Mr. James Cogan:

The scheme is Ireland's regulatory instrument for bioenergy in transport. Bioenergy in transport, given the size of our petrol and diesel fleet, is fairly important legislation. It was established almost a decade ago under a European regulatory scheme, which was the renewable energy directive. Those two Acts are kind of going into their next generation but perhaps they have not changed the thinking enough. The renewable energy directive for the next decade is essentially a continuation of the one for the previous decade but it does not think big. It is modest, clunky legislation and it is dwarfed by the Paris Agreement. It is kind of irrelevant in terms of the scale of climate ambition now.

If one looks at Ireland's climate action plan or any other climate action plan, or the national energy and climate plan that was submitted to the European Union, all of the ambitions are much higher than what this directive would oblige us to do. The biofuels obligation scheme should be tuned to a new world of much greater ambition rather than simply carrying on in the tradition of the previous decade, which was determined by the old directive, if that makes sense.