DUBLIN — Ireland’s government announced more than €500 million in tax cuts on motor fuel Sunday in an attempt to placate protesters snarling key ports and roadways.
Prime Minister Micheál Martin announced the cuts hours after police successfully cleared protesters from the ports of Galway and Foynes in western Ireland as well as on Dublin’s central boulevard, O’Connell Street, which tractors and trucks had blocked since Tuesday. The clearances came a day after police backed by soldiers broke a similar blockade of the country’s only oil refinery at Whitegate in County Cork.
But Martin rejected suggestions that the package, worth an estimated €505 million, represented a reward for the wildcat protesters, who had rejected the diplomatic approach advocated by Ireland’s official trucking and farming organizations. Martin stressed he had negotiated Sunday’s benefits in cooperation with those officials — and would not speak directly to “unelected” protest leaders.
“It’s beyond comprehension that we were on the precipice of losing oil refining capacity in the country in the middle of an unprecedented global supply shortage of energy,” Martin said. “It makes absolutely no sense what was going on.”
