Let's hear it for the Irish!

I want to share with you a BBC article entitled "Irish plastic bag tax set to rise". Here's how it gets started:

The country was the first in the world to introduce a so-called "plastax".

The 2002 move led to a drop from 328 plastic bags used per head to just 21 and raised millions of euros in revenue for the Irish exchequer.

The tax has remained at 15 cents per bag, but will increase to 22 cents from July. The extra money is put into various environmental projects.

Irish Environment Minister Dick Roche said the "plastax" had dramatically cut the estimated 1.2bn free plastic bags that had been given out by shops.

"This had an immediate benefit to our environment -- with a decrease in excess of 95 percent in plastic bag litter," he said in Dublin on Wednesday.

Let's also hear it for common sense. Think what we could do in this country with the money from a tax like that. And it would cause a hardship on no one. People who didn't want to pay it could always carry re-usable canvas bags.