Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We have reduced infringements from 19 to ten. This includes issues like environmental impact assessments of farms and septic tanks. We were fined up to €5 million in respect of those two issues and paid those fines. Those cases are now closed so there will be no further activity on those files. We are working through others which are at various levels of development with the Commission. Some are at a reasoned opinion stage. We hope that we do not have to go to court and are very active on all the files to ensure this does not happen. Some of them affect our Department while others affect the Departments of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, and Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. We are co-ordinating our responses to the Commission across the three Departments at all times to make sure none of those cases is elevated to the stage where we end up in the courts and are subject to fines.

In respect of the climate change discussions, all roads lead to Paris in 2015. Inevitably, there was an element of "let's wait for the next day" in Warsaw in respect of making more substantial progress than was made in Warsaw. Nevertheless, the process was agreed in Warsaw where people will make commitments in respect of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We have agreed how they are going to make those commitments, how they can be open and transparent in the way they are made and that they can be evaluated and analysed by member states in advance of Paris. Warsaw was seen as a staging post along the way to Paris. I am sure the next round in Lima in Peru will be the same. Gradually and slowly, progress is being made towards getting larger countries involved in the process. The European Union only deals with 14% of the greenhouse gas emissions. Countries like China, the US, India and Brazil need to be brought to the table more assertively and they are slowly being brought to the table, particularly the US.

The sectoral road maps and national road maps will feed into each other.

We are particularly interested in agriculture, transport, energy and building regulations. I have had very good meetings with the Ministers for Agriculture, Food and the Marine; Transport, Tourism and Sport, and Communications, Energy and Natural Resources in recent times. We have set up a process to get technical back up from the ESRI and UCC in order to ensure whatever comes through is robust and will help the strategic analysis of the draft national roadmaps. Work in this regard is progressing and I expect that a number of initiatives will be implemented in the coming months. Once we complete the sectoral roadmaps we will have them evaluated with the help of our technical experts. We will be able to revise our climate Bill in line with the recommendations of this committee. I have already signalled the changes I am prepared to introduce in this regard. I intend to proceed with the establishment of the expert group on an interim basis because we need to make the expertise of certain individuals available to my Department and this committee for the purpose of completing our deliberations.

I emphasise that the challenges are significant. The 2020 targets at EU level, to which Ireland subscribes by law, are ambitious and will create challenges for various sectors. We will have to meet the targets, however, or we will again be brought before the European Court of Justice and subjected to fines.

The emissions trading scheme for the aviation sector is difficult not just for the industry but also from the point of view of consumers. There is no point in the European Union standing alone with a solution to the aviation issue that does not involve the big players in the sector globally. The International Civil Aviation Organisation, ICAO, assembly has made progress in this regard. I hope a global agreement will be reached with the help of the European Commission, which is at the progressive end of the ambitions for these matters. Most of the European proposals can be seen as reasonable and should be adopted by some of the major countries. Major difficulties have arisen during 2013 on reaching agreement on aviation and reducing emissions. Technology has to come into play and consumers do not want to pay any more than they have to for their flights. The agreement must be on a global basis rather than among individual EU member states if we are not to be at a competitive disadvantage.