Mr. Oisín Coghlan:

I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak to it today in advance of the 25th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Climate Change Convention. Before addressing the issues that flow from COP 25 for Ireland, I would like to put on record my appreciation and that of my colleagues for the work the committee has done over the last year and a bit since we were last before it. The Stop Climate Chaos coalition, which Christian Aid, Trócaire and Friends of the Earth are all a part of, campaigned for the outcomes of the Citizens' Assembly to be treated with the same seriousness as the political system treated the outcomes of the Citizens' Assembly on the eighth amendment. We were delighted, therefore, when this committee was set up with the powers and the mandate it had, and we found the commitment and collaboration of the members of the committee, the advisers and the secretariat to be a real source of hope over the last year, as it produced its report.

As the committee knows, we regarded the first report of this special committee in March as a pivotal landmark in the history of Irish climate change policy. I described it at the time as the Good Friday Agreement for climate action, and I meant that comparison two ways beyond simply being an historic breakthrough and a seemingly intractable problem. First, if, as Seamus Mallon famously said, the Good Friday Agreement was in part Kyoto for slow learners, this consensus among the committee here was Kyoto for slow learners, as in it was getting where we needed to be, but late in the day. It was no less an achievement for that.

More importantly for today's discussion, the Good Friday Agreement was part of a process, and the committee's report was only the end of the beginning for our challenge on climate change. We look forward to this committee being really central to what happens next, and its successor, the standing committee on climate action, needs to have as strategic and as proactive a role in what happens next in Irish climate policy as it did in getting to this point.

My colleagues have looked at the COP itself and what will be happening there. I want to look more at what flows from the COP to what Ireland does here, and I want to touch particularly on four key governance mechanisms that flow from the COP and its decisions through the European Union that this committee can have a key role in. They are the ten-year national energy and climate plan, the 2050 long-term strategy, the climate action (amendment) Bill and the standing committee on climate action itself. To cut to the chase, in case I run out of time, I will put forward the three key asks we have on those four governance mechanisms.

The first two, the national energy and climate plan, NECP, and the long-term strategy, LTS, are due to be finished by Government in the next few months and there will be a public consultation. We would urge this committee to invite the Minister and his officials in to discuss those drafts with it before they are finalised and sent to the European Commission. On the climate action (amendment) Bill, our ask is simply that this committee does everything in its power to ensure that the Bill is progressed as far as possible before the election and at the very least goes through Second Stage, which involves it doing pre-legislative scrutiny before the Easter recess on 9 April 2020.

Finally, equally with the standing committee, we do not want to wait for the Government or the next Parliament to set it up. We would like the standing orders to be done in this Parliament, while this political consensus reigns, and that we establish the standing committee so that we are not waiting for the programme for Government, new Ministers and a new Government to get around to doing it some time before the end of next year.

In addition, to flesh out those issues, this committee was given a specific mandate on the NECP. Its report was to feed into not just new Irish domestic policy but into the NECP itself. Now, we understand from the Department that it plans to publish its second draft NECP - its first draft was last December - in the next few weeks and hold a three-week public consultation. It would be very timely for the committee to invite the Minister and his officials in to examine that, and there are some key questions we think it could be looking at when it does that. Has the new draft incorporated all the policy gains in the action plan? The action plan was a step forward in June and is a political initiative, however good. The NECP is on a statutory footing. If this Minister went and if a new Government came in, and it had not captured the NECP, there is no guarantee that the action plan would translate into the next Government's commitments, whereas if it is in the NECP, it is locked in.

More importantly, though, for the committee, does this new draft of the NECP close the gap between the committee's landmark report and the action plan? Good and all as the action plan was, it was not as good as the committee's report, and if the committee has done a gap analysis, well then this is the moment to apply that gap analysis to the new NECP draft and see if the Government has moved things forward since June.

Crucially, the European Commission has given feedback on the draft NECP, so again - there is detail in my statement on this - has the Government responded to that in its new draft NECP? That is a role that this committee could have. They are the main things around the NECP.

On the long-term strategy, which flows directly from the Paris Agreement, the main question there is: what is our target for 2050? The Government gave positive indications in the action plan that it was minded to adopt a net zero target for 2050. This is the moment with the LTS to do that formally and to update our national policy position from 2014 and use this new LTS to adopt formally net zero as the national position. Does it set out sectoral pathways that contribute to that, which is expected of it? Does it make clear how the long-term vision in the LTS would be operationalised on a year-by-year basis? How does it relate to what are going to be the annual action plans?

On the Bill itself, it is the part of the Joint Committee on Climate Action report that was most successfully translated into the action plan. The Government more or less accepted wholesale European recommendations, but the committee asked for the Bill to be passed into law before the end of 2019. As far as we can see, nothing at all has happened - at least not publicly - on that.

In the Government's action plan, it said it would publish the full Bill in the first quarter of 2020, which is obviously different from the committee's timeline. We have clarified that with it, and it means the full Bill, agreed with us. That means the heads of the Bill have to go to committee for pre-legislative scrutiny in time for a report from the committee to be incorporated in the full Bill before the end of March. The officials we spoke to - it was the Taoiseach and the Minister, Deputy Bruton - said that meant it coming into the Parliament well before Christmas, whether it is this committee or the other committee, to look at it and do pre-legislative scrutiny and to report by the end of January to allow reasonable changes the committee proposes to be incorporated.

We did not expect that before the budget but we expected it now, so has this committee or the other committee been in touch with the Minister and his officials? Is it coming and where is it at? Is it going to Government next week? Has the committee programmed time to deal with that between now and the end of January? It really is fundamental. Obviously, it is not going to be passed before the end of the year. Much as I would like it to be passed before the election - because it has to go through two House, obviously - at the very least, if we can get it through Second Stage before an election, it means there is an inevitable cross-party consensus if that is achieved and that it will be passed by whoever is in government next. That means it must get through Second Stage before the Easter recess, 9 April next year. That is a tight timeline, and our main message is that it will require the same sort of focus and purpose that this committee had to deliver the report applied by it just to drive the process. I know it is both a Government and a parliamentary process wider than this committee, but the committee members were the people who championed that governance structure. Committee members are the ones who will most notice if it is not achieved. We think it is up to the committee to drive that.

On the committee itself, we very much welcome that the action plan wholeheartedly endorsed the committee's proposal of a standing committee, but again, one cannot afford to leave it to others to make sure that happens. One has to take charge of that and drive it forward. If the opportunities in respect of the NECP, the LTS, the Bill and the committee are missed, we think the committee's really fundamentally positive legacy could be jeopardised. If the committee could get those four things over the line before the election, it would secure its legacy and move from the blueprint it produced in March to really strong foundations for future climate action with those four cornerstones. We wish the committee well in doing that. We offer any support we can from outside. I look forward to discussing that more with the committee. I thank the committee.