Kevin Hargaden and Ciara Murphy

Introduction: fuel and poverty in Ireland

‘We’re living in the country cold and wet with slugs.’¹ So muses the girl who narrates Eimear McBride’s harrowing novel of Irish childhood, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. Later she reflects on how she ‘become myself [sic] in rooms of cold familiar, for to me they are the same. Blankets in the window. Mattress on the floor. Same as last night same as weeks and weeks ago.’²

It is a difficult novel to read, not primarily because of the distinctive voice of ‘the girl’ but because of how McBride makes the consequences of hard poverty visceral to the reader. Ireland is cold and wet with slugs. And one of the reasons why ordinary people struggle to believe the stratospheric graphs depicting our GDP is that, down on the ground, it can be so hard to keep the cold out. In an analysis of fuel poverty in Ireland, the ESRI found that 8 per cent of people are consistently unable to keep their homes warm and ‘up to a quarter of Irish households are vulnerable to fuel poverty.’³

At the time of writing, spring has broken through an especially damp winter. But recent events mean that those at the frontlines of poverty prevention are already tense about this year’s winter. On 28 February 2026, a concerted surprise attack was launched on multiple Iranian cities by Israel and the United States of America. It was not entirely clear what aims drove this attack, but the Iranian state responded by making the Strait of Hormuz impassable, leading to an unprecedented increase in the price of oil.⁴ By mid-April, the debacle had escalated to the point that the American president threatened that Iranian ‘civilisation would die’ if they did not capitulate to his diffuse demands.⁵

In the face of devastating human suffering⁶ and almost incalculable environmental destruction,⁷ fuel poverty in Ireland hardly begins to register. But as quiet as the click of a pay-as-you-go fuel meter is in relation to the detonation of a ‘bunker buster’, that noise still matters to the person who hears it. As the Irish state responds to this dismal war, the establishment of a just and lasting peace must be the first concern. But we must also still acknowledge the wider consequences of this tragic folly. And it is in this sense that the war in Iran exposes an injustice far closer to home. Energy poverty reveals how the Irish state has intensified the suffering of those who struggle to afford fossil fuels through their stubborn reliance on technologies we should be eager to see made extinct.

Ireland as price taker

Ireland has minimal fossil fuel reserves of its own, and one of the few commitments of government that takes the Dáil’s declaration of a climate emergency seriously has been the refusal to issue new licenses for further exploitation.⁸ That stance has not been appropriately matched through the delivery of on-shore or off-shore wind capacity and, as a result, the Irish economy can be presented – from a certain perspective – as vulnerable with regards to energy supply.⁹ In 2024, 80 per cent of Ireland’s energy use came from fossil fuels, with transport and manufacturing driving this overreliance on imported fuel.¹⁰

Even if we successfully developed the untapped potential around renewable energy, when it comes to the fossil fuel component of our economy, Ireland will always serve as a ‘price taker’ on the periphery of Europe, ‘without any control over international prices through its supply to and demand from international markets’.¹¹ When the global markets are disrupted, we are precariously placed to feel the blow harder than many. While the logic is deeply flawed, one can apprehend how political leaders could be convinced that the solution to this problem is to intensify our reliance on diversified fossil fuel flows, fundamentally conflating energy security with fuel security.¹²

Notwithstanding the supports to incentivise domestic retrofits, almost 90 per cent of Irish homes are heated by natural gas or kerosene.¹³ While electricity and natural gas supplies are regulated by the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities, the CRU has no mandate over the kerosene market.¹⁴ There are rigorous guardrails to ensure that households are not recklessly disconnected from the electricity grid, but for the (largely rural) homes relying on kerosene, there is no similar ‘empty tank’ support system.¹⁵ The ESRI defines ‘energy poor’ as having to spend more than 10 per cent of your income on energy.¹⁶ Fossil fuel price spikes threaten to plunge large numbers of people into this category, but those with kerosene systems are especially vulnerable because their supply is typically bought in bulk. When the cost of the tank doubles in a month, it creates an immediate, insurmountable liquidity problem for many households, especially those who are already vulnerable.

As the Strait of Hormuz becomes a much more expensive route for shipping, even if the ‘crunch’ of the 2026 fuel crisis is temporary, the long- term consequences is that fuel poverty in Ireland increases as the Irish working class suffer the longtail consequences of the military fiascos of other nations. We might start to frame this as ‘collateral poverty’ to account for the fact that no one facing a cold and mould-ridden winter voted for this aggression against Iran. We will soon have tens of thousands of homes getting hit by the economic shrapnel of this travesty.

