Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I am a firm believer that there is no need to reinvent the wheel and when developing policy or legislation we should look to examples overseas to see where it is being done well. Countries such as Scotland, New Zealand and the UK have actually done a much better job in this. How much regard to international experience did Mr. Carroll take into the development and drafting of this legislation?

In his evidence to the committee, Mr. Carroll referred frequently to the programme for Government and the 7% target set. I have a concern if that was a large part of Mr. Carroll's thinking in developing this legislation.

Our legislation needs to be stronger than a document that is applicable for only the next four years. After the programme for Government was published there was quite a bit of discussion on how it backloaded the emissions targets. From my perspective, the programme for Government is not a programme for this particular Government, it is actually a programme for the next Government because a lot of the targets are for 2030. What I do not want to see happening is that we wake up in five or six years' time and think we have not addressed any of our emissions issues. We will be wondering why and we will be so far behind at that stage.