Mr. Neil Walker:

That is understood. There are five questions and I may not respond to them in the order asked. First, the Deputy spoke about damage, which is really the cost of adaptation. Most of the pollution is being done in the developed world and most of the damage is being done in the Third World. That is an issue of climate justice, on which I feel very strongly. Within Europe there are issues relating to flooding, coastal defence, etc. However, I do not claim to have any expertise in the mitigation costs of that. Globally, the Stern review has shown that the cost of mitigation should be cheaper than the cost of adaptation, but I cannot say whether that also pertains to one EU member state.

I agree on the need for a vision, which is why it makes sense to have a national roadmap. However, it must also adhere to European policy and cannot be a stand-alone national vision. On the issue of whether central roadmaps should inform the national roadmap, it will be a two-way flow.

Do I believe that the target for Ireland was scientifically reached? As I have previously outlined, the European Commission runs a model called PRIMES which is run by the University of Athens. It is similar to the TIMES model which Dr. Ó Gallachóir runs. A model is only as good as the numbers on which it runs and it is an engineering technical model. It is an optimisation model in Dr. Ó Gallachóir's case and a simulation model in the Commission's case. Having come up with a solution that was supposedly equimarginal - that is efficient - because nobody was asked to be able to do something at a higher marginal cost than everybody else, they then adjusted the targets for purposes of social cohesion. The target we have is not purely the result of science.

At a global level a scientific reduction is required because the environment only cares about global emissions. High-level international politics at the UN then decides the share that is being carried by the EU. Negotiations in Brussels then determine the share of individual member states and that is partly on economics and partly on social grounds. We ended up with the toughest target by far, partly because the modelling is questionable and partly because we were perceived to be a rich country - we got landed with our target based on 2006 GDP.

We need targets but we have loads of targets. Between now and 2020 for each year there is a trajectory for the ETS which is EU-wide. There is a trajectory for the non-ETS sector. There is a requirement to move towards the use of 10% of renewable sources of energy in transport. That is qualified by a target related to indirect land use change. There is a target for overall renewable sources of energy and there is a target for annual improvements in energy efficiency. That makes 48 targets.

We could put a reference to targets in the Bill, which we suggested to the former Minister, Mr. Gormley, more than two years ago. In order to get broad support for his Bill, all he had to do was to say that the purpose of the Bill was to enable Ireland to meet, at a minimum, its legally binding obligations under the EU climate and energy legislation.

However, this is not purely about energy policy. The climate-change working group covers not just energy policy, but also environment policy so it feeds into two broad policy committees. I believe every member of the Irish Corporate Leaders is a member of IBEC and most of them are represented on those policy committees. If there really was a stark disagreement between the two positions, it would have surfaced in our discussions.