With a transport system that is almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels, the rising costs of fuel is not just impacting poorly built and insulated homes but also people who rely on vehicles and machinery powered by petrol and diesel. In such a complex scenario, it is to be expected that the popular protest initially takes an inchoate form. Protesting the rise of fossil fuel prices by squandering fossil fuel is nonsense on its surface, but the farmers, hauliers, and malcontents who brought Dublin to a standstill in early April have to reckon with a profound problem with our economic model. As an island nation, Ireland benefits on an unimaginable level from the security and reliance of globalised connectivity. But there is no way for the state to counteract rapid structural realignments of power on a global scale. Whatever else happens as a result of the Iranian misadventure, it surely summons us to reckon with the reality that change will be forced upon us.¹⁷

Debunking ‘utopian’ environmentalism

For decades, the just transition has been dismissed as a well-meaning but ultimately unrealistic fantasy. ‘Pragmatic’ concerns took priority as Ireland avoided making necessary changes. The wisdom of those proposals was not disputed. But the price was judged to be too high, the action too inconvenient. Now, however, as a conflict 5,000 kilometres aways drives the cost of fossil fuel beyond the reach of ordinary people, we start to see how deluded this position was.

The trusted apologists of the status quo have left us with a system so fragile that it plunges into crisis when an octogenarian in Washington, D.C., posts a rant on social media. It turns out the only thing more expensive than committing to net zero was not doing so.

Yet even as our laggard status is exposed painfully as short-sighted, fiscally unwise, and societally damaging,¹⁸ there is a well-placed chorus line that insists that the appropriate response to crumbling foundations is to start building extensions. Opinion leaders simultaneously reduce the argument for climate mitigation to spurious cost-benefit analyses while also insisting that the state must invest a billion euros in a fossil fuel white elephant in the form of a floating liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal.¹⁹

The most up-to-date research on our retrofitting schemes indicates that they are most accessible to people who are already well off. Rather than see in that finding a basis for deepening our investment to reach more people,²⁰ the status quo protectors would like to see these initiatives abandoned. The present fuel crisis shows us how fossil fuels are not as reliable as the status quo defenders presented, and so we are encouraged to build more storage for fossil fuel. It is hard not to conclude that those who dismiss the measures of a just transition as unrealistically out of reach are willing to tax future generations to protect their ability to live within the logics of the twentieth century. Had ‘utopian’ environmentalism been embraced when the consensus about climate collapse was first achieved, or when our economies found themselves in disarray during the crash of 2008, or even when the Covid pandemic temporarily reset our societal expectations,²¹ Ireland’s economy would be much more secure and fuel poverty would be much lower than it is today. Every euro spent on renewable energy – whether directly through solar and wind farms or indirectly through, say, the retrofitting of our housing stock or the electrification of our train network – would have been an investment in price stability.²²

The best day was yesterday

The American environmentalist Bill McKibben recently observed that while sunlight must travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, not a single one of those miles passes through the Strait of Hormuz. It is a simple, physical fact that exposes the fundamental error of Irish energy policy over at least the last two decades. We chose a path of complex (violent) dependency over simple, domestically-located physics. If the best time to start building genuine energy security was yesterday, we must also admit that the current (and future suffering) of the energy poor is the direct result of our lack of ambition, which was also a failure to recognise reality.

Another way to think about this is that we are ‘paying interest’ on that debt of inaction. While the state has acted quickly to soften the blow, the regime of credits and emergency subsidies in place represent the bill due for denying the precarity introduced into global politics and trade by the growing effects of climate collapse and the biodiversity breakdown.²³ We will continue to have to pay billions in handouts that end up in the pockets of the fossil fuel giants because we dithered over spending millions on insulation.²⁴

As McKibben demonstrates elsewhere, a just transition that emphasises renewable energy and the rejuvenation of our infrastructure is the ultimate pathway to energy sovereignty.²⁵ In an unfortunate twist of fate, one of the great beneficiaries of the Iranian catastrophe is Russia, whose illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine is made much more manageable by skyrocketing demand for their gas.²⁶ Solar panels, wind turbines, and an array of battery technologies²⁷ will do more to protect us from the harassment of tyrants than any gas terminal.

