Diesel Has Breached €2.00 Every Day for Three Weeks. Here Is What the Data Shows.

Community-sourced price data from more than 1,500 Irish fuel stations shows that the national average price of diesel has sat above €2.00 per litre every single day since 6 March — 21 consecutive days and counting. Petrol briefly crossed the same threshold before easing. No official Irish database tracks these movements. FuelWatch does.

The numbers, day by day

The table below shows the daily national average for petrol and diesel since 18 March, drawn from nearly 2,000 price readings across all major sources. The data continues from our January–18 March dataset published on 19 March.

What happened

On 4 March, following the escalation of the Iran crisis, wholesale oil prices spiked. Within days, Irish pump prices followed. Diesel — which had averaged €1.73 per litre in January and February — jumped past €2.00 by 6 March and has not returned below that line since.

Petrol followed a milder but parallel trajectory, rising from a pre-crisis average of €1.745 to a peak of €1.99 on 22–23 March before falling back toward €1.87 by mid-week.

The data shows early signs of easing. Diesel has dropped from its €2.24 peak on 23 March to €2.09 by 27 March — a fall of roughly 15 cent in four days. But it remains 32 cent above where it was before the crisis began.

The gap between petrol and diesel

One of the most striking features of the current period is the widening gap between petrol and diesel. Before the crisis, the two fuels tracked within a few cent of each other. Since 4 March, diesel has consistently traded 15–20 cent above petrol — a gap that reflects Ireland's particular exposure to diesel-dependent supply chains and the higher proportion of diesel vehicles on Irish roads.

Why this data exists

Ireland has no mandatory fuel price reporting. No government database tracks what stations charge. The data in this article was assembled by FuelWatch.ie from multiple independent, community-powered sources covering more than 1,500 stations across all 32 counties.

Countries that introduced mandatory price transparency — Germany in 2013, France in 2007, Austria in 2011 — saw measurable reductions in both price levels and price dispersion within the first year. Ireland is the last major western European economy without such a scheme. TD Shay Brennan's PumpWatch bill, currently before the Dáil, would change that.

Methodology

Daily averages are calculated from all available dated price readings for the Republic of Ireland on each day. Data is drawn from independent community-based platforms and FuelWatch.ie community reports. Prices from Northern Ireland are excluded. Outliers below €1.50 or above €2.80 are filtered. The full dataset — covering 78 of 86 days from 1 January to 27 March with 4,857 total readings — is available in the press kit below.