Mr. Joseph Curtin:

If I may, I wish to add a brief comment on the question Mr. Barry O'Flynn posed in his address. He asked about the right target for Ireland. There is an assumption that if we were to consider a 2050 target it would be an 80% target in line with what the United Kingdom, Germany and other countries have done. I addressed that question in the NESC paper recently published, which suggests that an 80% target might not be the target for Ireland. For example, if we took a global justice approach and took account of a demographic increase in the Irish population in the period to 2050, and everybody was allocated a per capita target, Ireland's target might be less because we have a faster-growing population. If cost effectiveness at EU level was taken into account, our target might be less because we have a huge number of emissions from the agricultural sector.

I agree with Mr. O'Flynn that this issue is often overlooked in the debate. We have this knee-jerk assumption that the correct target for Ireland, if we were to go down the route of setting a 2050 target, would be an 80% reduction. I agree the analysis has not been done, with the exception of the NESC paper I drafted. There is a little bit of self-promotion in that statement but I believe we need to examine what would be the correct target for Ireland. We do not need to assume our target would be in line with those of other countries. Why should our target be the same as Germany or the UK? We must examine the reason we would set a target, and the criteria for setting a target. If the Bill will have a 2050 vision, we then need to examine what that target might be.