King Canute is famous for trying to command the tide, but Irish discourse is in an even more tragic state. We are refusing to admit that they tide has gone out as we, forlornly, cling to the logic of a fossil fuel age that will quite literally leave the poorest in our society shivering. Meanwhile, institutions as august and moderate as the European Central Bank frankly admit that the most effective way to ensure our collective security ‘is by cutting reliance on imported fossil fuels and accelerating an orderly shift to homegrown clean energy’.²⁸

There will be those who argue that such a transition is too slow to meet the immediate challenge. This is the logic driving the ‘quick fix’ promised by an LNG terminal. But this is a mirage of speed. Even a floating gas terminal takes years to commission, and an onshore facility will take another five years to open. The choice to invest in gas involves a billion- euro commitment to lock us into the very volatility currently impoverishing us at the appearance of rapidity. There will be critics who trot out the tired Dunkelflaute argument (those days when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine), but we are currently in the midst of a battery revolution, with a year-on-year reduction in costs of 27 per cent.²⁹ Sceptics might argue that we can’t deepen our retrofit plans because we lack the labour force required. But we can reconfigure how we approach that task, prioritising social and low-income housing and thus minimising the effects of energy disruptions on those most at risk. Objections are never hard to mine, but we should note how so often the obstacles described by those who prefer the present arrangement replicate the thinking that held sway when fossil fuel was the only option. Instead, the evolution of renewable technology should be making them endangered species.

Conclusion: Building alternatives is a justice issue

The primary concern we should have about the war in Iran is the harm done to Iranians (and, indeed, the Lebanese). A just peace must be the pressing objective of any diplomatic intervention the Irish state may get to make. But, down the line, as the state turns to consider itself, this conflict has reminded us that energy policy should primarily be concerned with protecting the most vulnerable in our society. Those at risk of energy poverty are not victims of this war, but they will suffer because of it.

When we grant that fact, it becomes clear that the just transition is not a far-fetched fancy of some do-gooding Greens but a robust, rigorous, and effective means of building state capacity. Energy sovereignty is within reach as a technological possibility. It is the political realm that needs to be developed. A signal that we have embraced this reality would be the understanding that large number of families living in cold, damp houses, reliant on tanks of kerosene they may not be able to afford, is not just a question of carbon emissions but of basic justice. Here, theological thinking has reached far beyond secular common sense. This is an expression of what Pope Francis calls ‘integral ecology’, the recognition that ‘we are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.’³⁰

The just transition is often discussed in the future tense, but for the 25 per cent of Irish households who may face the choice between heat and light or even food this winter, the injustice is already historic. By building our energy system on these volatile geopolitical fault-lines, we are left at the mercy of a global market that has no concern for social justice. By choosing to pursue fossil fuel shortcuts and resisting the temptation to thoroughly retrofit social and low-income housing, we are effectively abandoning families to come up with their own solutions. It is harrowing to read of ‘blankets in the window’ in Eimear McBride’s famous novel. It is unconscionable that we would settle for leaving households with little other option in 2026.

Building alternatives – deepening our retrofit schemes, fast-tracking wind farms (with community ownership), accelerating the roll out of solar power and a decoupled electricity grid – is the surest path to end the collateral poverty that marks our present moment. We have no influence over the expeditions great military powers undertake, but we can control our response.

There is a staggering, exhausted cruelty in watching people blockade our cities, demanding that the state subsidise the very fire that is threatening our wellbeing, all while the tools to extinguish it were dismissed as ‘too expensive’. The best time to build an alternative was yesterday; the only just time to finish it is now.

Dr Kevin Hargaden is the Social Theologian at the Jesuit Centre for Faith Justice. Dr Ciara Murphy is the Environmental Policy Advocate at the same institution and serves as the Eco-Delegate for the Irish Jesuit Province.

