Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to echo the comments of Deputy Farrell in respect of data centres. I am not going to go into the argument today, as the Minister knows my views on the issue very well, but the one point I wish to add to Deputy Farrell's argument is that every other example of where there are large numbers of data centres, they are part of a very large electricity network. That is not the case in Ireland, where we have an isolated stand-alone grid, and we are disproportionately impacted upon by the large number of data centres here. However, I will leave it for another day to go into that particular debate.

I wish to return to a number of points made by the Minister. He has made the point that this money is being ring-fenced for the most vulnerable and targeted towards them. I have here in front of me correspondence from Galway County Council. The midlands energy retrofit pilot programme, into which the carbon tax from last year was invested, is intended to target local authority houses across the midlands, most of which are in energy poverty, to try to support them in insulating their homes to bring them up to the highest possible insulation standard. I think we all agree that people in local authority homes across the country do need to see this investment. However, in the case of Galway County Council, its application for funding for local authority houses was only partly approved, because the Department advised it that it would only fund local authority houses that were in an an estate containing a mix of both council and private houses. Where it was exclusively a local authority housing estate with local authority tenants in it, they were automatically excluded from this retrofit programme. Rural local authority houses were also excluded. I have already made the argument to the Minister that people living in rural areas are disproportionately impacted upon by carbon taxes in the structure that exists. Local authority tenants living in rural houses were deliberately excluded from having the retrofit carried out to their particular homes. Therefore on one hand we are saying that we are targeting the most vulnerable, then we are excluding the most vulnerable. That is wrong, and not just in relation to this issue. This is an approach that has been taken by Departments of housing and local government, and local authorities across the country for years, where previous retrofit programmes deliberately excluded anyone that was in arrears. In many cases, they were the people who were struggling to pay their energy bills yet they were put to the back of the queue in terms of having any upgrade carried out on their homes. Again now, we are seeing that those living in rural areas, who are the most rurally isolated deprived families in the country, are being deliberately excluded by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, in terms of having the retrofit carried out on their homes, and when we are talking about housing estates that contain exclusively local authority tenants.

I asked the Minister a question about how much of the €27 million in carbon tax that is to be collected from farmers is going to be put back into schemes to reduce the carbon footprint in respect of agriculture. There is not any, because those initiatives are not there at the moment, yet we are taxing that particular cohort of the population. I think the Minister is being a bit disingenuous about what I have said on the issue of incremental jumps in carbon tax. The Minister knows well what I am talking about because I have put it in writing to him, I have articulated it to him and I have put it to the committee prior to this occasion. What I am talking about is introducing a completely different structure to carbon tax, and bringing it in on an incremental basis. I accept that we need to have environmental taxes, but the core principle behind environmental taxes is that they should not bring in revenue, rather, they should be revenue neutral and should motivate people to actually change. That is what environmental taxes are supposed to be about, instead of a confrontational approach. For example, if we use targeted investment, we have an opportunity to actually reduce the carbon tax which motorists pay on diesel by up to 50%, as well as dealing with the problem that we have in respect of waste oils. It is possible to blend renewable oils such as hydrotreated vegetable oils at a rate of 50% into our existing diesel that is used in transport and the agricultural sector, and there does not have to be any alteration to the existing vehicles. That would slash the amount of carbon tax by 50% that people are actually paying in those sectors, which are two of the most difficult sectors to deal with. We need to introduce a taxation model in this country that actually suits the Irish situation; we should not just copy and paste the models coming from Europe. The carbon tax model that we are implementing here will work very well in continental Europe, where there are high densities of population very close to public transport in urban areas. In Ireland, 37% of the population lives on 96% of the landmass of the country, which is the most dispersed rural population in Europe, so we need to introduce carbon and environmental taxes here that reflect the type of society and economy that we have, bringing about real change, rather than increasing revenue to the Exchequer.