Mr. Peter Doran:

As part of my preparations I listened very carefully to the Minister's contribution at the committee. I am puzzled. I have not been able to work out in my own mind what is the relationship between the difficulty, which is a genuine one, around land use, land-use change and forestry, LULUCF, and the agricultural methodologies and the adoption of targets. A very simple way to overcome any uncertainty around the agriculture sector would be to mandate the expert body - established perhaps in shadow form at an earlier stage - to advise post-2015. I presume some of these methodological issues will be resolved by 2015 as part of the international debate or negotiation. It would be a simple matter to devolve in part decisions about the level of ambition of targets and how the EU targets would be reflected in Irish legislation and to allow time for this to happen when the EU negotiations on burden-sharing and the US-CCC negotiations are complete. There would then be greater clarity.

Whereas the Minister talks about the need to avoid a new layer of targets, there is no reason the targets which might be reflected in the legislation eventually should not incorporate and simply reflect a calibration of existing targets, both European and future UN targets. The UK legislation includes the flexibility to revise targets, albeit in a way where the limits of that review would be prescribed.

I refer to the point argued by IBEC and suspect that there is a certain exaggeration. I understand part of IBEC's argument was the very point with which I began, that the fraught nature of these negotiations and the interaction of the sectors with the Government and the issues around burden-sharing are incredibly difficult. Climate change is, ultimately, about redesigning the entire economic system, shifting its basis from a fossil fuel design to one that will be liberated from that paradigm. The short-term calculations of business and industry can sometimes prevent us from seizing the opportunity to have a legislative design that will serve well into the future.

Given the consensus that has continued for several Governments, it would be a great shame to drop the ball by failing to press home the opportunity to have a long-term framework within the legislation. The Bill can act as a bulwark to test the intentions, capacity and good faith of IBEC, the agriculture sector and others by allowing for the establishment of an expert body with true independence and the ability to bring forward proposals to each sector in a way that would remove some of the difficult decisions from the more politicised forums in which they have been residing thus far.