Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and thank him for his honest appraisal of the current position of the Government and the Department. This committee has been trying to move matters forward in as non-adversarial and non-partisan a manner as possible. The Minister's frank analysis is helpful is assisting us in trying to do that. The Chairman asked the Minister about targets. I published a Bill that seeks to reintroduce targets. The reason is that in Ireland, we are quite good generally and culturally at doing something tomorrow, next week or next year. When one speaks to policy makers, as the Minister indicated with regard to the Department of Education and Skills, there is always another priority that seems to be far greater at a point in time. As climate change is something in the future, we tend to leave it on the back burner. I recall talking about this in 2009 and 2010 when people were talking about 2020 and 2030 targets. We are nearly at those dates and we are a long way off the targets.

We are probably safe to some extent because for the past three or four years the concern was all about what it was going to cost us. As we were coming out of an economic downturn, money was a priority and that captured people's attention. Now we have more money than we had and people have moved on. The focus is now on the damage that is being done and the window the Minister rightly identified for when we can make some changes. We must be about action from now on.

The Minister talked about the mitigation plan of July 2017 not really being the full suite of policies needed by 2020. Does the Minister hope that his next mitigation plan will have a more comprehensive suite of measures with clearly set out implications? Many will have negative implications and it is better to address it up-front. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine gave one of the better presentations here. It seemed to have given it more thought and one might say that so it should. It was in a position to say that if we need to do more, we can do more, but that will have a significant impact on the economy. We need to have that debate. If we are going to have a significant impact on climate change, our economy will have to change significantly and there will be cost implications. Anything we can do to push that up front is good.

Carbon tax did not happen in the budget. There is no point in going back over that. Does the Minister see himself or the Department being in a position to publish their trajectory for the next ten years or the trajectory that we should be on? I do not want to play the politics of this. There was a discussion at a recent Fine Gael gathering about significant tax cuts for a certain squeezed middle. The political debate from that centred around tax-raising measures being carbon taxes. We have seen what happened in France this week, where people have become mightily frustrated with the inability of the Government to reinvest the carbon tax into measures to decarbonise the economy. I think only 5% of what is collected goes into the decarbonisation fund. People are ahead of us and understand what needs to be done, but they will not want the State to become dependent on carbon tax as we have on so many other duties and levies, whether on fossil fuels, cigarettes or alcohol. We need to be clear that the moneys collected are ring-fenced and used to decarbonise the economy, such as in assisting and supporting cleaner and greener energy generation, for example, offshore generation.

The Minister talked about foreshore licences. There will be a requirement for much greater interventions than just offshore energy. It is nascent technology, especially in deep sea, so will require significant support from the State, but that is where there is long-term potential for us. If we manage to bridge that gap and harness the wind in that zone, we will have significant benefits to economic activity elsewhere. There are other areas, such as investment in the deep retrofitting of homes. The moneys collected in taxation need to be seen to be used. We need guidelines for onshore wind generation. It is not done by the Minister's Department but he will have to drive it. We know how good Government is regardless of who is there, with one Department passing the buck to the other. That happened with the Airbnb issue during the week, where no one wanted to carry the can. This is a much bigger issue than Airbnb so somebody will have to be prepared to take those tough decisions. I think the Minister has the experience, ability and leadership capacity to do it. I think he will find, from my experience on this committee, that there is willingness to do this in a bipartisan way. Deputy Bruton is the Minister so he will have to lead and we will be beside him on that.