Truckers have called up the 1961 road traffic act saying there’s no mention of fines or penalty points for this kind of protest. “There you are now. Black and white,” one says. Truckers very antsy, not willing to be identified. Say they’ve been threatened with increased penalty points…

Truckers have called up the 1961 road traffic act saying there’s no mention of fines or penalty points for this kind of protest. "There you are now. Black and white," one says. Truckers very antsy, not willing to be identified. Say they’ve been threatened with increased penalty points… from ireland

35 comments

  4. I suspect the guards won’t have much difficulty finding offences, either in other pieces of road traffic legislation or in public order offences.

  5. Why is it, that we all complain about the way things are in Ireland at the moment. And yet every time there’s a protest, we all complain about the protesters. 🙂

  6. You wouldn’t really expect a mention of penalty points in the Road Traffic Act of 1961, because they weren’t introduced until 2002.

  10. This is “the gang solves the gas crisis” type stupid.

    These people are blocking the port though which we import the fuel, further restricting the supply. They’re simultaneously causing increased fuel consumption through their traffic congestion, further increasing demand.

    So they’re causing a reduction in supply, and increase in demand. If there was a leaving cert between them they’d see how fucking stupid they are

  11. One has to laugh at these protests when there is apparently no ‘leader’ of the protest which a major red flag when it comes to this sort of action.

  12. Is there a thread that goes into more detail about the protest? From what I’ve understood, it’s about the cost of fuel. I know that the costs are because of the war, so there’s little the government can do, but also I can imagine it sucks if your job depends on fuel.

    Do Irish lorry drivers pay for their own fuel? Or are they usually under companies who cover that cost? I imagine that’s relevant.

    Aside from protesting fuel prices, are there more controversial things going on? I heard something about a Russian flag being waved, but haven’t heard much about it since.

    I would like to support protests, but it’s hard to find unbiased info on them usually. Also it’s easy for me to support one that blocks a road far away from me, while I sit in my home office…

  13. Just curious here but would the Gardai not be better off just saying that the vehicles are abandoned and getting them towed away and if they don’t want their vehicles towed then they need to move them. Like if I break down on the M50 they don’t wait till the car is fixed to move me as it’s obstructing traffic. Where is the law against removing someone’s vehicle from a roadway if they won’t move it themselves? That’s probably not in the road traffic act either.

  15. This kind of Lionel Hutz style confident gibberish stinks of freemen/sovereign citizen nonsense.

    Has anyone seen Ben Gilroy lately?

  18. How long until Leo does what his Canadian hero trudeau did and freeze bank accounts of protestors and threaten to put down their pets

  21. No real skin in the game here but making fuel for transport vehicles exempt from duty would bring down the cost of everything. We as a culture piss and fucking moan about everything, then when a group attempt to take action instead of joining them we piss and moan about that too.

    Make up your minds lads. If their protest wasn’t causing inconvenience it would be pointless.

  22. Alright, settle down people. It’s easy to mock these lads and be smug from our IT jobs or whatever (speaking as a pampered IT nerdlinger myself), but this hasn’t happened overnight, this is just years of anger coming to a head.

    The trucking industry everywhere is in crisis, you hear about a “trucker shortage” in Europe, the UK and the US, but there isn’t really a trucker shortage, there’s a trucker retention problem, because like with a lot of essential jobs these days, we treat people who do genuinely essential things like dirt, the UK and Ireland being poor compared to the rest of Europe when lads arrive at a warehouse for example. Pay is diminished, the hours can be unsociable, deadlines are too tight, there’s the extra hassle of brexit, and to top it all off when you finally arrive where your delivery is drivers can be left waiting around (time they’re not getting paid in some cases I believe) in some grim industrial park where no-one has the decency to provide any sort of facilities – showers, even toilets, not even offered a cup of tea.

    It’s mad how little respect truckers get now. I mean in the 70s, they were folk heroes, people were literally making movies and writing songs about them and celebrating them sticking it to “the man” and it was cool to have CB radio (oh, we were into this in Ireland big time, don’t pretend it was purely an American thing) and now people are having a moan about them on the internet. Our attitudes to people who do what’s perceived as “blue collar” work has really dropped. In reality it’s a job with a very high degree of responsibility where screwing up means financial losses at best and people getting killed at worst.

    Maybe, they’re not going about it in entirely the right way, but they still have my sympathy overall. We need them more than they need us. These protests are about fuel, but also not about fuel.

  25. As far as I’m concerned, this has been organised in part by Russian trolls, and I’m sure loads of lorry drivers in Ireland have jumped onboard from online posts.

    The Irish government could and should temporarily remove the taxes on fuel to reduce prices – but anything that involves removing sanctions from Russian fuel need to be left alone.

    By buying Russian fuel we are finding the unjust war again Ukraine, as individuals we should all be prepared to make changes in order to help end the war – it’s better than sending your wishes and old jumpers.

  26. More easily influenced morons radicalized by the far right into a “movement” to copy the US and Canada. Can’t say it wasn’t predictable.

  27. Someone needs to tell him the Road Traffic Act 2002 introduced penalty points so that’s why he doesn’t see it in the 1961.

    Being awarded penalty points for protesting though sounds like a supreme court challenge waiting to happen.

  28. Can only imagine what it’d be like to have the confidence of people who spend half a morning reading about an act on the internet, and then carry on like they’re some sort of legal authority on the subject.

  29. I know people here are saying that the truckers action is stupid as it’s stopping fuel imports. However you forget **the price of petrol is 50% tax**.

    Changes in the international market price are peanuts compared to what the state takes.

  30. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/dublin-truck-protest-little-disruption-to-traffic-in-city-as-pedestrian-march-fails-to-take-place-1.4849760

    >The group behind the protest, **which named itself The People of Ireland Against Fuel Prices**, previously said it would not leave without a resolution on the issue, and called on participants to be prepared to protest “for at least one week, maybe even two”.

    >The demonstrators were **previously known as The Irish Trucker and Haulage Association against Fuel Prices**.

    Did they get the memo about how strange the name was from here…?

  32. No govt is going to give in to this kinda lark. Sets a precedent that every time someone whips up a crowd on half truths and sometimes outright misrepresentation, they will do this and get what they want. And let’s face it. Too many folks in society are too stupid to be allowed that power.

  33. one of them was reading out the Bill of Rights 1688 earlier, a piece of legislation which sets out certain basic civil rights and clarifies who will inherit the Crown.

  34. Fair play to them. This sub is so full of people complaining about the way things are in this country. I do it myself, but when lads actually try to stick up for themselves we complain about them too!

Leave a Reply