Mr. John McCarthy:

I will loop back to the rates issue before dealing with the questions on waste. It is important to bear in mind that the 2015 percentages are estimated on the basis of budgets and may not be the correct final figure. I suspect there is an element of economic buoyancy in the figures, to the extent that there has been a pick-up in economic activity with new businesses establishing. There was some analysis done of the 2012 rates income and from memory, 80% of businesses that paid rates in 2012 in the Dublin City Council area had a rates bill of less than €5,000 per annum. That means there is a smaller number of larger entities that are paying a very significant amount in commercial rates. As the Deputy said himself, part of the change in the percentage is explained by the fact that revenue from other sources has been contracting. That said, in overall terms, the rate of commercial rates levied has not increased for four or five years, with only one or two exceptions. In a few cases, the rates actually came down.

The 2013 overall national report is publicly available and we will send on a copy to the committee. It is on our website and is a very useful platform for us. We take it as a baseline document for guiding some of our engagements with local authorities on the financial side of things as we progress through the year. We will certainly make a copy of that report available to the Deputy. In terms of the extent to which waste is going abroad, it is not so much for landfill but primarily for energy recovery. It is going into cement kilns or thermal treatment facilities.

That is not a sustainable way to deal with our waste from two points of view. First, the potential for recovering energy is lost to us.