Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I would like to clarify procedure and the reason we started with this issue. As members will be aware, we were to report as a cross-party committee at the end of January. We sought a further extension in order to deliberate. We have been working on this issue of climate action for the past seven months and, as we all know, we are under time pressure. The clock is ticking on how we deal with climate change. The Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Bruton, is waiting on our cross-party report to feed in to his whole-of-Government plan. The reason we opened in public session on this issue was that we were to go into public session today and tomorrow and have a report published tomorrow. There was one issue that came up at very late notice last night and again this morning which created an obstacle. We had to overcome that stumbling block if we were to publish tomorrow. That is why we opened on this particular amendment to the amendment, as I explained earlier. I am giving all members an opportunity to give their views on this particular stumbling block.

I acknowledge and compliment members on the many hours of work that were done in private session. We have worked collaboratively. We are on the same page on more issues than not. As Deputy Smith said, this is only one small part of the overall solution to tackling climate change.

Whether the Deputy agrees or not is a separate issue and she has made her views on that very clear. We have done an awful lot of work. We have more than 40 recommendations in the report and the price of carbon is just one small part of it. This is why I felt we needed to go into public session to get this started. Then we will go back to chapter 1 and start working our way through the whole of the report in order that we can report to the Oireachtas. What we have done over the past seven months has been very ambitious. It is a transformational piece of work that can feed into not just this Government but future Governments. On this, I want to move to our next-----