Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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I accept that for farmers who have a tax liability the changes made in 2012 will benefit them. I do not dispute this but the fact is that a very large proportion of farmers in this country do not have a tax liability because they are making very little, if nothing, from their farms at present. The reliefs are all well and good but farmers cannot access them unless they actually have a liability to pay tax in the first place. This is part of the problem.

I will go into greater detail later but I am arguing against an incremental increase in carbon tax on an annual basis. The Minister needs to do it on a step-change basis and I said this to him when I was in my previous role as Minister with responsibility for the environment. With incremental slow change, people will absorb the tax rather than act upon it. It will not bring about the type of motivational change needed. If the Minister did it in big blocks of changes every three or four years, it would act as a much bigger motivator. I will come back to this point later. I do not want to dwell on it now.

The Minister said the objective behind the carbon tax is that it will be ring-fenced to be used to lower the use of carbon throughout the economy. I welcome this principle. The difficulty is that €27 million will be collected from the agricultural sector in 2021 in carbon taxes and none of this money will be put back into lowering carbon usage in the agricultural sector. This is the difficulty I have. The tools, mechanisms and vehicles are not there as of yet. The point I am making is that we should not be taxing a sector when alternatives are not available.

We are taxing farmers and investing the revenue in diesel hybrid buses in the city of Dublin when we should be going for zero emission buses, an argument I had in the past with the Minister and the previous Minister with responsibility for transport. I fundamentally disagree with the idea of diesel hybrid buses. Regardless, we are subsidising diesel in Dublin Bus but using taxes on the agricultural sector, where there is not an alternative available, to fund this investment. That is fundamentally wrong and it is why I am opposed to the approach being taken.