John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is not a big deal, though. What I am coming at is that the witnesses want to tax everything. People are hard pushed enough. I get a coffee in the morning that costs €2 and the witnesses want me to pay €2.10 or bring my own cup. That is practical but we would need a reasonably long lead-in time. When the plastic bag levy came in, a constituent of a former colleague of mine made plastic bags. The levy came in so quickly that the business was devastated. It had to come in but would have needed a couple of years' lead-in time.

There are opportunities for business here and I would love to hear the Environmental Pillar address that. The witnesses have looked at just one aspect. If Cork and Kerry county councils collected 300,000 cups in rivers and fields just from rubbish, we can safely assume 500,000 were used, 300,000 of which ended up being collected. It would be interesting to hear a business case for that from the witnesses. Then there is all the coffee residue, which is a fertiliser, and all those little wooden stirrers, which are recyclable. There is a whole business possibility there. Rather than tax everyone up to the armpits with stuff, we should look at ways of generating enterprising ideas for dealing with this. A local businessman in my constituency was thwarted in his efforts. He had got to quite an advanced stage of setting something up but one of the coffee takeaway companies wanted to charge him for taking the coffee residue because he was taking so much of it. He was doing that company a favour by recycling and so on, but that scuppered the whole thing. While tax is one aspect, enterprise has to be included as well.

We need to dig down more deeply into the question of electric versus diesel and petrol cars. We were told ten years ago that diesel cars were the way to go because they were more efficient in respect of emissions and our car tax was rated accordingly. Then we found out that Volkswagen and others were lying through their teeth about emissions. We do not know who is telling the truth now. I am sure it is not just Volkswagen but other car manufacturers as well. Have we any statistics about the manufacturing impact of producing hybrid or electric cars? I am not being a denier. I just want to drill down. What is the cost of and how do we generate the electricity that powers all these cars? What is the price to the environment of that electricity? A study comparing the Hummer and the Prius found that although on the road the Hummer is much more damaging to the environment, the manufacture of the Prius and its huge battery pack also causes great environmental damage.

A close fried of mine worked in one of the energy agencies here. Returning to the issue of plastic versus paper bags, we all welcome the fact there are no plastic bags littering the countryside. However, some shops are now charging 70 cent for a bag, because if they charged a lower price, they would have to pay Revenue. They have pitched it at such a level that one can buy a more heavy-duty plastic bag for 70 cent but the State gets nothing out of it. Many people are using these bags. The plastic bag levy did not apply to takeaways and places like that either.