Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I support carbon taxes as a concept. In fact I support them as more than a concept. I was a member of the Government in 2013 that introduced and legislated for carbon taxes in Ireland, something which, interestingly enough, was opposed by people who are now calling for it. We took a decision as a Government, for a particular reason, not to increase the carbon tax in this budget. It is important to bear in mind what carbon tax means. It means increasing the prices of diesel, petrol, home heating oil, solid fuel such as a bag of coal, electricity and natural gas. What we have seen in particular over the past couple of months is rising energy prices as a result of international factors. The price of a barrel of oil has gone up. As anyone will say, the cost of energy, the cost of filling one's tank with home heating oil and the cost of paying one's electric bill have gone up anyway in the past couple of months. We project it will continue to rise over the next couple of months, even without a carbon tax. I am also conscious that this has been a bad year for farmers and, therefore, a difficult year in rural Ireland, including places such as Clare. I am also conscious that Brexit is coming and that it could have an impact on our haulage industry. Having a carbon tax with carve-outs for agriculture and haulage makes a nonsense of a carbon tax because agriculture and haulage are responsible for so much of the emissions. We decided on this occasion to pursue other green taxes. For example, we have increased VRT on diesel vehicles because we want to discourage people from buying them. A big error was made in green taxation by a previous Government, which thought that encouraging people to buy diesel cars would be good for the environment and for health. It was not. We now know that diesel cars in cities do as much damage to the environment and produce as much CO2 as petrol cars. We know that diesel cars damage people's health because of SOx and NOx emissions. That is what happens when a Government gets green taxes wrong. A previous Government did that. We took a decision to do something to reverse that in this budget by making it more expensive to buy new diesel cars. I have explained the reasons why we did not think it was appropriate on this occasion to increase the carbon tax because the prices of all of those things have already risen dramatically in the past two months and are likely to rise in the next few months even without a carbon tax.

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