Michael McDowell

So the basic rights of every citizen to go about their daily lives wouldn't be impinged in the manner it was, which was criminal.

Sorry, this isn't a matter of tiffs between government ministers.

It was plainly obvious as the eyes in your head that to remove these vehicles would require heavy vehicles and that the only people in the apparatus of the state who had that equipment were the army.

And there's nothing unlawful about the use of army equipment to do that.

Nothing whatsoever.

I would imagine that the Minister for Defence, if she wasn't too busy with the Foreign Affairs Department, which she also has, would have been volunteering the assistance of the Defence Forces to ensure that the basic law of the country was being upheld.

No, I don't.

I don't accept that anybody should break the law.

And, I mean, I would make this point to you, Clare.

If a group of vegans decided to park lorries outside meat plants across Ireland to prevent cattle being slaughtered and processed, the IFA would have a very different view about it.

If a group of people, of eco-warriors, descended on Ross Lair and all the ports,

and blockaded trucks on the basis that they were spilling out pollutants.

In those circumstances, I'd expect the truckers to have a very different point of view.

The simple fact is that the law should have been upheld from the very beginning, and it should have been made very, very clear that a small group of people, some of whose remarks I see in the Irish Times today, in Fintan O'Toole's column, show what kind of people you're involved in,

should organise themselves as a committee to bring the country to its knees.

There's no excuse for that, nor is there any excuse for people screaming obscenities at Gardaí who were there to uphold the law and the right of ordinary people to travel to and from work and to have oil and diesel and petrol for their cars.

These are fundamental rights.

I have to say, Paul makes one good point there, and that is

that the whole purpose of the carbon tax was to change behaviour.

If fuel prices are going to shoot up, you have that change of behaviour no matter what way, no matter who's taking the money, whether it's your company.