The Irish Road Haulage Association (IRHA) have said that a rolling protest is 'imminent' in their calls for the government to suspend the carbon tax on fuel.

Irish motorists and transporters have felt the rising costs of petrol and diesel since the outbreak of the war in Iran.

Rosenallis man Ger Hyland, President of the IRHA, has accused the Irish government of 'price gouging', and has called on the government to suspend the carbon tax until the war has concluded.

"Our rolling protest is not 'ifs' or 'maybes', it is imminent," Mr Hyland told the Leinster Express / Laois Live.

"I had hoped to hold off until after St Patrick's Day, but unfortunately I see us being out on the streets before then. There will be a massive amount taking part, and we are calling on the support of the general public and the farming community, they are every bit as discommoded as the transport industry," he said.

"We are calling on the government to suspend the carbon tax, not abolish it. We want them to suspend the tax until the crisis in the Middle East is over. The government say that the money is for the retrofitting of housing, but as an association our members have paid over a billion in carbon taxes. We have not seen one red cent to show for it," he said.

"One of our members was using 70,000 litres of fuel a month. He got fuel this morning, and it had cost him an extra €9,000 than it cost him a week and a half ago. Fuel has risen by 12 cent this morning alone. The government snuck six cents on fuel in January, and nothing was said on it," Mr Hyland said.

The road haulage chairman argued that he and his members feel 'unheard' by the Government.

"We don't feel heard, the Goverment is tone deaf to our industry. We are paying the highest tax on any industry, 36 percent of our turnover goes back to the government in direct taxes, with fuel being the biggest of this," Mr Hyland explained.

"The government is accusing oil companies and distributors of price gouging, but it is nothing in comparison to what the government is getting. For every euro of petrol, they get 65 cent of it in tax. With diesel, they get 60 cent. The higher the price of fuel rises, the higher the money they get," he said.

A meeting on the matter was held in the IRHA head offices on Saturday morning.

"The anger and frustration in our meeting was phenomenal, I have never seen a transport meeting like it," the association president said.

"In rural Ireland, everyone has to have a car to get to work, we don't have public transport. We're all feeling the pinch," Mr Hyland stated.

It has been several years since the Irish Road Haulage Association has held a protest. The last rolling protest was in 2021, where a mass demonstration took to the streets of Dublin in protest of rising fuel prices.

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"We are not the enemy here. We are an island nation, everything we have has all been transported on the back of a truck. If it hurts the haulage community, it hurts the rest of Ireland. We are not in the business of protesting, we have been driven to it.

"We feel as if the Government is price gouging the industry, its time now that they give us something back," Mr Hyland finished.