Irish govt takes steps to calm fuel crisis

The Irish government has announced a support package worth 505 million euros ($591 million) to assist those hardest-hit by rising fuel costs following a week of public anger and demonstrations across the country.

The hike in prices resulting from the conflict in Iran has led to protesters blocking fuel distribution sites and major roads, and now the country's Prime Minister Micheal Martin has announced the extension of temporary cuts to duty on petrol, diesel, and other types of oil, along with the postponement of a planned carbon tax increase.

Blockades involving slow-moving vehicles have seen many petrol stations run out of fuel, and in County Cork in the south of the country, police used pepper spray to clear protesters blocking trucks leaving a fuel refinery.

Police commissioner Justin Kelly said several arrests were made after protesters were warned that what they were doing was "not a legitimate form of protest".

"We gave these blockaders fair warning that we were moving to an enforcement phase and they chose to ignore that and continue to hold the country to ransom," he added.

Mounted police have also been used to disperse protests in city centers, and Martin, from the center-right Fianna Fail party, criticized protesters for their "self-declared" right to impose blockades, saying they had "explicitly rejected the right of democratic representative groups to speak for them and have gone well beyond simply expressing their point".

Martin's political rivals have criticized the coalition government's handling of the situation, with Sinn Fein, the largest opposition party in the Dail, the lower house of the Irish parliament, ready to table a vote of no confidence on Tuesday, which several minority parties have said they will support.

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald said the handling of the situation had been "disastrous" and that the government had "lost the confidence of the public". The party's spokesperson on finance, Pearse Doherty, told Irish public broadcaster RTE that the party backed the protests, which he said were part of a wider cost-of-living crisis, rather than just being about fuel.

The government, he went on to say, is "still not prepared to actually make the necessary steps and take the necessary steps to make fuel affordable". It had moved "from insulting people to demeaning them, to threatening them with the army, to refusing to talk to people and try and resolve this (crisis)", Doherty said.

It is not just government opponents who have been critical of the way the issue has been handled.

Arriving at a Fianna Fail parliamentary party meeting, John Connolly, who represents Galway West in the Dail, said it was "very disappointing the way the whole thing panned out and the way it was handled from the start … We're going to have to ask what should have been better and what needs to improve in terms of our communication to the public".

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