By Jonathan Magee
SOARING energy bills, unaffordable childcare, a broken housing market, and the ongoing defective blocks scandal, the full weight of Donegal’s cost-of-living crisis was laid out at a packed public meeting at the Radisson Hotel, Letterkenny, this week.
The Sinn Féin event, hosted by TDs Pearse Doherty and Pádraig Mac Lochlainn and councillor Dakota McMenamin, drew a significant attendance, with many defective blocks campaigners among the crowd.
From the floor, a father of three, both he and his wife working full-time, told the meeting they were being left with nothing after bills. “We are crippled by childcare costs,” he said, to clear recognition from those around him.
On childcare, Doherty said Sinn Féin had long costed a proposal for €10-per-child-per-day care, a policy Fine Gael adopted ahead of the last election but had still not implemented, instead capping costs at €800 per child per week which he described as “crazy stuff.”
Deputy Doherty said the human stories coming through his constituency office every day reflected a deeper structural failure.
“We have the highest energy bills in Europe, three companies have announced double-digit percentage increases in the coming weeks, and 320,000 families nationwide cannot pay their energy bills. There is something fundamentally wrong in the Ireland of 2026,” he said.
Attendance at the cost-of-living crisis meeting hosted by Sinn Féin.
Mr Doherty condemned the government’s decision to withdraw energy supports last October, and set out a series of Sinn Féin proposals: a €400 payment per family toward energy costs, a €500 USC rebate, double child benefit, and a cut in excise duty on home heating oil. He noted the government had refused to reduce home heating diesel excise while cutting private jet fuel excise by 17c per litre, a detail that drew a sharp reaction from the audience.
A retired couple from Ballyshannon described returning to the town in 2019 after years away, only to be shocked by its decline, derelict buildings, closed businesses, and little to keep young people there.
A man named Darragh said he had returned after seven years abroad and simply could not get on the housing ladder despite seeing empty and derelict properties everywhere.
“On every single metric, Donegal has been left behind,” said Deputy Pearse Doherty.
Deputy Mac Lochlainn said young families were being outbid by institutional investors at prices already far beyond Donegal wages, and expressed frustration that the government had cited the county’s low population density as justification for its lack of priority status on affordable housing, a claim that left the audience visibly shocked.
Mr Mac Lochlainn also raised the defective blocks issue, telling the meeting that too many Donegal homeowners had iron sulphide problems in their homes, not just mica, and that the absence of a science-based approach to the redress scheme remained deeply frustrating for campaigners.