Professor Peadar Kirby:

The focus on the national advisory group is the top level advice to the Government. The Deputy rightly said that is internal. It is internal to the governance process.

I would see the external part - which is vital - as the actions the Government will take on foot of the advice it gets. We need decisive government action in this regard, to bring to the attention of citizens the huge challenges we face. Citizens must be informed these are challenges facing all of us, but it is important these are not framed as a series of awful threats. There are also opportunities here, for example, to clean up our environment and to live less hectic lives. Of course, this involves change to things we take for granted. I agree the message to society is just as important as the message to government, but it is for the Government to act on that. Whether anything can be included in the Bill in this regard is up to you, the legislators. It seems to me it would be possible to make the point somewhere in the Bill regarding government actions for society. I mentioned in my submission the need to balance a low carbon economy with a low carbon society and I mentioned this precisely for these reasons. This is not just a challenge for restructuring the economy, which it is, but also for how any of us live our lives as citizens. Both these dimensions interact with each other and must be taken into account.

On the sectoral plans, these are an interesting way of advancing. These should go hand in hand with targets and should not be seen as a substitute for them. There is a danger, in light of the NESC report, they might be seen as a substitute. I totally agree that we need an emphasis, in terms of our broad plans, on a society of greater equality. In other words, we need to share the burden equally. There is plenty of research, including Irish research, which indicates that the people who suffer most are the people less able to carry the burden. In other words, the costs of climate change are much higher for poorer sectors of the population than for better off sectors. The equality dimension needs to be built into our planning, but as this is a sociological issue we need the involvement of sociological experts.

The final question related to how we can square the circle in terms of our agricultural production. This is a huge challenge for Ireland. In Ireland there are three major areas where we face enormous challenges - construction, mobility and agriculture. The agriculture area poses the most severe challenge. We need to get the agricultural experts to acknowledge that much of the planning that has gone on for agricultural development in this society, the Horizon 2020 plan in particular, is premised upon increasing emissions. Therefore, there is a clash between two areas of public policy. We need to highlight this and to make planners realise that we are dealing with issues of such gravity that we cannot afford to fluff on them. We need to be consistent and must have agricultural planning that is consistent with the roadmap promised in this legislation to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.