Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I have limited time. The Minister can speak when he is concluding. Over the past ten years, this Government has built 500,000 houses and missed an opportunity to maximise energy conservation. Instead of implementing the EU directive on the energy rating of buildings, the Government has sought a derogation for three years. Over the past ten years, EU policy on agriculture has changed, as has the practice of agriculture. Instead of paying farmers to produce nothing, farm supports could be used to encourage and support farmers to produce the raw materials for bio-fuels. It would be better for farmers, better for the environment and better for the taxpayer. Instead of closing down the sugar factories and allowing them to be sold off to property developers, they could be converted to the production of more bio-fuels.

Why do we not have a decent grants scheme for improving the energy efficiency of homes, schools, and all our older buildings? Given the dispersed nature of our settlement pattern, why do we not use the country's roof space to capture solar energy in greater quantity? We are making some progress with wind energy, but given the size of our maritime area — we own almost ten times more sea than land — why are we not leading the world in developing wave energy?

Given the Government's apparent belief that the market is the answer to everything, why has the market not been set to work more effectively to cut down carbon emissions? Where are the tax incentives so favoured in every other area of economic endeavour? Why is there no system of green tax credits to encourage energy conservation and incentivise carbon reductions, cleaner technologies and a cleaner environment? Members can imagine what €750 million in green tax credits could achieve, but the Government intends simply to get the taxpayer to pay for its failure to get it right on Kyoto.

The carbon fund will be used to buy carbon credits from people elsewhere in the world who are too poor to put carbon into the atmosphere themselves. Taxpayers' money will be used to buy carbon credits from that quarter of the world's population who are too poor to have electricity, in order to facilitate us to continue to keep SUVs pumping out poison along the Stillorgan road. We will buy the right to have air conditioners from people who are too poor to have an electric bulb or fridge or even the food to put into it. This practice represents environmental imperialism. It is the 21st century equivalent of the practice whereby corn was shipped from our shores while people starved during the Famine. We are now the ones shipping the corn and buying up the carbon. Hunger and poverty are no less painful in Africa now than they were in Ireland 160 years ago.

The Labour Party does not oppose the Bill because we have a principled objection to the establishment of a carbon fund, but because it is almost ten years too late. While we recognise the fund as a perfectly legitimate element of the Kyoto package, it is obvious the Government intends to take advantage of it to pay for its mistakes and failures on climate change. We oppose the Bill because we want to alert the Irish people to the enormous price they will yet pay for bad and wasteful Government over the past ten years. When historians look back at today to wonder at and regret the missed opportunities, they will ask why in the best of times Ireland was cursed by a wasteful, incompetent Government which had no vision and was unable or unwilling to harness the country's economic success for the social and environmental well-being of our people. Nowhere have the Government's failures been more evident than in the crucial area of climate change.

This is the time of year when we all turn our eyes to the polar cap. While there still is a polar cap and before it melts away, and Santa has to be transported by paddling his canoe rather than by sleigh and reindeer, I take the opportunity of wishing a happy Christmas to the Minister, his officials, the Leas-Cheann Comhairle and Members of the House.

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