Fuel Price Protest Dublin 24th November

Looking at RTE just now, who'd have thunk that Eamon Ryan was the truckers' friend? Says he will look into their grievances, and not a word of condemnation for what is a huge cost to thousands of ordinary people and businesses trying to make a living.

Our politicians are terrible cowards when faced with militant disruption. A few years ago there was a large reduction in the annual road tax paid by HGVs, largely negotiated by one Verona Murphy, now an independent TD.

insane? not a chance.

it was actually quite cheap given the infrastructure requirements to support them and the heavy maintenence that infrastructure requires.

It's completely absurd to think that we might be without HGVs. There may be some who will suffer losses, but if everyone who suffered losses in the private sector were to blockade things, then the economy as a whole would collapse. In any event we will have to be weaned off our dependence on diesel fuelled HGVs in the longer term, and part of that will be done through higher fossil fuel prices.

We all drove the race to the bottom for truck driver pay. When your customer keeps demanding cheaper prices and most of your costs are fixed you can only cut the non fixed costs, which is wages.

Do I think it is right that truck drivers have sh1t pay and conditions, no. But increasing the price of running a haulage company isn't going to improve their pay or conditions it's going to make them worse because now companies will start cutting other costs which could see drivers out on defective vehicles.

If the companies go bust 2 weeks statutory redundancy isn't going to help the drivers, they get paid feck all so their redundancy will be feck all.

So what's the country supposed to do for food and medicine while the haulage industry is rebuilt by people with no idea of how to run a haulage company?

You want the haulage industry to collapse and you think that everything will be OK. Did you miss what happened at the start of Covid? The UK had a fuel crisis on the rumour of issues with fuel supply, which took a hell of a long time to resolve for a country with supposedly plenty of fuel!

Can you imagine what will happen if there is a rumour of no HGVs. Shops don't hold stock and the supply chain is already broken. Our CO2 emissions would increase massively as the country descends into chaos.

There’s a reason these two protests didn’t have any support from the IRHA, and why there was less than 30 trucks involved in the latest one.

Hint - it’s because the industry isn’t on the verge of collapse. One of the companies I saw there is one that we have blacklisted due to safety concerns (obvs. won’t name them here) and I’d wager a guess that the reason they were free to spend all day parked up is that they’d have been parked up elsewhere with no work otherwise

These protests are from a very small group, and their actions on Monday had the biggest impact on hauliers who were actually working.