Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Since the committee was established in July last, all of the sessions with witnesses have been in public session. Since January, we have been meeting in private session to try to achieve cross-party political consensus and produce a powerful all-party report.

The children who went on strike from schools and marched on the Dáil and in my constituency were saying we need action. I explained to them that this committee is important because when members reach an agreement across party lines it carries considerable weight and gives the Minister of the day significant power to act upon its recommendations. It is easy to get consumed by the knowledge that the Minister is from the Fine Gael Party but we could have a Fianna Fáil, Labour Party or Sinn Féin Minister dealing with these issues tomorrow. I guarantee that we will have Ministers from other parties before 2030. That is the nature of politics. If we look back 11 years, Ministers have changed and they will change again in the future. We should not become fixated on who is in government and whether people trust it. The issue is this committee, as an all-party group, agreeing what is the best way forward. That gives us considerable power and we should not underestimate that.

It is disappointing that the Fianna Fáil Party amendment proposes to acknowledge rather than accept the need for increases in the carbon tax. Deputy Dooley states he wants an increase in carbon tax but his party, in this amendment, is watering down the wording of the recommendation by using the word "acknowledge" rather than "agree". This removes the proposed trajectory for the carbon tax increase, which would give absolute certainty to individuals and businesses and give them a roadmap showing how we would reach a figure of €80 per tonne by 2030.

A key point to remember is that this is not a revenue-raising tax but a means of achieving behavioural change. If we remove the trajectory and tell people where this carbon charge will go, we will not achieve the crucial change in behaviour we are trying to bring about. It will be a fudge and the other positive elements of the report will get lost because the headline will be that the committee was not brave enough to set out a trajectory for carbon tax.

I do not have a problem with ring-fencing revenue generated from increases in the carbon tax. We should discuss how such ring-fenced money could be spent but I question the view that we can dictate now how everything will be spent when we do not know what will be the spending plans of Governments of whatever parties in 2026 or 2027. That is where consultation is key. Fine Gael has been passionate about getting buy-in on carbon pricing. In the next two or three months, we intend having engagement, which will be led by the Department and involve town hall meetings being held across the length and breadth of the country. Every Tidy Towns group, local executive of the IFA or ICMSA and all other sectors of society impacted by this would have their say on how best to use an increase in the revenue raised to achieve behavioural change. That is what we need to do. Removing the proposed trajectory for increases to the carbon tax would weaken and water down the report and would be a retrograde step in the context of all the work we have done since July last.