John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is a comprehensive answer. I liked the reference made. We all knew that initially equality budgeting related to gender and it then spread out to areas like disability.

Interestingly, this morning at the Committee on Budgetary Oversight, we had an interesting paper from the OECD which referred to some of our tax incentives around the area of climate action. Retrofitting and even the incentives for the purchase of e-cars are actually quite regressive. This is a view I have heard for a while, namely, that many of the incentives favour those people who have relatively positive incomes and savings. For example, when retrofitting a house, people need to have substantial savings before they can take advantage of the grants. The grants are generous but in order to take advantage of them, one must have substantial savings. Similarly, with the bike-to-work scheme for e-bikes, they are an expensive piece of kit and the tax incentive is generous but people need to have a lot of cash in hand in order to purchase them. This is another aspect we need to start considering for budgetary and taxation policy.

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