Brian Stanley (Laois, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am a bit disappointed. For the past eight months the committee has operated in a collaborative way and, overnight, how the committee operates has changed in that we are suddenly told a substantial cross-party amendment has been submitted and this is the first sight we have of it. That flies in the face of how things have worked to date. As the Vice Chairman of the committee, I want to express my disappointment with that.

The amendment in front of us is obviously to give some cover to Fianna Fáil in regard to what is happening here. We have set out our case in this regard. There is now a proposal for another amendment to an amendment. Sinn Féin has an amendment that we want to put here today, if these amendments are going to be allowed to go before the committee. I propose that these amendments be allowed.

This decision to increase is going ahead. We want to change how things are done and we want to change the volume of carbon emissions being pumped into the atmosphere. We have heard the evidence over the past eight months and, before that, the evidence was heard by the committee of the previous Dáil, which dealt with legislation. Sinn Féin sought stronger legislation that had binding sectoral targets, although, unfortunately, we did not achieve that. The fact is that what we are doing here today is giving the green light to further increase carbon tax after the increase a few years ago. In effect, with VAT and everything else on top, what we are talking about is €2.50 on a bale of briquettes and in the region of €12 on a bag of fuel.

We want to move away from fossil fuels and we have spoken at length about this. There is a lot of good stuff in the report, which we have backed. There are nine chapters in the report and we made proposals that fed into that in a constructive and collaborative way, and there is much in it to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and to act in a more sustainable way-----