Sir, - As petrol and diesel prices approach €2 per litre, Irish motorists are once again being asked to absorb costs that are, in no small part, a Government creation (“Government open to providing new cost-of-living supports as prices rise, Minister says,” Politics, March 8th). Approximately 60 per cent of what consumers pay at the pump flows directly to the Exchequer through five separate levies: excise duty, the National Oil Reserves Agency levy, carbon tax, the Better Energy levy and VAT at 23 per cent.
The Government has responded to this latest surge with the all-too-familiar expression of “concern”. Yet concern does nothing.
With a single decision – the suspension or scrapping of any one of these taxes – the Government could provide immediate, meaningful relief to hundreds of thousands of households who are already struggling with the cost of living. It would represent a rare moment of decisive action by this Government rather than managed optics and endless announcements.
The real danger is that we’ll be handed a flashy one-off payment to grab the headlines, while the Government’s other hand quietly picks our pockets through yearly hikes in excise duties and carbon taxes.
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This isn’t a sustainable way to run a country. The social contract is already stretched to its breaking point by the housing crisis; it simply won’t hold if the State keeps squeezing the life out of household budgets. A government needs to be a guarantor of stability, not a predatory tax collector. - Yours, etc,
DEAN LITCHFIELD,
Dundalk,
Co Louth.
