Mr. Matt McGann:

We also published a document with an analysis of green budgeting and tax. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform had already published something on expenditure. We are in the early stages of looking at green budgeting, as are other countries. It lends itself more to expenditure than to tax. We have set out the issues with green budgeting before taxes apply. It is a green tagging system for various tax measures based on existing measures. This could be used on a per year budgetary basis to assess, as a first step, the monetary value of the greenness of the budget. The only people I have seen who are ahead of us on this are the French. They have more developed criteria. They assess the environmental effect on six criteria rather than just the monetary value. They have a four-point scale of how green a particular measure is. With regard to the tax base, even though our system is relatively rudimentary, it is one of the most advanced. The European Commission is asking us to present to other countries on what we do.