Ms Marie Donnelly:

I want to wrap up with a more general approach to the comments the Deputy has raised, both in terms of taxation and what is our policy on scrappage in its widest sense. Ultimately, what we have to achieve is demand reduction in transport, which is part and parcel of the policies. It is an area currently being developed further and it is the one that we absolutely need to achieve. It is one that will deliver initial reductions, which is what we are particularly interested in, but it will also deliver a service to the community and our society. Some of that is by facilitation. We need to make public transport available, we need to make safe cycling lanes available and we need to have pleasant pedestrian walks available so people will make those choices because they will be the obvious and logical choices to make.

There will also be a necessity, shall we say, for push-pull. I would go back to the parking comment that I made earlier. The Finance Act provided for a levy for urban parking, but it was never implemented and I am not sure why. For people who have a car park available to them as part of their job, while it varies, of course, on average that is €20 a day, €100 a week or €5,000 a year. We are not saying we should take the car away from people but if they are getting €5,000 a year of parking, it is not an outrageous suggestion to say they should pay a levy for that parking, and that funding should be used to further invest in the alternative options that are available. It is a choice. It is a push-pull mechanism. It is one that is already on the books in our system in Ireland and it just needs to be implemented.

I go back to my earlier comment. We have plans and the plans are good. We talk about actions that will deliver results. The difficulty we have is that we are not sanctioning those actions fast enough. We have to be much faster in implementing and rolling out the plans we are talking about. We need to take things from paper and put them into reality as quickly as possible. That is the urgency that we face. That is the only way we will stay within the carbon budget both for 2025 and, ultimately, for 2030 and beyond.