Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I was mortified when I heard the cups mentioned and Ms O'Brien is right. I must record my deep concern at the shocking news that President Trump is apparently pulling out of the Paris Agreement, which is a shame on that Administration.

I agree with the three cases being made by the witnesses but I want to widen the discussion out a bit. I am not asking for an immediate response but am sharing some of my own thinking on these issues. First, with regard to the introduction of a charge on disposable cups and a refund on items that are recycled, it seems to me that we have reached that stage now. We had a similar experience to the example from Kerry that Ms O'Brien outlined. We had a similar clean-up of our own local river recently and we did a scientific assessment of what was in it. The river was clogged with bottles and cans. That was what was in it - litter. It is actually a litter problem as well as a resource-use problem.

Similarly, if one surveys what our supermarkets are selling to us, one finds that many items are wrapped in non-recyclable materials and that has to stop. We can stop it by some of these signals. One reason that has not been done in the last five or ten years is that in a sense, the Repak system we put in place always argued against it. Repak argued that it would undermine its system of recycling. My view is that everything has changed because we are starting to incinerate our waste - 600,000 tonnes in Poolbeg and there is also an incinerator planned for Cork. That is all madness, to my mind, if we want to go towards a circular economy. In making their proposals, what would the witnesses say to Repak who have always said that such a refund may undermine its recycling system?

I agree with the proposal for an aggregates tax. I was at a meeting in Teagasc yesterday to discuss land use and aggregates form part of that but there is a wider issue of land use that we must address. We need a national land use management plan that is quite radical in terms of how we address climate change here. One of the strong signals in that has to be a reward for farmers who are, for example, supporting biodiversity. There is some land that we will have to stop farming and stop draining. We must provide for flood management, water storage and carbon storage. To make that work, we need to go beyond the current GLAS system or any of the other farm payment systems to specifically support certain types of land use in a land use management plan for biodiversity, flood management and climate reasons. Have the witnesses considered where the income for such a signal on land use, to support good land use management, might come from? While I welcome the aggregates charge, we are going to need more than €80 million. This is a multi-billion euro tax change.

On the transport issue, I agree with Mr. Coghlan that we are not going to have electric vehicles all over the country tomorrow.

If, however, we are serious about climate action and air pollution, we need to do what other countries, including Holland, are doing, namely, saying there will be no more petrol or diesel cars sold in ten years' time. That is where we need to go. It is the end of the internal combustion engine motor car. Other countries are doing this. It is not as impractical as it may seem. That is the scale involved. The alternative is a better car. Electric vehicles are becoming absolutely standard and are coming down in price. The maintenance cost is but a fraction. It would be absolutely valid for us to set such an ambition.

The one interesting point on the tax side is that we must start thinking about how to replace the multi-billion euro revenue we get from excise and petrol taxes at present. Have the witnesses examined that bigger picture? They should forget about equalising. I acknowledge we need to equalise in respect of petrol and diesel but we need to start having answers as to how we equalise our loss in tax revenue that will accrue as we switch away from the use of fossil fuels in the motor industry, which we have to do at the desirable speed.

We were out today proposing a just transition. The IMPACT trade union was out yesterday looking for something similar. Would the witnesses agree with the calls that have been made for switching away from the PSO levy on the operation of peat-fired power stations to a just transition fund that would fund jobs, particularly in the midlands, in retrofitting and other energy efficiency areas? If we shut down the peat-powered plants in the next year or two, we could access about €120 million for such a fund. Would the witnesses support that just transition proposal to switch off the peat plants and instead switch on a retrofitting industry in the midlands with the funds that we would save?