Neale Richmond (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am extremely grateful to Senator Conway for raising this issue. He is absolutely right in saying that today is a great day. There is not a Member of these Houses who has not been calling for a proper deposit return scheme for years.It has been the subject of motions at every political party's conferences, Ard-Fheiseanna and youth conferences for years. It seemed like a common-sense thing but it sadly took too long to bring in. However, it is in now. Today is a good day. It is a good day for the environment and for the budding entrepreneurs who might do a bit of litter picking in their communities.

As Senator Conway has rightly said, this issue has been a topic of discussion at the retail forum, which I chair, a number of times. We had Re-Turn attend to provide an overview of the deposit return scheme process and to answer queries from members, including retail representative bodies of all sizes. While it is great to see that 84% of Irish people are positive about the scheme, we need to help retailers meet these costs. Supports from Re-Turn are in place for small businesses in the form of reduced or waived fees, financial assistance and exemptions. All retailers receive a handling fee for each container they take back. Handling fees are intended to offset the cost of collection, infrastructure, retail floor space, staff and security. In addition to handling fees, several other supports from Re-Turn are in place to assist small retailers, including exemptions from takeback services and financial support for the installation of a reverse vending machine.

After engagement with retailers on this matter, my Department made a case, as part of our budget submission last year, to have reverse vending machines included in the advance capital allowance scheme as we believed this would make a great difference in helping retailers take part in the scheme. It is understood that this was not possible this year due to the scheme not meeting the definition of energy efficiency required to qualify for the EEE scheme. I underline that this is extremely disappointing to me, to my ministerial colleagues in the Department, to the Senator himself and to the retailers we are all speaking on behalf of. Any further legislative change would need to be legislated for through budget 2025 and the finance Bill 2024. We are working on this consistently. My officials are engaging with both the Department of Finance and the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications to advance it. We want to help retailers avail of this scheme for their own sake as well as for the sake of their customers. Now that we have this brilliant scheme up and running, we can see how well it will work. It is important to see it spread out to small retailers, the likes of which Senator Conway was once upon a time.