Aisling Moloney

So people will be aware, or maybe they're not aware, that on every litre of petrol that you buy, two cent goes to the National Oil Reserve Agency.

Now, that agency takes that money in and the vast majority of that levy goes to the Climate Action Fund.

This is happening since 2020.

A change in the law meant that they'd

put most of that two cent levy into the Climate Action Fund to fund climate action measures like solar panels on top of school buildings or electric vehicle chargers and electric vehicle charging infrastructure around the country, initiatives like that.

So they've collected over 500 million euro in that levy in the last, since 2020 and up to 2024.

And analysis that we did on the financial statements shows that the Climate Action Fund

had 278 million euro sitting in its bank account at the end of 2024.

So basically, the Climate Action Fund, every year from 2020 to 2024, it was in surplus.

So they didn't spend all the money that came in and there was money left sitting in the account, which has accumulated to the level of 278 million at the end of 2024.

Now, they're the latest financial statements we're able to get access to.

The 2025 statement for the fund hasn't yet been published.

So that means that that's 278 million euro.

But that's also combined with the story that we had in the Irish Independent recently as well, that the carbon tax.

So this is another tax you're paying on fuel.

And that was supposed to be ring fenced for climate action measures.

But we learned recently that 250 million euro of that.

So another half a billion or another quarter of a billion, which makes it all a half a billion.

has not been spent and it went back to the exchequer.

So we see there the taxes that we are being told we're paying to fund climate action measures, half of it went back to the exchequer and half has been sitting there unspent.