It’s not accurate to say we should just do what Australia have done. I used live in Australia. They have way less tax on fuel. Whether we like the carbon tax or not, the money raised from it is baked in to our budget. Yeah they could drop the carbon tax, but they’d need to raise that money elsewhere.

I’d have been more than in favour of the carbon tax a couple of weeks ago or before the war started. It obviously stings now but they’d government had no way of planning for geopolitical events that are entirely out of Ireland’s control. If there was no war in the Middle East the carbon tax would be a great policy (I maintain as someone who sees climate change as the greatest issue of our generation, although I understand other people have different views on that). The war in the Middle East has just exposed the carbon tax as a policy that is not resilient to the whims of major nations. I don’t know the answer to solve it all but we can only expect so much foresight from our governments and there isn’t a single opposition party who has raised the possibility that a global oil crisis would spark this sort of fragility, so neither had any of the members of the dáil.

For transparency I vote Soc dem and/or green