Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will not dwell on the point I made on Committee Stage. I want to pick up on two things the Minister of State said. He said rural Ireland is not desolate. The competitive funds provided by the rural and urban regeneration schemes encourage communities to come forward with innovative ideas, and they are very positive. The difficulty is that the vast majority of people living in rural Ireland have to commute long distances to get to work, something about which Deputy Kenny spoke earlier. People in my constituency have to travel long distances to get to work.

If we are going to deal with the challenges of congestion and housing in Dublin city, we must recognise that we can never build enough houses to meet demand. We need to bring about balance. The Government is doing that through the incentives it is providing and so forth, and that needs to continue.

I am glad the Minister of State brought up the issue of methane. It is not subject to carbon tax, despite the Citizens' Assembly recommending that it should be. I do not believe it should be. We need to examine seriously the issue of carbon leakage because of the European accounting structure for carbon.

We are penalising agricultural production in Ireland. What is produced in the agricultural sector here feeds the European Union. We are trying to shut down the sector and import products from an alternative source in South America, where people are being moved off the land. That is bringing about a devastating impact on the climate and destroying the lungs of the globe in the Amazon basin. We need to look again at how we calculate and treat methane emissions.

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