Mr. Michael Ewing:

I will give a brief introduction to the environmental pillar and how it has engaged at local and national levels over the past four to five years. The pillar has 27 members, all of which are national environmental organisations.

There are approximately 40,000 individual members of these organisations. We focus on sustainability and were established originally by an Act in April 2009. That is our general background.

We nominate to a wide range of bodies and all of our nominees go through a selection process. They report back to local organisations and the environmental pillar. We provide training. We have very few resources, but we train our local representatives as much as we can because it is really important that they understand the processes in which they are engaged and the messages they are carrying. The local representatives form local networks based on the local authority areas in which they are nominated.

We nominate to a number of international bodies. They include the National Economic and Social Council, NESC, and the European Economic and Social Committee, on which Mr. Cillian Lohan represents the Government. He was nominated by it rather than us, although we obviously recommended him. We have representatives on a range of bodies dealing with housing, forestry, the marine and pretty much every area one could think of. Most recently, I was nominated to the working group on active citizenship and local government which was set up by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Phil Hogan, in recent months.

At local level we have 172 nominees to county development boards, SPCs and the boards of integrated local government companies and partnership companies. We are very much engaged at local level in a very active way. All of the nominees operate in a voluntary capacity; none receives any payment for his or her work. Nominees do it because of a love of their community and the need to protect the environment and develop communities in a sustainable fashion.

We nominate to SPCs in addition to the environment SPCs, including 12 economic SPCs. This is particularly relevant in terms of the new SPCs. We have 20 people nominated to development SPCs. We have been engaged very closely in local development through the nominees for the past four or five years, that is, since our foundation. It is, therefore, not new to us to talk about economic and development issues. In fact, it is part of our bread and butter. We work with all strands of society for the well-being of people in general, not just the current generation but also future generations. That is the background to what we do.

Society relies on clean air, fresh water and healthy soils. These are fundamental to our living as human beings. That is the background to all of our decision-making and engagement. Whatever we do has to be on the basis of these fundamental supports for life. This is related to sustainability. Essentially, sustainability thrives in an economy in equilibrium with basic ecological support systems. I refer to phenomena including clean water. Without these support systems, the economy is destroyed and cannot operate, nor can society.

Very much to the fore is the limit of growth. We are seeing the limits associated with the raw materials used by industry and limits to the availability of water and land. We need to do something about it and engage with the problems. The environmental pillar is at the forefront in trying to do so and we are working with our partners in the social and economic sectors.

I have a diagram that encapsulates our belief system within the environmental pillar. We believe human beings came from the environment originally. We belong to the environment and it is something on which we fundamentally rely. Our society was built out of that environment and in the context of that environment. We then created the economy as a way of dealing with each other in terms of trading goods. The economy is a creation and can be changed. We can amend it to suit our needs as a society. Our environment is fundamental. We can change it, but we are doing so only for the worse. These are issues that need to be addressed very closely.

The concept of a greening economy is very relevant to local development. Let me give an example of how the Department proposed to engage at national level in addition to local level. We joined NESC in 2011. Prior to that, NESC had produced a report on the economic crisis entitled, Ireland's Five-Point Crisis. This document was extremely well written, but it did not connect with the concept of sustainability. It left the issues relating to bad planning and the series of mistakes made through not including environmental concerns in the thinking process. This very morning NESC produced a new document looking back over the past five years and reflecting on the original document. It includes a series of new ideas that essentially came from the environmental pillar and, therefore, informed the thinking of national government. The new ideas concern greening the economy and turning it into a sustainable one based on the understanding that social, economic and environmental issues go together. NESC's new paper is entitled, Ireland's Five-Part Crisis, Five Years On: Deepening Reform and Institutional Innovation. We are very much in the picture with this and engaged with it nationally and locally. Innovation is part of the game as far as sustainability is concerned. Sustainability will drive innovation in the new economy for Ireland. We very much believe in development, including the development of a sustainable and innovative society for the future.

NESC has ongoing work on the energy strategy. We are engaged with it and the role of data in greening the economy. In the document published today the social partners and the independent representatives - 30 people in total, including Secretaries General of various Departments - have agreed that this is a model that would really work for Ireland in the future. It is a model we generally support. It is actually a very well thought out idea of how the future of Ireland should be mapped out. It operates at all levels of society. The connection between sustainability, the environment, the economy and society is fully mapped out in the document. We have supported its publication and analysis.

Mr. Lohan will talk a little about greening the economy.