Green Party’s car policies are driving me demented

IT would be nice if the Green Party could just come straight out and say what it thinks, namely that it would greatly like to see cars eliminated from our roads altogether.

When in government in the early part of the century, it pushed through a change in motor taxation rules that saw cars taxed on carbon emissions rather than on engine size.

Overnight, after July 1, 2008, the market turned upside down. Where once petrol models outsold diesels two to one, the ratio changed almost exactly inversely. Soon, though, it emerged that NOx, or nitrogen oxide, emissions from diesels were more harmful to human health than CO2.

Then party leader Eamon Ryan suggested that a village of 300 people could get by with 30 pooled cars, which shows how little he knows about the likes of my north Wexford community, in which there are people who commute to Dublin for work, others who need to do the school run, more who have no option but to drive to the nearest shop, and so on. Operating a rota would be a nightmare.

Then the Greens decided we shouldn’t be driving cars with internal combustion engines, whether petrol or diesel, at all, and we should switch to zero-emissions electric vehicles instead. Now, Mr Ryan, pictured right, is talk of imposing extra parking charges in Dublin on SUVs, or sport utility vehicles, despite the fact that many of them, from the Kia EV9 to the Audi Q4 e-tron to the Mercedes-Benz EQE, are actually fully electric.

Paris has now decided, or, at least, just under 6% of the French capital’s population has decided in a poor-turnout poll, that swingeing charges for parking cars in the city will be decided by the weight of the vehicle. How long before that’s Green Party policy too?

The way things are going, they won’t be happy until we’re back to bolting planks to old pram wheels and using two bits of twine to steer. Honestly, the next general election can’t come soon enough.