Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Is there an international comparison with regard to the collection of tolls? If, for example, a person goes through a toll collection point and does not have a tag or whatever, the toll has to be paid by the following evening, which is when most people will do it. However, penalties arrive very quickly if, say, somebody does not get to pay the toll. How do we compare with other jurisdictions? Could TII give us some information about third-country vehicles? How does it collect the tolls, or does it collect them? The other thing I discovered from replies I received is that people overpay. It can be quite a sizeable amount of money and it goes into the revenue of the particular company. I have an issue with that.

It is overpaid and really, it is not its funding. If it went into an account such as the Dormant Funds Account it could be disbursed to good causes. There is an amount set by regulation. There is something wrong about retaining more than this amount. Why should it be permitted to retain it? It is quite a sizeable amount of money in some cases.

There are a number of issues further on in the document. It states it excludes the impact of Covid and current inflation uncertainty. We saw an article in one of the Sunday newspapers about it not being possible for people contracted to do a piece of work to do that work without significant losses. This report tells us it has not evaluated elements such as inflation and Covid. We need these projects and if we have to go back to square one because people do not complete the projects and down tools it will cause delay. If such a delay is on a major motorway we could lose access to a lane for example. I am not happy.