A Mr Tom Mangan recently had a letter published in the Irish times and the Irish Independent. His letter was given much prominence so I am not going to reprint it on my website. He can get his own website (Petty I know) Mr Tom Mangan is not, I suspect, one of the people who voted to elect me as a Green Party councillor on Ennis Town Council. He is a resident of the town in which I am one of the public representatives in the county in which I am also a public representative. Mr Mangan claims in his extraordinary diatribe against carbon taxes specifically and the Green Party generally that the people I as a Green Party Councillor represent are "a small number of the cosseted middle-class who in general have access to a reasonable public transport system"

I represent a cross spectrum of people with the same access to public transport as Mr Mangan enjoys, car owner or not. His attempt to identify a new demographic of Green Party voters who somehow contrive to live in areas serviced by public transport while "the vast majority" of the population is denied such access and must rely exclusively on cars for transport defies logical analysis.

In the course of his diatribe, Mr Mangan dismisses as "fantasies" and a "lie" respectively the Green Party’s policies to tackle what was described this week by An Taoiseach as "the most important and pressing issue on the world’s agenda", that is climate change.

Mr Mangan castigates the Green Party for allegedly discarding its principles to stay in power while at the same time excoriating the Party for sticking with those very principles by promoting a carbon tax. You just can’t win with some people!

The most significant economic challenge we face is dependence on imported fuel the price of which will continue to rise over the coming decade. The aim of a carbon tax is to incentivise new entrants to our indigenous renewable energy market, and reduce our dependence on foreign fuel sources, which in turn will give us an economic advantage over our main competitors.

Carbon tax is not an easy message to sell. But it is not designed to penalise the poor, vulnerable or elderly as Mr Mangan suggests.
The money collected by way of a carbon tax will be used to help support the less well off in their fuel needs and make the changes necessary to secure our energy supply.

If what Mr Mangan perceives as the Green Party's 'new-age Utopian fantasy' is a country where we don't import 85% of our fuel, where we don't fear the flick of Russia's switch on our gas supply and where we're capable of producing all our own indigenous electricity then I am firmly committed to remaining a member of 'John Gormley's motley crew'. In fact, we're actively recruiting. And numbers are up.

Mr Mangan and his ilk are perfectly entitled to indulge in their own fantasies of infinite and inexhaustible supplies of carbon fuel burning away in their car engines and boilers without making the slightest impact on global climatic conditions until the day comes when they bump into Fred Flintstone on the public highway. Meanwhile, in the real world, the Greens are committed to continuing to work in Government in constructive engagement with our coalition partners to plan responsibly for Ireland’s future energy needs and to tackle the potentially devastating effects of climate change.