Mr. David Owens:

Sure. The taxonomy is just getting to biodiversity, so a technical standard has been published under the delegated Act. Basically, the Council and Parliament allow the Commission to define in this delegated Act the technical aspects of it. That has not been adopted yet. It is very detailed. We have not looked at biodiversity in and of itself. The taxonomy, as the Cathaoirleach knows, covers six things, namely, adaptation, mitigation, biodiversity, the circular economy, waste and pollution, and water. In a way in the taxonomy, biodiversity is not given top priority. It is a factor. It is in there in the corporate sustainability reporting directive, CSRD, that was being referred to earlier and in the work we and our sister Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform have to do to try to look at aligning budgets towards the taxonomy over time. It simply has not come in yet because it is not fully defined in the taxonomy. However, it is a recognised factor, not least due to the work done by the citizens' assembly. The recommendation that came from the assembly that wants the Department to take a look at the tax system from that point of view is something I feel this committee is likely to recommend, and we will then consider how best to do that.

The measurement issue raised in the earlier session is very real as is how many different aspects we would need to try to put into the hopper and bring down, and have brought to bear on individual taxation. We do green tax analysis. It is published as part of the budget each year. We tag different tax expenditures and taxes as being green or otherwise.

I would say that is a pretty good proxy for whether they would be positive or negative for biodiversity. Again, we would need to look at it with a different lens.