Budget handed Big Oil €6 billion-a-year cheque from Irish taxpayers with the message 'Keep her Lit'

The government chopped up its plan for getting people off fossil fuels and threw it on the fire Neil Leslie Group Editor Irish Daily Star, irish Daily Mirror, Irish Sunday Mirror 05:00, 10 Oct 2026 There's a cartoon by the Far Side comic strip genius Gary Larson that ponders the question: "What really killed the dinosaurs?" ‌ ‌ With a streaking meteor in the sky, a group of T-Rex pals stand around a bike shed – puffing away on cigarettes. ‌ Never mind impending doom from above, it’s the smokes that will get you. ‌ It’s something of a running theme in Micheal Martin’s career from the day he introduced the world’s first smoking ban to his Government’s latest Budget. Smokers were the only group in the country singled out for a kicking on Tuesday. A Fianna Fail backbencher is even championing a new law to ban anyone born after 2009 from ever buying cigarettes, to create a "smoke-free future generation". ‌ But when it comes to the actual doomsday device threatening those same generations of unborn Irish kids, the message from the Government is "Don’t Look Up". While Big Tobacco was getting its annual kicking, Big Oil was getting away with murder. Forever wars have already supersized its profits to something beyond $3billion a day around the world. ‌ To that they can add around €6 billion in fossil fuel subsidies that Irish citizens will now hand over every year so we can keep the lights on. That would be the price of three much-maligned children’s hospitals. A year. Every year. ‌ It’s 10 times what we spend on grants for renewable energy and retrofitting in homes. For just one tenth of it you could have free public transport. It’s a grand shakedown that forces Irish taxpayers to foot the bill for obscene profits that are made on the back of summers of climate carnage like the one we have just been through. But if there was a message from Tuesday’s Budget it was 'Burn, Baby, Burn'. ‌ Yes, people will need short-term help if we are going to transition our energy system away from fossil fuel. But the Government has decided to chop that transition up for more fuel to throw on the fire. It has U-turned on the one idea it had, which was to tax fossil fuel use instead of subsidising it. ‌ The notion of a carbon tax is the enemy of political parties and the illegal blockaders who think we should be drilling for more oil in the Atlantic to bring the bills down. Tuesday’s Budget killed it. And replaced it with nothing. No big bang to unstrap the country from the fossil fuel rollercoaster which means your gas and electricity bills are decided on the whim of warmongers and oil barons. ‌ No windfall tax on the monstrous profits being made from a revenue model that depends on creating twin cost of living and climate disasters. No grand ideas. No cathedral thinking to build a future for those unborn generations. Instead Government policy is to run scared from whatever latest angry mob has been whipped up on social media threatening to blackmail Irish citizens with more illegal blockades until they get what they want. ‌ The bestselling book What We Owe The Future by the philosopher William MacAskill poses a "thought experiment". Think of all the human lives in history (around 100 billion to date), back-to-back as one long life. ‌ Now imagine, if you can, living all those lives as one ancient lifespan. Today, you would be about four trillion years old. If we homo sapiens survive even the average one-million-year lifespan of a typical mammal species – a lot less than those T-Rex pals – 99.5 per cent of your life would still lay ahead. ‌ It tells us that "the future is big". And also that the present is a hell of a time to be alive. We are living in one of the handful of lifetimes that can decide whether all those future lives are filled with suffering or beauty, or exist at all. Whether they are smokers or not. ‌ In a few weeks the Irish Government will lead the European Union at the COP climate talks in Turkey after a summer in which the continent burned. The room will be filled with lobbyists for Big Oil and fossil fuel states. It will be a chance – maybe the last – for the nations of the world to name and shame them as the cause of the problem for the first time. ‌ And to agree on a piece of paper that the age of oil must end. Or instead we could just take the opportunity to hand them over the blank cheque we wrote in Tuesday’s budget. And tell them to keep her lit. Article continues below Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news from the Irish Mirror direct to your inbox: Sign up here.