Mr. James Cogan:

The two important documents that Ireland has produced this year are the climate action plan and the national energy and climate plan. The national energy and climate plan is the official blueprint for every country in Europe for achieving climate goals under the Paris Agreement over the next ten years. We, like all other European countries, submitted ours to the European Commission early on this year and we are finalising the final versions of the first generation of these plans, because they will be renewed every two years. December is the date for finalising those. Ireland is in bad company in that many of the plans submitted by countries to date are highly non-specific. It is difficult to grasp how things will be done. They have not been costed, so it is difficult to grasp how much a particular measure will cost, whether it is heating, cooling, transport or power generation, per unit of carbon saved, and therefore how much it would cost if scaled up to the amount of carbon that we will have to save in the economy overall. Admittedly it is the first generation of plans and hopefully the next generation will be more clear. If one is looking to these plans for guidance on what we are actually going to do, those documents are not very helpful in the specificity of what they tell us they will do, how the plans will be done and how much they will cost. That will be one of the next things that the major news agencies in the world will report. This week we have had two reports that show that carbon emissions are going up and that we are not doing enough about it. When people look at the collective set of national energy and economic plans, including Ireland's, that will be yet another message where the action is not matching the rhetoric.