Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will be moving my amendment to the motion. I will be sharing time with Deputy Barry.

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward its motion. I agree with everything in it and I hope Sinn Féin agrees with the additions I propose to make to it. These include a very specific step-down subsidy for taxi drivers to allow them to return to work without losing their pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, if they earn more than that payment. My additions also include grants to cover the ongoing costs of insurance, car loan repayments, licence renewal and fuel, all of which drivers simply cannot cover, even as these debts and costs accumulate, given that the work now available to drivers has decreased by 60%, 70% or 80% and will remain sparse as a result of public health measures. Taxi drivers understand these measures and have supported them but they are the economic victims of them and need supports for their support for the public health measures.

I have also added that there should be a complete moratorium on the issuing of new licences during the pandemic and that there should be a scheme under which the NTA would buy back the licences of taxi drivers who may, for health or other reasons, wish to exit the industry so that they can cover the investment they made to get into the industry in the first place. These are in addition to the other demands included in the motion.

Yesterday's magnificent taxi protest was the biggest such protest that has ever taken place in this State. It dwarfed the expectations of the organisers. In every sense, it was a brilliant show of solidarity. Men and women, black, white and brown, were united as taxi drivers whose livelihoods have been devastated as a result of public health measures. They are now pleading with the Government but soon they will demanding that the Government reciprocate the solidarity they have shown with real supports.

I stress to the Minister of State that the taxi drivers' first impulse was not to protest. I know this because, months ago, I met the four groups that organised it to discuss what to do about their plight. They asked us to request that they be allowed appear before the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response and that I bring their demands to that committee, as I had brought them to the current and past Taoiseach, Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, and Minister for Finance. They hoped that, if they set out their plight, a reasonable Government would understand and respond.

They hoped they would not need to protest and debated long and hard about doing so at all. It finally became clear that, despite a lot of tea and sympathy from the Government and the Covid-19 committee, absolutely nothing was forthcoming for them in the July stimulus package and there were no clear commitments to give them income subsidies or provide access to the grants they need to cover their costs. The Government was not going to issue a moratorium on licences, extend the ten-year rule for the replacement of their vehicles or, critically, dissolve the Taxi Advisory Committee, which has failed as a representative organisation because it had barely any taxi representatives on it in the first place. It became clear that a genuinely representative national taxi transport forum where the voices of the taxi drivers themselves can be heard and where their representatives put forward their case was not going to be established. The Government has ignored all of this.

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