Valerie Flynn covered the fallout this week<\/a>, and the reaction she gathered was telling. Dubliner Toni Kelly noted that while she herself can avail of free travel, plenty of others will just have to absorb the increase and cut back somewhere else. A Galway campaigner put the contradiction even more sharply, saying the government is \u201cpenalising commuters who are trying to do the right thing\u2026 while spending hundreds of millions subsidising fossil fuels through excise reductions\u201d.<\/p>\nTrinity\u2019s Brian Caulfield made much the same point: funding could be found to keep petrol and diesel under \u20ac2 a litre during the spring crisis, but apparently not to hold fares where they were.<\/p>\n
Minister for Transport Darragh O\u2019Brien pushed back on that framing when he spoke to David McCullagh on RT\u00c9 Radio One this week. His case was that even with the rise, fares will still sit about 8% below where they were in 2022, and that the extra revenue will fund roughly 140 additional bus and rail services from 2027, on top of a network that carried a record 365 million journeys last year.<\/p>\n
About a quarter of the population, he pointed out, already travels for free. Asked directly whether it made sense to raise fares while cutting fuel excise, he didn\u2019t really answer, pivoting instead to the wider bill: public transport now costs close to \u20ac1.6 billion a year to run, split between fares and direct Exchequer funding through the Public Service Obligation.<\/p>\n
Asked the same question a different way, the Taoiseach\u2019s answer amounted to \u201cnothing ever stands still\u201d. Not exactly reassuring for the kitchen table.<\/p>\n
Part of the reason fares are rising is that they were never covering the real cost to begin with. Fare revenue meets only about 38% of what it costs to run our buses and trains. The Exchequer picks up the rest, close to \u20ac1 billion last year.<\/p>\n
A 90-minute Leap fare in Dublin will go from \u20ac2 to \u20ac2.30, and a monthly pass here already ranks as the second most expensive in the world, behind only London and ahead of New York.<\/p>\n
Subsidising transport heavily isn\u2019t unusual by European standards, plenty of cities do it, but it does mean the sums are exposed every time the government needs to find savings, or every time fuel prices push up the cost of running the fleet.<\/p>\n
Some countries have gone the other way entirely. Luxembourg made all public transport free back in 2020, becoming the first country in the world to do it. Ticket sales weren\u2019t even covering 10% of running costs, so the government reasoned it may as well drop fares altogether and fund it through general taxation, about \u20ac41 million a year. Car use there fell 11% and ridership rose 25%.<\/p>\n
Malta followed with free transport for residents from October 2022, and Tallinn in Estonia has run a free scheme for registered residents since 2013, backed by a local referendum and costing the city around \u20ac70 million a year through municipal taxes and EU support.<\/p>\n
None of these are huge countries, and none are trying to cover Ireland\u2019s spread of rural towns and scattered villages, but they show the model can work when the political will and the funding line up, rather than pulling against each other the way ours currently does.<\/p>\n
So could we have free public transport?<\/p>\n
The NTA has actually costed this. A report it commissioned from EY in 2022 put the price of making all PSO bus and rail fares free at around \u20ac545 million a year, plus a smaller amount if you extend it to commercial bus operators too, so realistically \u20ac600 to \u20ac700 million in today\u2019s money.<\/p>\n
Compare that with what the State has spent this year just keeping petrol and diesel cheaper: an initial \u20ac505 million package in April, rising to about \u20ac750 million by August, with a further extension since adding another \u20ac400 million or so. All told, that\u2019s over \u20ac1.1 billion in less than a year.<\/p>\n
We could very nearly make public transport free for what we\u2019re currently spending to keep it cheap to drive.<\/p>\n
Which brings us to where our own road-related money actually goes. Motor tax used to feed the Local Government Fund, which channelled over \u20ac1 billion a year into local authority roads spending.<\/p>\n
Since 1 January 2018, that link has been cut.<\/p>\n
All motor tax revenue now goes straight into the Central Fund, the general Exchequer, rather than to local authorities.<\/p>\n
Fuel excise duty works the same way. It brought in over \u20ac2 billion in 2025 from petrol, diesel and green diesel alone, and none of it is ring-fenced for roads or public transport.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s general tax revenue, spent according to whatever the priorities of the year happen to be. So the money we hand over every time we tax the car or fill the tank isn\u2019t quietly building the bus and rail network that might eventually let us use the car less. It goes into the same pot as everything else.<\/p>\n
On fuel prices themselves, there\u2019s a genuine surprise buried in the latest EU Weekly Oil Bulletin. After the spring\u2019s forecourt chaos, with terminal blockades and pump prices past \u20ac2.05 for petrol and \u20ac2.35 for diesel, you\u2019d assume Irish drivers are being fleeced compared with the rest of Europe. We\u2019re not. Once tax is added, Ireland\u2019s pump price for both petrol and diesel comes in below the EU27 average, cheaper than France, Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands.<\/p>\n
Our pre-tax diesel price is the second lowest in the EU, and our pre-tax petrol price is the fifth lowest. It\u2019s our relatively lighter tax take (for now), not our raw fuel cost, that keeps us mid-table rather than at the cheap end.<\/p>\n
There is one place the picture looks genuinely encouraging for climate change at least, and it\u2019s in the numbers we track ourselves at DoneDeal Cars.<\/p>\n
Searches for electric cars are up 40% so far this year, while diesel searches have fallen 22%. During the worst of the spring fuel crisis, electric searches nearly doubled year-on-year, suggesting plenty of people did the maths on running costs for the first time.<\/p>\n
More encouragingly, the shift is no longer a Dublin story. Wicklow now has the highest EV uptake of any county at 39.3% of new cars, ahead of Kildare and Meath, while Roscommon, Cavan and Clare have all more than doubled their electric registrations.<\/p>\n
Dublin\u2019s share of the national EV total has fallen from 46.5% to 38.3% as the rest of the country catches up. The transition is working. Whether it keeps working depends on Budget 2027, with VRT relief due to end in December, the SEAI grant cap already cut once this year, and the Benefit-in-Kind threshold for company cars set to halve.<\/p>\n
A scrappage pilot offering \u20ac5,000 towards an EV was fully subscribed within 75 minutes of opening in July. There\u2019s clearly demand. Whether the supports survive to meet it is another matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We\u2019re not car mad. We\u2019re car dependent, because the buses and trains too often don\u2019t show up on time or at all, because the tax we pay to drive was never really ring-fenced to build something better than driving, and because, until public transport becomes something people can actually plan their lives around, the car will keep winning by default rather than by choice.<\/p>\n
Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years.<\/strong><\/p>\nJournal Media Ltd has shareholders in common with DoneDeal Ltd.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paddy Comyn YOU\u2019LL HAVE SEEN it outside your own local school. A line of cars idling bumper to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":673654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[17963,9,10,284739,13,14,6,17,11,12,15,16,5,123271,13421,7,8,284568,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-673653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-motoring","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-car-dependency","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-ireland","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-paddy-comyn","tag-public-transport","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-transport-fares","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117217643736328869","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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