Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for her reply. Specifically, solid fuels being brought into this State from Northern Ireland enjoy the same freedom of movement that applies to most other goods. How can she expect a carbon tax to operate in the Twenty-six Counties if we have product coming from outside the State which is coming in and undermining business here? That just cannot be allowed to continue. The estimated figures from the fuel merchants I have for loss of revenue in 2023 is €77 million.

Leaving that aside, we will lose our complete infrastructure of fuel merchants in this country and it is happening as we speak here. They are going out of business.

The reality is, and the Minister of State has said it in her statement, that much of this product which is coming down from the North of Ireland is illegal to be sold here. An inspection regime has to be put in place. I will repeat the three requests I have. These are: fuel merchants here have to be licensed; they have to be open for inspection; and there has to be checks on product being moved from one place to the other within the State to see if the product on those trucks and lorries is legal. That has to happen immediately.

We will have more and more of this issue in the post-Brexit period where the standards in the Twenty-six Counties and the standards in the UK and in Northern Ireland will be different from our own on different products. We cannot allow the homegrown businesses in this country suffer because of that. That is what is happening at the moment. We have different standards, a different rate of taxation, and the fuel merchant businesses are being completely undermined and will become completely unviable. We must impose the same standards where product coming down from the North will most definitely have to be legal and, if it is being used in this country, it must be subject to carbon tax to ensure a level playing field for our fuel merchants here to ensure fairness. This is also to ensure that the environmental improvements which we are trying to achieve from carbon tax do actually happen.

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