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The Department of Finance hopes the new plastic bag tax will yield £4 million a year over the next 4 years. If each bag costs 15 pence and the Executive receives all the proceeds I reckon we would have to buy 26 million bags each year to provide the required amount of revenue.

Predictably the new tax was welcomed by Sinn Fein's Daithi McKay who had The NI Independent Retail Trade Association wants a meeting with the Environment Minister Edwin Poots to discuss the practicalities of the proposal.

The move has also been welcomed by the South Down Green councillor Cadogan Enright. Mr Enright says that for the past five years Green activists have been collecting plastic bags from the hedges around Lecale and Downpatrick and posting them off to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in London as a protest at the UK not copying the Irish Republic's scheme. Councillor Enright argues that "the Republic has shown that people will go back to old pre-disposable ways if given a chance - so must we".

So if you spot George Osborne carrying a bag from a Downpatrick grocers you know where he got it from.

Cadogan Enright is currently contesting the leadership of the local Green party. His opponent is the former Green Euro candidate Steven Agnew. I bumped into Steven Agnew in the Stormont canteen the other day and asked him when the new leader would be anointed. He told me the party should have the result this month, but won't announce it until January in recognition that Christmas is a quiet time so far as local politics is concerned. As Tom Petty once put it, "the waiting is the hardest part".

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