Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Chairman, what might be helpful is the ETS has been in place for a number of years now. It is the European carbon budgeting. It sets targets for a number of sectors. Some of them the Chairman will be familiar with, like the 2020 targets we have missed and in terms of renewables. It might be useful to give a sense of the ETS and how these proposals mean to change that. From the environment committee, some of what they were doing is saying individual countries have a competency in relation to transport and buildings and we collect carbon tax for that but in the future, based on these proposals, Europe is going to collect that. Maybe the officials can give us a sense of that.