Ms Marie Donnelly:

It can go higher than £12, but it will not go lower. In the emissions trading system, ETS, carbon allowances are bought and sold. Sometimes they can be traded. Therefore, if there are many of them, the price will be very low. As happened when the carbon allowances were withdrawn, the price went up.

The next time the Deputy is in the pub, he can say the reason the price of diesel has gone up is we are dependent on fossil fuels from outside the country. It is not just Ireland but Europe is one of the largest regions in the world and one of the biggest importers of fossil fuels. However, it does not determine the price of fossil fuels. The price is determined elsewhere and Europe, in its entirety, is a price taker. Therefore, when the price goes down, it is great, but when it goes up, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. That is one of the reasons we need to go down the route of energy transition. Think of a utopia where we use our natural resources such as wind, solar, bio and marine energy to produce our own energy vector which we would use for heating and transport and the generation of power. It would be done with our own resources on our own island and we will be energy independent. Then we would not have to take the global price for diesel because we would no longer be buying it. We would decide what our price was. Energy transition is not just a climate issue, it is also about security of supply and competitiveness because the competitiveness of European industry frequently relies on the international price of oil and gas and can put us at a huge disadvantage when competing against other competitors globally. Equally, from a security of supply point of view, as the committee knows, we import a lot of gas supplied by a particular colleague through a particular pipe which can be turned off.

Some 45 million people lost gas supply in the eastern European countries because the supply pipe was turned off. There are issues of security of supply and competitiveness in energy transition as well as climate change. The price the farmer is paying for diesel is a factor in that context. The next time the issue comes up, Deputy Neville can say that farmers need to be part of the energy transition.