Tone Deaf Government Gets Rude Awakening?

April 2026 - Fuel Protest Blockade Dublin copyright Alamy

With the US/Iran war kicking off in April 2026 triggering disruption to world oil supplies, the advice of Ireland’s Department of Energy to the Irish people was to ‘car pool, slow down and do the laundry at night’. That all sounded reasonable.

That is until you consider that just two weeks earlier, the entire Irish Cabinet had been on a massive worldwide jolly to mark St. Patrick’s Day. Ministers and even their junior counterparts were despatched across the globe to everywhere Brazil to Australia. Perhaps that explains why a lot of Irish people are angry and take that advice about doing the laundry at night with a grain of salt.

All of this came to a head with the recent protests by hauliers and farmers protesting about increased fuel prices. This saw protesters blocking roads and quickly escalated to blockading ports and Ireland’s only oil refinery. Within days, panic buying of fuel led to garages running out of fuel.

There was a palpable sense of fear on the part of the country’s political rulers. However, you could be forgiven for thinking that the fear had less to do with Ireland’s fuel stations running dry and more to do with the sense that Taoiseach Micheál Martin and his deputy Simon Harris were losing control of the political narrative.

A story about an ad-hoc group of hauliers, farmers and agricultural contractors were effectively holding the nation to ransom by blocking roads and triggering panic buying should have been a relatively easy one for any government to deal with. Indeed, with fuel supplies tightening, politicians were quickly deployed on the national media with co-ordinated messaging about how the protesters had made their point and now needed to call off the protests.

A key feature of the official government response was the tactic of not legitimising the protesters. This was seen in an early announcement that talks would be held with ‘representative groups’ but not the actual protesters. This was a deliberate strategy of trying to undermine the protests by presenting them as some shadowy group outside of Ireland’s power loop.

In this respect, Minister for Justice Jim O Callaghan went on the media with the suggestion that the protests were being whipped up by ‘external players’ – this being media code for the infamous ‘far right’. In turn, the mainstream media also ran a story about a tax settlement made by one of the leaders of the protesters.

While fuel shortages have affected everybody, the greatest effect was on the communities most closely associated with hauliers and agricultural contractors. It is in rural communities heavily dependent on diesel for transport that the fuel pumps first started to run dry. Yet these were the communities most supportive of the protests despite being most affected.

The line about dealing only with ‘representative groups’ goes to the heart of the Ireland that we have seen develop over the last twenty years. This has seen positions of privilege and influence being accorded to a plethora of state-funded NGOs who have used their position to push their own agendas on everything from climate to gender ideology.

In the case of climate, this has seen the Irish state enact laws which not only have been highly unpopular but also counterproductive. Under the influence of the Green Party and various NGOs, Ireland has signed up to ambitious climate targets such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 51% by 2030. This is in a country which has banned oil and gas exploration meaning it will eventually be totally dependent on fossil fuel imports for as long as fossil fuels are used in Ireland.

If you want another example of the high minded hubris evident amongst Ireland’s ruling class these days then consider the kudos these same people earned by banning peat and turf cutting in a country that was once famous for its turf cutting. However, one unforeseen piece of folly associated with that sees Ireland’s horticultural sector instead now importing peat from places like Latvia. 

Perhaps this is what people were rebelling against in April’s fuel blockades – the sense that ordinary Irish people have been locked out of decision-making in a modern Ireland which increasingly is neither democratic or inclusive for Irish people. The political class that has locked them out has much to fear from hearing from what it would like to call ‘unrepresentative groups’ which these days appears to be code for ordinary Irish people.

This political disconnect played out in the 2024 Referendum on Family and Care which saw an overwhelming rejection of the proposals which, amongst other things, would have seen the word ‘woman’ removed from the Irish constitution. This was a proposal that was supported by most of Ireland’s political parties including its opposition parties, NGOs and the media.

This disconnect was again highlighted in the 2025 Presidential election which saw 13% of voters register a spoiled vote in what was the country’s largest ever protest vote. These are the people who clearly are not represented by the golden circle of Ireland’s ‘representative groups’.

The priority at this stage for the FF/FG government is not to concede the obvious that it has in fact conceded to a group that it sees as not being a representative group. The reality of this is that these protesters are, in fact, representative of a large swathe of public opinion which no longer feels represented by so-called ‘representative groups’ in Ireland.

The Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael coalition government has come out of this with a bloody nose and a realisation that the political certainties that have ruled Ireland over the last two decades may no longer apply in 2026.