Mr. Joseph Curtin:

The role of the committee, as set out in head 10, will be significant. I was pleasantly surprised to see the extent to which sectorial ministries and the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government would have to report back on the implementation of their various roadmaps and the national plan. However, I get a sense the Bill is scared of public participation. Why will the reports of the expert advisory body not be published? Is it envisaged that the Government will be embarrassed by these reporting requirements? Publishing these reports would be very basic in terms of the public accountability and the open, transparent and accountable governance citizens are increasingly demanding.

If the expert advisory body were to produce a first draft of a national roadmap, this committee could hold hearings on it with all of the sectoral interests and incorporate the feedback into the roadmap. Climate change could be one of those areas that could develop the committee system to interact with the public. The publishing and making of information available to the public is a key enabler of public participation. One weakness of the Bill is that any dissenting opinion on the Government’s policy will not be in the public domain. It is the opposite in the United Kingdom where in 2011 the climate committee published its third national roadmap for 2023, but the UK Government disagreed with it. There has been a debate with all of the sectoral interests, with, for example, the Treasury stating the roadmap would damage the United Kingdom’s economic outputs. All of this is in the public domain, which allows people to decide which group they believe. In vibrant democracies there is nothing wrong with different people disagreeing with each other in the public domain and allowing the citizen to decide whose position they support.