Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am dealing with it now. It depends. This is the bureaucracy today, that one cannot have common sense prevail.

The Members of the House here and the Minister of State will be acutely aware of the financial strain commercial vehicle road tax is placing on Irish haulage operators. The introduction of the lorry road user levy, LRUL, in Northern Ireland has compounded the difficulties. Unless road tax in southern Ireland is overhauled as a matter of urgency, countless jobs will be lost.

I ask the Minister of State to examine this. He must know as well as I do that the playing field was not level even before this levy was introduced in Northern Ireland. The tax for a commercial lorry in this jurisdiction, which is paid to the county council or the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, is €3,500. The equivalent rate on the other side of the Border is €640. It is six times greater here. I cannot understand it for the life of me. A charge of €12 per trip is now being added. One could have to make several trips in a single day if one is going to and from Donegal. One would be straddling the Border as one goes up and down. It is a punitive tax on an industry that is already struggling.

We have a wonderful road haulage industry, in the main. In recent years, it has worked with the Road Safety Authority, the National Roads Authority, the Department and everybody else to streamline everything and bring it properly under the legal realm as it should be. It seems that this charge is what it is getting in return. It has been pleading for years - with this Government and with its predecessor, from which the Minister of State inherited this problem - for the introduction of a pay as you go road tax system like that used in other European countries. If hauliers could pay road tax in instalments, it would be some effort. Many hauliers I know are parked up for nine months of the year. They might get one or two days of work each week, but they still have to pay a punitive rate of tax. As a result of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, many cross-Border committees and organisations are working together. In that context, it beggars belief that some kind of arrangement cannot be reached with the Northern Ireland authorities, if not the authorities in the UK as a whole, to ensure our people are not blindfolded. We would not place restrictors on the engines of their lorries to prevent them from going more than 15 mph. Requiring them to pay this punitive tax will have the exact same impact.

We are supposed to be in Europe as good Europeans, but we get kicked by the Europeans all the time with our finances and everything else. I do not believe this charge prevails in other parts of Europe. We implement things like this that are not implemented in other countries. It is only a land border, as we know. There is no sea. There is nothing between us when we drive up and down. I know it intimately. I know the difficulties they have. The punitive system of tax for commercial vehicles must be changed anyway. Countless hauliers I know have gone out of business in recent years, having tried their best to hang on. When hauliers get into trouble, Revenue is the most ferocious creditor they have to deal with. They get no hearing at all from the State. All they get is anguish. They are subjected to all kinds of checks from the traffic corps. I am fine with that. They try to keep their lorries up to the requisite standard for road safety. This is a punitive taxation system. I do not know what Ministers or senior officials allowed this levy to be passed into law without some kind of quid pro quoor some kind of arrangement for the hauliers here. We do not have jurisdiction up there, obviously. Are we asleep at the wheel? It is just madness to allow this infrastructure, which is already struggling, to be hit in such a punitive way.

I suggest that business and foreign direct investment will be lost when people start to encounter more expense in transporting goods north and south - to and from Larne, or from Donegal down to Dublin. People will not come in here because of the costs. The costs faced by road hauliers are already savage. I refer to the cost of fuel like white diesel, for example, or to the cost of road tax. Trucks have to be maintained and upgraded to an exceptionally high standard to keep them on the road. There are some very valuable haulage companies in my home county. They are on their knees. They are bewildered at the lack of engagement by the Ministers for the Environment, Community and Local Government and Transport, Tourism and Sport in this instance. We have been allowed to sleepwalk into this situation. They got adequate notice from many Members of this House and the Irish Road Haulage Association. They should have been better prepared. Some effort should have been made. It should be made now, even at the 11.9th hour.

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