Ms Valerie Freeman:

I am not a climate change or energy expert. I am coming at this from a planning perspective and have seen what was not happening but should have been. The Deputy is absolutely right, however, to say we are balancing many different things. A former EU environment commissioner stated:

[O]ur climate mitigation policies should not come at the expense of biodiversity. We have very important targets to achieve renewable energy but we need to be careful about how and where they can be developed.

That is the critical thing we are talking about. The Deputy has raised many important questions. The 40% target is out of line with targets in other European countries as far as I know. It is an Irish target that was set.