Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for being in the Chamber to discuss this issue. Last week, I met a delegation of solid fuel merchants who are members of a newly formed organisation. Every town and village in the country has a fuel merchant. Unfair competition is shattering their trade. Approximately 50% of the coal that is being used in the country is coming down from Northern Ireland. It is estimated that €100 million worth of coal products will come from the Six Counties into the Twenty-six Counties this year. For better or worse, we have a carbon tax in this country. VAT is also applied to solid fuel products. That puts our fuel merchants in a completely unviable situation whereby they are not able to compete with the products coming from Northern Ireland. Those products are not subject to carbon tax and VAT in the same way as products sourced in the Twenty-six Counties. The vast majority of the products coming down are illegal to be used in the South. Smoky coal is the principal such product. It has been banned in the Twenty-six Counties. Smoky coal is coming down from Northern Ireland in very large quantities nonetheless.

Carbon tax increased again on 1 May and added 90 cent to the cost of a bag of coal. We know that carbon tax is a climate action measure and we are not here to argue about the carbon tax. This is about a level playing field. Unfortunately, there is no surveillance of where products are coming from at the moment. Three recommendations have been made to me by the fuel merchants. The first is that a mandatory licence should be put in place for all fuel merchants. They feel that is the first requirement to bring some regulation to the business. It is unusual for businesses to look for regulation but in this case, the fuel merchants feel their very survival depends on it. If there is no licensing system in place, they do not know how the products coming down from the North can be controlled.

The second recommendation is that if there is licensing in place, all fuel merchants' premises should be open to inspection.

Again, if they are open to inspection and there was illegal product on the premises, that would be seen. If the product was sourced from outside our jurisdiction, that would come to light during the inspection. That would have to bring transparency and fairness to the trade. The third request is that there would be Road Safety Authority, RSA checks on vehicles carrying fuel around the country.

At the moment. we have articulated trucks coming down from the North and couriers also with single axle lorries bringing down significant quantities of solid fuel. There are no checks at any stage on them. We need to have checks on these and if we had the licensing system in place and the inspection regime; if someone is carrying product that is not legal in this country, that would be confiscated.

If there were a number of these checks on roads around the country, we would very quickly see a reduction in illegal products coming into our jurisdiction.

As it stands, fuel merchants are facing completely unfair competition. They will not survive and will go out of business. We have seen some large fuel merchant firms announcing their closure in the past number of weeks. This is getting worse by the week where there is more and more product coming down from the Six Counties and we have to have a level playing field. The product that is sold here has to be legal and has to be subject to the same taxation regime.

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