Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thought that the Deputy would give us credit for hitting every part of the roadmap that I outlined last January but I am not going to get into nitpicking about whether we hit it a week or two earlier or later. I have hit what I set out last January. The Deputy can tell the NGOs that too. I have hit every target on that roadmap. I am the first Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government to do that. We will not have an abstract discussion about these matters because we have EU legislation with which we must comply. That is legally binding. I stand over exactly what was set out on the roadmap and I have hit every milestone on it.

If some of the NGOs had been present at Doha, which they were not on this occasion, they would have noticed that the outcome there was almost a shambles but it was not because of the EU leadership. I was present at many of the meetings with the Cypriots as part of the Presidency team where we could see that we could have wound up in a difficult situation and gone backwards from the Durban platform that was agreed in 2011. One has to view this in the round. We did not go backwards. We now have a work plan under the Durban platform and a second commitment period from 2013 to 2020 agreed under Kyoto which was not easy to achieve within the EU, particularly in respect of the difficulties facing the Polish Government and other member states in eastern Europe. We brought them to a unified position which took compromise all round. Far from some of the disappointment that Deputy Kevin Humphreys expressed, it would have been far more disappointing if I was reporting failure at Doha.

We have a roadmap, if I may use that word again, from now to 2015 that will hopefully convince the Canadians, the New Zealanders, the Chinese and the Russians to come on board, and the United States to show some leadership for once and for all, given that it produces 85% of all emissions. We hope that the US will say that it is taking climate change seriously and understand the impact that it will have on the planet and the people living on it because our resources are finite.

I hope we will be able to reach agreement by 2015. I will come back to the committee on a regular basis to brief it on how we are getting on with regard to domestic and international policies. We will include all members of the committee in the communications on the meetings we will have. Everyone will be kep fully up to date.