Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

On the question of just transition and taxes, what is happening is an attempt to tax people's behaviour without making alternatives available to them. Pushing up carbon taxes for ordinary people is pushing up their heating bills. Some people have poorly insulated homes, by any standards, and cannot afford to have them retrofitted. Bringing in the taxes first, without addressing that reality, is saying to people they must change their behaviour but offering them no alternatives. Many ordinary people do not have alternatives to turning on the gas, lighting the fire or driving a diesel car up and down the roads because there is no proper public transport, particularly in rural areas. That behaviour is being taxed while, at the same time, the newspaper headlines today refer to an Irish subsidiary of Microsoft that made €315 billion in profit in this country last year but paid zero corporation tax.

Climate justice is about addressing that type of unfairness. I was standing beside Deputy Bruton outside Leinster House when he was Minister and a group of young people shouted at him "System change, not climate change". He smiled and said he agreed with them. Where is the system change in allowing Microsoft not to pay any tax on its billions in profits while more and more money is taken from the poor to heat their homes or drive a smelly old diesel car because there is no bus that will take them around their locality? Without looking at those issues, the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, is not dealing with just transition. We need to spell out what it means and have a proper definition. If not, we are feeding into climate denial. What starts with people complaining about having more money taken from them or saying this climate business is too heavy on farmers and rural communities turns into climate denial and leads to a very fractious society where we are not all in it together and are not pulling together. There needs to be a broader definition of what is meant by just transition and how we can pay our way. The axe has fallen very hard on the wrong sector.