Mr. Jean-Pierre Schweitzer:

I thank Deputy Cronin. First, the Deputy raised the point - it was in my reference statement but I did not read it out - about the own resources plastics tax from the EU. To be honest, I am quite surprised that, as far as I am aware, almost all European member states are paying this - what I consider to be an environmental levy - from their general budgets rather than charging the amount for the non-recycled plastic packaging waste to the producers or the industry linked to the products involved. It is a bit of a scandal, if you ask me. I would be interested to see member states respect the polluter pays principle for that levy.

The Right to Repair campaign, which I also did not mention in my speech, is a campaign we established in 2019 which brings together NGOs, both the one I work for but also independent repairers and repair cafe networks. I thank Deputy Cronin for raising the matter. The campaign is going well, I would say, because there is more and more attention in non-EU countries of right to repair. The biggest challenge has been to engage independent repair shops in the campaign. It is not because they are not interested, because the ones we speak to are very interested. It is actually because they struggle to have time because they really are working on such a margin. The amount of time that they can give to repairing phones and laptops and the turnaround that they have to have for a product they repair each day means they have limited time to engage in policy action. We would welcome to hear from any independent repair shops that are interested in right to repair because we are slowly building this network. We have two members in Ireland - the Rediscover Centre and Community Resources Network Ireland - and they contribute well to the project.