Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with a number of my colleagues. I congratulate the Minister and wish him well in his new Department. He certainly brings a wealth of experience to it, and this House and the country will benefit significantly from that. To respond to the Minister's reference to his background and history as an economist with the ESRI, when it comes to climate change we will have to look at doing things entirely differently from how they were done in the past. The old norms that applied to the way in which the economy grew and developed and the reliance we had on staple entities within that need to change dramatically. While the Minister's experience will be helpful, we will have to turn it on its head somehow in respect of dealing with the environment and climate change. I hope he will participate in that.

I thank the Green Party for bringing this motion forward. As I stated on Second Stage of the Bill, and again at the communications committee, we will work with the Green Party, the Labour Party and others to try to bring this to fruition. While we have some slight differences regarding how it might be implemented, we agree with it in principle. We introduced a similar Bill with a great deal of detail but it was knocked at the first hurdle. We had thought it through too much and, notwithstanding new politics, it failed to get through the onerous requirements of not just the money aspect of it but also the other preventive measures the Government has in its armoury.

Earlier today I met with representatives of Trócaire to discuss the need for urgency to be injected into the debate around climate change and sustainability. It is far too easy to be paralysed by the scale of the problem or to believe that it will be addressed by somebody else. The report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, has been absolutely clear that a fundamental shift in the mindset of policy makers must take place now. It is not a problem for some future set of notional politicians, but for all of us now. Fianna Fáil recognises that Ireland must take decisive action to address it. It will require a significant shift from everyone and, in parallel, there will have to be proper sustained investment in public transport and bioenergy and biowaste production. Work is ongoing at the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Climate Action, but this report must become something tangible, which is accepted across the House and is acted upon. Every Member knows the issues that must be addressed. We need the political will to ensure that they are. The time that is wasted putting off the inevitable will only result in harsher measures in the future. That is in nobody's interest.

The Bill at the heart of this motion would form a part of that fundamental shift in thinking. There are issues in the Bill that will require additional work. Deputies Eamon Ryan and Catherine Martin are cognisant of that and from the outset have accepted the necessity to work through them. That is accepted by all sides. They can be worked through on Committee and Remaining Stages if a money message is forthcoming as a result of tonight's motion. I listened intently to the Minister and I hope that it will be forthcoming when he has concluded his detailed analytical work and accepts the new realities we face.

At the core of the Bill is a desire to address plastic waste and to reduce the levels entering landfill. This is both timely and necessary. In Ireland an estimated 983,380 tonnes of packaging waste were generated in 2015. That is about the same weight as 19 Titanicspiled on top of each other. This is unsustainable. In 1997, the Fianna Fáil-led Government set up Repak, an organisation of Irish businesses that support recycling. Since then, Ireland's recycling rates have increased dramatically, from 15% in 1998 to 66% by 2011. This was a steep change, but the results of the IPCC report show that we must go further. Recycling can only go so far and reduction must also play a role. This was part of the reason that Fianna Fáil introduced a levy on plastic bags in 2002. That policy change drastically reduced the number of plastic bags consumed in Ireland from about 328 bags per capitato 21. Indeed, McKinsey has shown how consumer goods companies can reduce overall packaging costs by 10% by making simple design changes. We must empower and encourage producers to reduce the level of plastic used to create packaging in the first place.

We must also develop and improve the circular economy. I believe that individual consumer behaviour can only go so far in reducing the volume of waste that is sent to landfill. We could have 100% compliance in recycling our recyclable waste, but this is worth little if we do not drastically cut the amount of overall waste. A major study by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2015 found that using a circular economy approach could boost Europe’s resource productivity by 3% by 2030. Far more work is needed to promote the development of this vital space.

Fianna Fáil supports the creation of a waste reduction task force which would be responsible for identifying ways to incentivise waste reduction in the public and private sectors and promote the circular economy. This will also benefit the consumer, who will not be responsible for disposing of huge amounts of unneeded packaging. Those of us who have become a little more conscious of the impact of the materials we put back into our recycling system or into our black bins have come to realise that even where one makes a concerted effort to recycle material or dispose of it appropriately, there is too much packaging associated with the products we consume. Much of this is associated with marketing techniques and we must work to reduce it. We must incentivise behavioural change among both those who design the packaging and those who purchase it.

Recent documentaries such as "Blue Planet II" and "Drowning in Plastic" have exposed the deeply distressing effects of plastic on waters and oceans that thousands of miles from land. At the current rate, there may be more plastic than fish in the ocean, by weight, by 2050. This problem is transnational and so are the solutions. However, Ireland can and should be at the forefront of ending this scourge.

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