Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Either there is a hole in the financing of the national development plan or the numbers are wrong.

I want to make another point. I was on local radio this morning, not my local radio but Shannonside, on this matter which I have raised with the Minister's Government colleagues for the last month. The number 30 bus which provides connection between Donegal and Dublin, particularly the airport, and goes through Cavan, left people standing on the side of the road at 3 a.m. on Monday morning, missing flights to Germany and other places to go to work, because it did not turn up. Forget about all these glossy brochures that the Government keeps launching, if the Minister lived in rural Ireland he would know that it was the 75th time this year that bus did not turn up in the middle of the night leaving people on the side of the road. He might also be conscious that it was the 109th time in the last year that it did not turn up. That is the reality. Those are the realities for people living in my community and all the rest. The first day I came here, I laughed when someone asked me if I had taken the train.

The last time there was a train in Donegal was in the early 1960s and that is the reality for a lot of people. The reality is that a carbon tax will increase the price of diesel and petrol when their price is at an all time high. Another reality is that for every litre of petrol as much as 95 cent is tax. We know that behavioural taxes work but there must be alternatives. When a bus does not turn up in the dead of night or when people do not have money under their mattresses but the Minister for Finance says that sometime in the future prices will reduce and people will be able to afford the price of an electric car so suck it up in between because we are pushing up the price of heating and petrol. The reality is that a carbon tax makes people poor. I ask the Minister to answer my question. The Government has baked in €9.5 billion of carbon taxes that does not factor in a reduction in consumption. Is this a revenue raising generator? Will there be a 10% reduction in carbon consumption as outlined in the climate action plan? If so, does that leave a hole in the financing of the national development plan so the allocation of €1.5 billion for agriculture and the billions of euro for just transition?