Seán Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

With respect, this is one example of the lack of direction in this budget. We do not know where we are going. The people hit by this are those who commute the most and commercial enterprises. We are driving up costs again. As my colleagues said, we went to the trouble of establishing an Oireachtas Joint Committee on Climate Change and Energy Security. The Greens boasted that they were instrumental in the setting up of this committee, but at every hand's turn we do the direct opposite to try to deal with the issues at hand. Transport is one of the greatest emitters of CO2. Rather than encouraging people to use diesel instead of petrol we raise the cost. There is no attempt to meet the targets we set for ourselves and which are being set for us. We are going to find ourselves spending hundreds of millions of euro on fines for not meeting our targets.

If this were part of a plan I could understand it, but I wish we would stop wasting our time and not pretend we are trying to do something about CO2 emissions. We should lead by example. An all-party committee went to the trouble of producing a Bill on offshore renewable energy. We launched it nearly two months ago and have not heard a dickie bird since from the Government. An all-party committee produced a piece of legislation to modernise-----

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