Notes

1. McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press, 2013), p. 11.
2. McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, p. 103.
3. Pillai et al., ‘Fuel Poverty in Ireland: An Analysis of Trends and Profiles’, The Economic and Social Research Insitute, June 2022, p. 3.
4. Isabella Weber and Gregor Semieniuk, ‘The World Energy Shock Is Coming’, New Statesman, 21 March 2026.
5. David Gritten, ‘Trump Condemned over Threat That Iran’s “Civilisation Will Die.”’, BBC, 7 April 2026.
6. Claudia Flores et al., ‘UN Experts Strongly Condemn Deadly Missile Strike on Girls’ School in Iran, Call for Independent Investigation’, United Nations, 6 March 2026.
7. Damien Gayle, ‘From Black Rain to Marine Pollution, the War in Iran Is an Environmental Disaster’, Guardian, 20 March 2026.
8. Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘Ban on Licences for New Oil and Gas Comes into Force Following Cabinet Decision’, Irish Times, 2 February 2021.
9. Eamonn O’Reilly and Sean Finaly, ‘Joint Committee on Climate, Environment and Energy Debate’, Houses of the Oireachtas, www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint_committee_on_ climate_environment_and_energy/2026-03-25/2/
10. Barry O’Halloran, ‘Ireland Relied on Fossil Fuels for 80% of Energy Use in 2024’, Irish Times, 15 August 2025.
11. ESRI et al., The Implications of High Energy and Carbon Prices on Firms (ESRI, 2024), p. 3.
12. Caroline O’Doherty, ‘Minister Blocked in Bid to End Scrutiny of Law Giving Him Power to Approve Gas Reserve’, Irish Times, 22 January 2026.
13. Central Statistics Office, ‘Key Findings Household Environmental Behaviours – Energy Use 2024’, www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-hebeu/householdenvironmentalbehaviours- energyuse2024/keyfindings/
14. Commission for the Regulation of Utilities, ‘What We Do’, www.cru.ie/about-us/what-we-do/
15. Though, we should remember that the prevalence of ‘pre-pay’ meters means that a significant number of people are perpetually at risk of being connected to the grid, but to little effect.
16. Barrett et al., Energy Poverty and Deprivation in Ireland (ESRI, 2022), p. 4.
17. Rowan Hooper and Alec Luhn, ‘Why the Iran War Is Speeding the End of the Fossil Fuel Era’ New Scientist, 19 march 2026.
18. Keith Adams, ‘Ireland after the Climate Action Plan’, Jesuits in Ireland, https://jesuit.ie/blog/ ireland-after-climate-action-plan/
19. These two op-eds in the nation’s leading newspapers were separated by just over a fortnight. The first disregarded the personal lifestyle, environmental well-being, and fuel sovereignty arguments for retrofitting, calling for support schemes to be scrapped. The second, by the same author, advocated for an LNG terminal and celebrated the ‘creative ambiguity’ that has marked the government’s approach to over-riding opposition to what the author grants is a development that locks us into buying American fracked gas (which would be illegal to generate in Ireland) for decades. John McManus, ‘“You Don’t Get Your Money Back for 64 Years”: Why Retrofitting Doesn’t Make Sense’, Irish Times, 11 March 2026; John McManus, ‘We Could Do with a National Gas Reserve Right Now. Pity We Don’t Have One’, Irish Times, 1 April 2026.
20. Which is what the review itself actually proposes: ‘We conclude that meeting climate objectives will likely require both faster delivery of existing measures and additional, better targeted interventions grounded in representative, data-driven evaluation.’ Lynch et al., ‘A Review of Residential Heat Decarbonisation in Ireland’, ESRI, p. 1.
21. As testified to by Spain’s experience: Ruth Wright, ‘Spain Could Be the Only EU Country to Beat Energy Price Hikes’, Euronews, 11 March 2026.
22. Hannah Daly, ‘Price of Our Dependence on Fossil Fuels Is Becoming Clear Yet Again’, https:// hannahdaly.ie/2026-03-11-fossil-fuel-crisis/
23. Helen Thompson, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2022). See especially chapter 2, ‘The Impossible Oil Guarantee’.
24. McInerney et al., Fossil Fuel Lock-in in Ireland (EPA, 2019).
25. Bill McKibben, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilisation (W. W. Norton, 2025).
26. Thomas Graham, ‘The Iran War Is a Boon for Russia. Putin Should Still Worry’, Council on Foreign Affairs, 27 March 2026.
27. McKibben, ‘Night into Day’, The Crucial Years, https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/night- into-day
28. Frank Elderson, ‘Europe’s Fossil Fuel Dependence Poses Risks to Price Stability’, European Central Bank, 7 April 2026.
29. Amar Vasdev, Battery Storage Costs Hit Record Lows as Costs of Other Clean Power Technologies Increased.
30. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (The Holy See, 2015), 139.