I have great regard for the Minister of State and hope he has the best of luck in this role, but he is nearly a year in it and car drivers are still being significantly financially assaulted in this country. The level of money they have to pay currently is quite incredible. Last year, drivers paid €1.9 billion in VAT and VRT. Last year, car drivers contributed to €4.1 billion in fuel taxes, which is the highest figure in the history of the State. Car drivers are being hammered by tolls. In the last ten years, the M50 toll has collected €2.2 billion. The M50 is a monument to two things from this Government, which are waste on one level and rip-off Ireland on another level. I will give the Minister of State a reason for this. The two M50 bridges were built at a cost of £53 million. The public-private partnership that built them collected enough tolls in its first year to pay for the bridges completely. Interestingly enough, Pádraig Flynn signed the contract for the public-private partnership and in a subsequent tribunal it was found the company had given him money. This is how the system works here. The particular company then sold those tolls to the State for €600 million and the State since has taken €2.2 billion in tolls. That is savage and absolutely wrong. We have paid for these bridges ten or 15 times over. How can any Minister make an argument for the collection of tolls on bridges that have been paid for so many times? We have a Government that has a policy of getting drivers out of their cars. It is a fair argument. We want to decarbonise society, so let us use tools to do it. There are two ways to do it, namely, the carrot and the stick. The carrot is the provision of public transport. Some 80,000 people in my county commute to work daily. They would give their left arms be able to commute to Dublin by train. Navan is the biggest town in the country without a rail line. It is quite incredible. The rail line for Meath has been promised for many a long year. Noel Dempsey promised the rail line in 1994 and now his daughter Aisling is promising it as well. The soonest we can see the rail line arriving in Meath is 2036 and that does not include a delay with the railway order, which has happened in the last couple of weeks. There is a public meeting in Navan in December about that. We have the Government using the stick of higher VAT, VRT, fuel prices, carbon taxes and tolls to get people out of their cars, but those people have no public transport alternatives for getting to work because the Government is not providing that to them. That is the real frustration in society.

Sentiment score: -0.02