Colm Brophy (Dublin South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

At that price, it helps to place a 15 cent tax on it as a proportionate amount to influence behaviour. If a person is paying €3 or €4 for a coffee, 15 cent will not make a difference to him or her. It is the same with tin cans. People buy cans of Coke, for example, ranging from €1 for a can to €1.20. They do not care. The proportionate amount of the charge that the representatives want to introduce to make a difference would need to be very high.

One of the consequences relates to the section of society who, for a variety of reasons, choose to not participate. This is a consequence that does not seem to be looked at but we have had some really bad experiences of it. Deputy Lahart and I represent the same constituency and are in the same county council area. This is about people who dump illegally. We brought in bin charges but we ended up with a situation where, in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains, everything is being dumped. I am not condoning it. I would be much more in the business of objecting to this behaviour, but there is a whole section of society that feels excluded, and because middle Ireland decided it wanted to bring in all the charges, these people feel that their solution is not to be environmentally friendly, not to participate and to step outside the whole thing.

This ties in to the next point. With regard to the changes being looked at around diesel and cars, from my knowledge of it, the actual cost of running an electric car is very low. The buy-in point to electric vehicles is very high. While it is a nice thing for people who have large amounts of income to be able to go environmentally friendly with the electric car, even with subsidies, there are electric cars, such as a new Renault electric vehicle I saw in the Sunday newspapers, that cost nearly double the price of a conventional diesel or petrol car of equivalent size. A host of people are being excluded with regard to their ability to get into this.

When we brought in the changeover to diesel, we also brought in the incentivised scrappage scheme and so on, but the point was made, quite rightly, to a number of public representatives that there were people who did not have the money to engage with that scheme at the time. People have said many times to me as a public representative that they are driving, for example, a 1.4 litre ten year old car and paying €800 a year in road tax, yet the person down the road is driving a 2 litre diesel car and he or she pays €120 for road tax. We need to bring people with us, so I am less in favour of where the witnesses are going with their levies and taxes and I am more into incentivising people. I would be of the view that there should not be a levy or tax on someone using a plastic box in which to put a sandwich. The box should just not be available.

The San Francisco comment was interesting. We are an island nation and it is very easy to implement a measure and have an impact by phasing it in over a period and by making something unavailable at a manufacturing level. There are very fancy shops selling very expensive things 100 yards down the road from this venue. They wrap the items in paper and people pay twice the odds. There is no necessity for something to be in an individual plastic box. I would much rather see this issue dealt with through the prohibition of its use rather than through a tax, which is easily absorbed by those with money and which continues to allow the practice, and where those who do not have money just continue to pay too much for their lunch.