Dr. Geraldine Brennan:

If I might come back to that, again, in my professional capacity, I agree with the Deputy that there is a balance between, as he said, carrots and sticks. The view, I think, in industry is that the stick is coming but is not here yet and that the carrots are there to help with driving the momentum. Then, when the stick comes, if you have not figured this out from a competitive advantage perspective, there will be people who will be liable for those taxes and who will suffer and go out of business as a result.

One of the things that I think has been mooted for a very long time in academia is a shifting of taxes away from labour towards raw materials. Again, I am not an economist so I will proceed down this line with caution, but it is a matter of understanding in what ways we can incentivise through taxes the use of perhaps secondary raw materials versus virgin raw materials and understanding how we can create incentives to utilise and reduce the taxes on labour if we are trying to incentivise repair in particular. Those are ways to do this. Again, I am happy to send on some examples of these ideas in the circular economy discourse within the academic area. I refer to people such as Walter Stahel, who has spoken on RTÉ's circular economy hub.

Where this becomes challenging is always in implementation. Conceptually, it is intuitive to say we should move taxes away from labour and put them on raw materials. However, as to how that is done in the economy and the ramifications for those operators as to how those taxes are implemented, we do not want to put those businesses out of business automatically in the process. Again, this is beyond my core area of expertise, so I am just flagging it. Absolutely, there are areas that can be explored but with caution, given the fact that this is a transition.