Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House.

In the 1950s, my father ran a ballroom in Skerries. This was during the time of the showbands and the big ballrooms. At the time, there was a tax on each dancer. The ballroom owners of Ireland held a big meeting to call on the Government to tax ballrooms by size instead of taxing each dancer. This would be of considerable benefit to the ballroom owners. There was a big campaign, but when they were ready to take action, my father stood up and said he did not know whether it was a good idea. He said that back in the earlier part of the twentieth century, there was a tax on cars. The case was made for taxing the petrol instead of the cars because this was a better indicator of road use. The Government of the time thought that was a great idea and put a tax on petrol as well as on cars. My father said he did not think one should ever propose a new tax to a Government because it would impose it and leave the other one there as well. The campaign fell apart.

I will make a proposal rather like this today. We have a problem with traffic in Ireland and we do not always use our laws and our taxes in the general interest. We usually use taxes just to get money. We have not thought this through. If we have a serious problem with traffic and do not use public transport enough, maybe we should consider ways of encouraging its use. I want to use this debate to highlight a basic mistake in the way we tax cars and other vehicles. Front-loading the costs gives people a vested interest in using their vehicles as much as they can. What we should do is make it more expensive to use one's vehicle. We need to move towards a system in which people pay the cost of using their vehicles as they go.