Dr. John O'Neill:

The Deputy raised a wide range of issues. To take up the matter of joined-up thinking, the current position, which is underpinned by legislation since last year, is to have a whole-of-government approach in terms of how we plan for mitigation and in making sure that all the relevant sectors contribute towards the national mitigation plan. As I mentioned earlier, the key part of that will be trying to align policies within that national plan to ensure that the plan is coherent and is relevant to the targets at EU level and our broad overall commitments under the Paris Agreement. This is challenging. There is no getting away from that. It raises the questions that were raised here earlier. It will raise questions for the Government in terms of the choices it must make in policies and measures into the future and in terms of the fiscal space, to use that term, with regard to how certain policies and measures get funded to the exclusion, perhaps, of other measures in different sectors that do not get funded, be they in education, health and so forth. The key thing was to try and mainstream climate into all the different policies we are looking at, so all the policies brought forward by the different Departments and sectors are examined from the point of view of climate, and that the national mitigation plan would reflect that in a co-ordinated way.