Grace O'Sullivan (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State very much for his responses thus far. With regard to his comments on innovation and losing people, as a nation we should have ambition and should not be fed by fear. We should be fed by opportunity. I would like to start with my reaction to the draft plan as it stands. In terms of our climate obligations. we are an island nation, we have an abundance of wind and waves and we have solar potential. We are not giving enough attention to our potential to secure our country in terms of energy. We have the potential and we have to write what we are going to do to secure our energy into the plan. It must be in there hard and fast and with a timeline. We must stop importing fossil fuels. We need timelines. I want to see timelines. I want to know when I will be able to say to my children that the day of fossil fuels is over in Ireland because, in 2040, we will be energy secure because we will have wind energy, solar energy, wave energy and all the innovation which the Minister of State has spoken about. We can do it but we have to have the ambition and we have to lay down timelines as to when we will deliver this. I would like to see that written into our plan so that not just ourselves, the middle-aged, but also the youth will look at this plan and get excited because they will see job opportunities, they will see where their money, as taxpayers, will go, and they will see that this plan will lead to a country which is energy secure.

We talked about transport earlier. I, too, believe that we, as a country, should be investing - hard, fast and fully - in public transport systems. There should be public transport systems which roll out from my home town, Tramore, into Waterford and then allow people to transfer onto a train or bus up to Dublin. The current system does not demonstrate joined-up thinking. If one jumps on a bus from Galway after university on a Friday, when one arrives in Limerick one will have missed the bus to Waterford by five minutes. We are not thinking strategically about how we operate our transport systems. We need our systems to link up as they do in countries such as the Netherlands. We need good, efficient, effective systems which are joined up all the way from a city, to the towns and onto the villages. We need much more integrated transport systems which will deliver public service to people and communities in the towns, the cities and the capital. It must be price effective. At the moment a bus journey for a student costs too much. We have to look at how we can achieve efficiencies of scale in terms of getting more people onto the transport systems while making such systems affordable? We need to serve not only the people who have jobs but also the people who want to travel but are curbed by the cost. We need to bring down costs for the users of the public transport systems.

On housing, we must be much more ambitious in respect of retrofitting. I know the Minister of State was working with the former Minister, Deputy Coveney, on these issues some time ago. We need to be much more ambitious in rolling out solar power to all houses. We must retrofit houses in order that they are warm and people on low incomes are not suffering from fuel poverty as we come into the winter. We must ensure that they have multiple means of warming their houses, such as through solar power or other renewable energy sources. This is all about innovation and creating jobs. We must ensure that every house, hub or whatever kind of housing we build for the people and for families is absolutely 100% energy rated and that we deliver the best for the people. On renovation and such issues, it is all about innovation. The more we scale up and the more we develop, the better the design systems will become.

That also goes for wind energy. I believe that in 2040 we will not be seeing the kind of wind turbines we see today. It will be a totally new model. There will be little wind turbines on the edges of buildings and there will be solar windows. It is all there and it is happening, but Ireland needs to jump on board the renewable energy revolution and we are not doing so. We are still stuck looking into the documents rather than looking out at the world and pulling the systems in. The environment includes the issue of healthy air. We need to have good, healthy, quality air. We need to make sure that the environment is wrapped into everything we do and wrapped into the economy.

I must talk about Waterford for one second. I am delighted to see that it was mentioned twice in the Minister of State's presentation. It is the oldest city in Ireland. We need a south-eastern technical university, as the Minister of State says, but Limerick Institute of Technology could be included as part of the university of the south east. University Hospital Waterford also needs 24-7 cardiac care and we need better services in that hospital to serve the whole of the south east.