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

No, Deputy, never. Not only that, to be honest we were campaigning against it before the Rural Independent Group was. I had to point it out to the Deputy’s brother at the budgetary scrutiny committee when they were going to remove a tax relief on fuel that would have seriously affected rural Ireland. He had not noticed it until I pointed it out to him. Luckily enough, that particular relief was not amended because we pointed it out to him. I go to the trouble of reading budget documents.

We oppose the carbon tax for precisely the reasons Deputies Michael Collins and Danny Healy-Rae have pointed out, as well as for other reasons. I do not buy into the urban-rural divide. There is no doubt carbon tax is unfairly hammering rural Ireland for all the reasons that have been outlined, because they do not have alternatives in terms of public transport. However, in urban Ireland, this is also a problem.

I will reference one recent egregious example, affecting one of the most vulnerable cohorts in our society. For the want of €200,000, a volunteer-run not-for-profit disability door-to-door transport service for people in wheelchairs has closed down in my area in the last few weeks. These are wheelchair users who cannot use conventional public transport. The taxis and buses are not adapted for their types of wheelchairs. They had a door-to-door service called ACTS. I raised the issue in here for months. I pleaded with the Ministers of State, Deputies Rabbitte and Butler, and the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, and I asked that €200,000 be found to maintain this wonderful service that brought hundreds of the most vulnerable people to doctors' appointments, gave them a social life and so on. It is outrageous, to be honest. How are they supposed to get to their doctors' appointments in the absence of that service which has now closed down? They will not have any choice but to get into cars, will they? They will have to get into somebody's car and be driven there, which will incur costs in terms of petrol, diesel or whatever. They do not want to do that. They would far rather use the ACTS buses, but those buses are gone. I do not know if the Government was just too lazy to act on the issue that was raised. I cannot believe that for the want of €200,000 the Government could not sustain the service. It is shameful.

I read the budget documents; I do not just read the speeches. As if the regressive nature of the carbon tax was not bad enough, I then look at the Minister's budget for this year, and find that it has been cut by 17% in the area of climate action. If we are trying to create alternatives to replace fossil fuels, surely the Minister's budget should have gone up, not down. In particular, the main line item, where it has been reduced by 35%, is in the area of energy transformation. It is down 35% from last year, from €791 million to €513 million. How the hell did that happen?

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