Vincent P Martin (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach Gníomhach. I begin by welcoming the Minister of State to the Chamber and by commending Senator Garvey for leading out on this issue. It is enthusiastically supported, as one might imagine, by Senators Pauline O'Reilly, the Minister of State, Senator Hackett, and myself. We have been campaigning to seek positive inroads for many a long year on this and today, hopefully, could be a day of bright, new, encouraging news but I will wait to hear what the Minister of State has to say.

Senator Garvey has spoken of 3 million plastic bottles being purchased on a daily basis. The statistics are compelling and glaring. That works out, from the most reliable statistics we have, at 21 million bottles per week, which comes in at approximately 1 billion per year. Irish consumers spent more than €76.5 million on bottled water in the past year because it is often bought in bigger containers than, for example, soft drinks. That accounts for the consumption level. More than 152 million litres of bottled water were sold in 2016 where just under 138 million litres of soft drinks were sold in the same year. It takes three times as much water to produce a litre of bottled water than to provide drinking water in taps.

Programmes for Government are important and the programme for Government was negotiated, it seems, a long time ago back in 2020. It was agreed in that programme, and I know the Minister of State is aware of this, that, "We will develop a scheme between the local authorities and Irish Water to provide drinking water fountains nationwide to reduce plastic bottle litter" and that we would, "Phase out the use of single plastics." Our intention in that programme was also "to introduce a deposit-and-return scheme for plastic bottles and aluminium cans, in line with the findings of the recently commissioned report." We should stand as a Green Party proudly accountable on all three of these commitments in the lifetime of this Government. It is our intention to get these commitments over the line.

In my hometown of Naas, we have opened a beautiful vibrant farmers market on a Saturday morning. Phase 2 will happen very soon and is to have a water fountain. That will be made a little bit easier after the success of today.

I conclude by saying that in Naas, we had the reverse vending machine trial period. I will be bringing down the Minister of State, Deputy Ossian Smyth, for a public meeting when we will reveal the full statistics as part of that. In one town alone in less than ten months over 1.3 million containers went through that machine. It is good to render these containers to a safe place but, ideally, we do not want the 100,000 bottles and the 100,000 aluminium cans going through that machine. Ideally, we would like to phase out plastic altogether because so much of it is causing marine pollution and I believe only 28% of it actually finds its way safely towards being recycled. That is such a small statistic where the rest of it, as single-use plastic, is a scourge which we want to tackle. We want to translate words into action. The Green Party means business on this. This was a big issue with us going into government and I will be more than quietly confident that during the full lifetime of this Government we will have achieved the ticking of those boxes, will have translated words into action when it really matters, and will have a results-based performance in government, with the Green Party as part of this coalition Government.Go raibh maith agat. I will hand over now, with the leave of the House, to my colleague Senator Pauline O'Reilly.