Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

There were two questions. The first related to the concentration of the corporate tax base and risks around that, and the second was on climate.

On the corporate tax side, as the Deputy will be aware, this is something we have been highlighting for a long time. As time has passed, that revenue has increased quite fast. Reliance on it has increased, not through any Government policy but because the companies in question pay more tax in Ireland on the basis that they are doing more taxable activity in Ireland. As the Deputy will be aware, we are concerned about the risks around that, as we have been for a long time. We are perhaps getting a little more certainty on the policy side of that but we are increasingly reliant on a small number of companies. That revenue can be volatile and we think we should reduce reliance. That is why we think the rainy day fund would be a good way of ring-fencing that.

In terms of the wider strategy for the economy, investing in education and infrastructure and continuing to ensure Ireland remains competitive are all very important, irrespective of what happens on the international side.

Those things might attract international companies and they may help domestic ones to develop. Encouraging the economy is good for many reasons. It provides people with good jobs. It provides additional revenue that can be used to finance increased public activities too. All that makes sense. It is not something that we look at in great detail but it is important.

On climate, we have all become much more aware in the past couple of years of the seriousness of the climate problem and the scale of the action we will need to address it. In fairness, there has been progress on that. We had a new climate action plan this year that sets sectoral targets, and the targets have been made more ambitious over the past year. There has been a lot of progress but we are still catching up. The fact that there is no assessment of the budgetary impact of climate is a serious concern. We just do not know how much it will cost. It could cost quite a lot. A big question is how much of the burden will fall on the private sector and how much on the public sector. Another issue that has not been tackled is that some of the mitigation or transition measures may impact heavily on low-income families. That might require changes to the welfare system or some kind of compensation which, again, could be very expensive. Measures such as retrofitting could be very expensive. These things just are not factored into the Government's budgetary plans because there is no overall assessment of how much it will cost. We know that some of the necessary investments are in the national development plan. It is not that it is not spending any money on this; there is a sizable commitment there. However, it is not clear how things like retrofitting and a massive switch to electric vehicles will be funded. The Government needs to make progress on that very quickly because it could be very expensive. The additional spending available under its current plans is quite narrow. Most other countries in the same position have not fully worked out how much it will cost and how it will work. The Climate Change Advisory Council's report was published earlier. As its chairman said, 2030 is tomorrow in terms of the kinds of investments and timescale of making these changes. We really do need to work on this as fast as possible. It needs to be a massive priority.