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

I thank Professor FitzGerald and his colleagues for attending the meeting this morning. It has been a very informative and engaging session. I was struck by the reference to whether we should have a single statutory authority with teeth. Has the council considered proposing a whole-of-Government and whole-of-society approach to tackling climate change? I am very au faitwith the Healthy Ireland agenda which has taken that exact approach, whereby every Department must have Healthy Ireland policies in place. It goes from the Taoiseach's office across all Departments, through to the local authorities and into the local communities. It then filters out through sports clubs and all sorts of organisations. As it appears to be a good approach, is that something the council has recommended to the Government as part of its advisory role?

I was also thinking about how to get the message out about climate change. I have highlighted the important role Met Éireann has in this, and in its strategic plan it refers to its responsibilities and goals for getting information to the public on climate action. Would the council recommend that Met Éireann play an important role? Some other meteorological services internationally have taken innovative approaches to getting messages to citizens on this issue, be it through animated YouTube videos or through their own broadcasting services for weather reports.

Professor FitzGerald spoke about the fictitious Mrs. Murphy and we can all probably visualise such a Mrs. Murphy. I am familiar with the work the Tipperary Energy Agency does. Is that a model that could be replicated to reach the Mrs. Murphys of the country in respect of linking with the local community through the local authority and so forth?

With regard to forestry, the biggest landowners in the country are Coillte and Bord na Móna in terms of the amount of land that is available in that regard. Would the council recommend that they plant a significant amount of the area they hold with broadleaf trees? That would be a shift for Coillte because although it has some broadleaf it primarily has coniferous plantations. Bord na Móna was mentioned earlier. There is a significant shift in its strategic plans around moving away from peat. Being from County Offaly I am familiar with this and with the challenges that exist in terms of communities transitioning and coping with the massive loss of employment that has already occurred, not to mention what will occur in the future. They are coping but, as others have mentioned, they need help in doing so.

As regards what will replace the peat, there were references earlier to agriculture. Many in the farming community are open to making changes. If there are attractive schemes in place many of them are happy to try them, but the problem arises when they do not work. Miscanthus is an example. Many people in my area and in other areas across the country went along with planting miscanthus only to find that they had no market for it. The company that was to buy it from them suddenly realised that it was not suitable and left all those people, who were happy to make that transition, with a product they could not sell. This was a big issue. Has the council made recommendations on what is suitable biomass? There is not much point in peat-fired stations shifting to biomass if the biomass they will use is not coming from within this island but is being brought in from India or elsewhere. That would be ridiculous. It is not the direction we should take.

I believe anaerobic digestion has been hugely underutilised. However, where there have been proposals to move to anaerobic digestion in some areas, whether it is a farmer who wants to do it for his own use or for the wider community, there are immediate objections to it because people do not understand. This brings me to the original point about communications on this. We have failed massively to communicate with the citizen about what is happening.

I think we have left the door open for climate change deniers to step right in and create all this uncertainty around renewables and so on. That is an absolute disaster, for which we as public representatives and policy makers have to take the blame.

I wish to ask about the reform of the EU emissions trading system, ETS. Professor FitzGerald referred to the doubts about the success of the reform of the ETS and I would like him to expand on that.