Marcella Corcoran Kennedy (Offaly, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The first recommendation of the Citizens' Assembly was to resource a new or existing independent body and enable it to penalise the State for not meeting its targets. What are the views of the witnesses on this? Professor Fitzgerald and his colleagues were against it and did not think it would work very well. I asked them whether we should take a whole-of-Government or whole-of-society approach with cross-departmental and cross-sectoral responsibility. I referred to the Healthy Ireland agenda, which uses this model. I asked whether it was something we should look at from the Department of the Taoiseach all the way to communities, whereby we get information out on the actions on climate change rather than having another agency using a stick to whip everybody into line.