Carbon tax the tip of the stealth tax iceberg

We had yet another hike in carbon tax this week…

From Thursday, we’ll pay around €17 a year extra for gas and €20 for home heating oil.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Gas customers will be paying around €138 a year now on average in carbon tax alone – with home heating oil costing €160 extra.

Carbon tax has been ratcheting up since 2010 and will continue to rise until 2030 at which point it will nearly have doubled again, adding over €230 a year in total to our bills.

I was initially in favour of carbon taxes as they are at least supposed to influence our behaviour and combat climate change.

But the reality – as you’ve probably guessed – is as disappointing as almost every other Government initiative.

Firstly, the money taken in carbon tax is meant to be ‘ring fenced’ for climate change initiatives.

Only, it isn’t. At least, not properly.

Between 2020 and 2023, Carbon tax almost doubled to a whopping €934m taking out of everyone’s pocket – even the poorest of the poor.

But only 61% of this money went towards ring-fenced schemes, according to the State spending watchdog the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG).

The rest went to the Department of Social Protection or was given back to the Department of Public Expenditure due to underspending.

CAG said it wasn’t “possible to confirm” if the money that went to the DSP was spent correctly. And there is no central tracking system for carbon tax receipts.

Many billions collected in carbon tax went towards hikes in fuel allowance, retrofitting homes and encouraging farmers to go green.

But is that fair? What if you’re not a farmer – or don’t qualify for fuel allowance? And you have to be pretty well-off already to afford expensive retrofits.

Yet another beef with carbon tax is that jet fuel is excluded, following persistent lobbying by airlines, while kerosene – that heats many homes in remote areas - is not.

So rich holidaymakers jetting off for a summer sojourn in the Canaries are effectively subsidised, while a struggling pensioner, who can’t afford one holiday in the sun never mind two, freezes in their remote cottage in rural Connacht.

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Carbon tax is bad enough but it’s just one in a raft of sneaky stealth taxes that the Government increasingly falls back on to fleece us.

Why cause a fuss by openly raising taxes when you can slap sneaky levies on everything without a peep of protest?

Even better if you can claim some virtuous reason behind your levy.

The Public Service Levy racks up our electricity bills by €42 a year as well…and it too is meant to go to ‘environmental causes.’

But are these any better implemented than the carbon tax ones mentioned above? Somehow I doubt it.