Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

On the carbon tax, one other thing has changed in the last week. At the Council of Ministers meeting on energy last week, the Council committed to introducing effectively a Europe-wide carbon tax on transport and home buildings. It will go up to about €50 per tonne, is what I think the Parliament recommends. It must go through negotiations with the Parliament but there is no-one expecting it will be reversed. Therefore, Europe will be going towards introducing this. It already has a carbon tax on the industrial side and it will now introduce it on the domestic and the transport side. Ireland will not be included. We get a derogation because we have already gone in that direction. However, as I said at a meeting of the transport committee yesterday, if we were to change tack by giving up on the carbon tax and not having a similar scale of measure, the first thing we would have to do is start paying the European one. Then we would not have the funding that currently comes from that to support the retrofitting of our homes, to provide targeted social welfare increases and to help small farmers out.

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