Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am listening with great interest so it is easy to be patient, in the circumstances. I had originally put my hand up to come in about obsolescence because I had forgotten to mention it the first time around, and Deputy Devlin mentioned it, as did Senator Higgins. There must be a lot of scope in consumer protection. It seems some of the failures and some of the cases that have failed are around proving that the materials used were going to become obsolete, as opposed to really looking at the length of warranties and what can be done there, so we are actually putting the onus for innovation onto the companies if it is the case that the rights sit with the consumer.

I thought the point made by Ms O'Brien in regard to leasing was an interesting one. We spoke a lot last week about the sharing economy, which has not really come up today. This is something I passionately believe can develop and can also build community, because we do not need to own everything and we actually use most things very rarely. If we look around our houses, they are stuffed to the gills with things we might use once a year, for example, something to take the air out of a radiator. I brought up the example of a shovel last week because I rarely use a shovel, but I have one. There seems to be no overall policy around developing an app or something in the digital sphere to develop a sharing economy because we need a large number of people using it for this to develop. Any thoughts the witnesses might have or any international comparators would be very useful.

The final important point relating to the circular economy is rainwater harvesting. I do not know if this is the place to bring it up but if we are not to discuss it now, we need to find a place to discuss it because, in consumption generally and in manufacturing, water is one of the great by-products that we dump, yet we do little rainwater harvesting here considering the volume of rain we have. I think it is ripe for development.