Barry Ward (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte riomh an Aire Stáit. It is always nice to see my Dún Laoghaire colleague in the Seanad. The issue I am raising is one I know the Minister of State is very well aware of, given he has responsibility for it and he launched a public consultation on these regulations last October, as I understand it. The difficulty I have with what is happening is that those who actually use these cups in their businesses do not really know what is happening. If you look online at the proposal that is involved here, going back to last July the BBC was reporting that this levy was coming in the next couple of months. When the draft regulations were published in October, RTÉ and other media outlets in this country were reporting that it was going to happen. It kind of came as a fait accompli, yet at his stage we do not know, for example, when it is definitely happening, although the Minister of State has said that it will be early next year or by the end of this year, and we do not know exactly what it is going to cover.

Quite apart from the impact this is going to have on businesses, the reality is that, for the most part, we are talking about small businesses. Local coffee shops, small businesses, convenience shops, supermarkets and anybody who sells a hot drink in the course of the day are all going to have to take on this 20-cent levy on a disposable cup used in that context. The chances are this is going to be passed on to the consumer. There are surveys suggesting a substantial number of people - up to a quarter of people - say they will spend less on coffee because of the imposition of this levy. That is not to say levies are not important. We know in this country that it has worked very well in the context of disposable plastic bags.

I have no difficulty with the principle behind this, but the reality is the way it is being done has created, to my mind, two problems. First of all, it is affecting small local businesses in particular, usually one-off shops. I am not talking about large chains with significant capacity to deal with the issue. Those small businesses do not have certainty about what is happening. The second difficulty and the real problem I have with this is the inconsistency of it. It only applies to hot drinks. At the same time that Missy Moops café in Dún Laoghaire will be serving a latte in a disposable cup, across the road in George's Street McDonald's will be serving a Coke in a disposable cup and with the same problems, but it will not have to pay a penny. With this levy, we are putting small businesses in a disadvantageous position relative to massive large multinationals like McDonald's on the other side of the street. There is a terrible inconsistency in this project. It is not about the principle of a levy on products that encourage us to use multiple-use products and to avoid single-use products. I do not have a problem with that. The Minister of State knows that, when I was on the council with him, I put down draft by-laws in Dún Laoghaire to ban single-use plastics. I am very much in favour of that. However, when we put in place a levy like this, we need to know it is going to work and it is not going to pitch one business against the other.

The last question I want to ask is about the actual public consultation. I understand there were 2,371 responses to it. What did they say? Did they point out these problems? Is the Government going to take on board the responses to that public consultation or was this a done deal? Is it something that was already decided? If that is the case, what was the point in having the public consultation? If the Minister of State could bring clarity to this for the businesses and the people in our local community, I would be very grateful.