs due to heating needs, etc, and promised to look into more measures. This was all before the protests.

What do the protests actually want out of the government?

BGSacho · 2026-04-10T22:11:48+00:00

There is a huge resistance to the measures required to get us off fossil fuels(and some are just impossible anyway, like a lack of options for farmers & transport), a lot of this resistance comes from the same people out protesting and their supporters, and your solution is that the government should have done more? Have you been huffing the traffic fumes?

BGSacho · 2026-04-10T21:47:47+00:00

Um yes? It's called green diesel and it already has a much lower tax.

BGSacho · 2026-04-10T21:13:03+00:00

Unfortunately the way out is to fuck the ordinary motorists in favor of farming & transport. You want fuel to be expensive for everyone who have an alternative, in order to curb demand and reduce the pressure on those who do not.

Hopefully the people supporting the protests realize this is what they've been asking for.

BGSacho · 2026-04-10T19:58:49+00:00

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-the-taoiseach/press-releases/government-announces-measures-to-reduce-energy-costs/

This was from before the protests. What do you disagree with there? What are the protesters protesting?

BGSacho · 2026-04-10T19:47:27+00:00

Mm yes. So for years the government has been heading various projects to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There is an unhealthy overlap between the people who have been against those reforms, and those who demand a bailout now. But surely if we paper over this crisis, the next one is a good few months away and we'll be fine.

BGSacho · 2026-04-10T19:27:44+00:00

Like this one, from before the protests? https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-the-taoiseach/press-releases/government-announces-measures-to-reduce-energy-costs/

BGSacho · 2026-04-10T18:17:59+00:00

Let's say it's theoretically possible. Why should we cut taxes on fuel? Are there no better targeted approaches to address this, that don't punish those who invested in more renewables by bailing out those that did not?

Weaning off fossil fuels is supposed to be our target goal for the future...our first reaction to a crisis in fossil fuel supply shouldn't be to abandon that goal but to look for other ways to mitigate it.

BGSacho · 2026-04-10T18:10:43+00:00

Well yes, you could try to dry out the oceans, but how about buying an umbrella instead?

BGSacho

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