KERRY County Council took in over €25 million in motor tax between January and the end of August according to figures from Minister for Local Government Simon Coveney.
This was the the ninth highest amount in the country. Figures were revealed by by Minister Simon Coveney in response to a question by Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin.
Over €742 million was taken in across 26 local authorities in the first eight months of the year with Dublin collecting the most at €190 million. The tax collected locally is passed onto the Department of Transport.
Why is road tax passed back from the local authorities to central government. Surely the €25 million collected in Kerry by Kerry county council should stay in Kerry for road maintenance works. I assume that the logic is getting it passed back to central Government is because counties like Dublin and Cork would be the biggest contributors to the central fund from road tax whereas counties like Leitrim and Sligo would contribute the least. I would suggest a need to start a campaign to discuss the need for some many different categories of road tax ,be they the pre July1st 2008 cc based scheme or the post 1st July 2008 co2 based scheme. It would seem to me that if you are in a position to purchase a low Co2 emissions car, you contribute very little ongoing monies to this “road tax” fund whereas if you running a pre 2008 large cc engined car, you are contributing a disproportionate amount. This strikes me as unfair and would appear to favour the well off and also be very anti family, as larger 7 seater cars by the nature of their sizes tend to be higher Co2 and higher cc engined cars. The whole point of the introduction of a co2 based road tax scheme was to have a polluter pays based system of road tax. A bigger ceist is whether all this money gathered under the road tax heading is actually used to maintain our roads?