Owen O'Malley

The police in Ireland, they tend to allow people to kind of play out their anger.

So there had been a week-long protest which had shut down a lot of public transports and also road traffic.

And so a lot of the motorways around the country, the freeways around the country, were just literally shut down.

And the main wing road around Dublin was shut, which caused havoc.

The government met in order to try and offer a package to alleviate the fears and concerns of those protesters.

And that largely seems to have worked.

Partly it's worked in that it's offered those co-testers something, but also the government, the state physically moved to remove vehicles that were blocking freeways.

Yeah, so the government didn't actually meet with these protesters, and it probably escalated tensions a little bit more.

It then escalated tensions more when it said it was going to bring the military in to kind of clear these roads.

That was probably backfired as well by increasing tensions.

I think it's a major part of it.

So a lot of the climate policies have been delivered by the European Union, taken up with alacrity by Irish governments.

And in the last government, the Green Party was a member of the government.

And so it insisted that there was increases in carbon taxes.

These were never popular in rural Ireland.

Rural Ireland is more dependent on private transport.

It also tends to have different types of home heating.

So it uses the home heating oil.

The home heating oil has gone up by 67% in one mug, partly as a result of the war in Iran, but also there was going to be a new carbon tax hike coming in on the 1st of May.

So the government should have been aware that this was a problem.