Dr. James Glynn:

Regarding the inclusion of Irish territorial waters as a sink, one of the other committee members asked about this already. It is to reflect the scientific reality that Irish territorial waters are already absorbing carbon dioxide. There are also geological reasons that to sequester CO2 in offshore gas fields should be included as a sink. Natural solutions around algae production and seaweed production are also possible solutions to sequestered CO2 and that should be acknowledged in the Bill. From my reading of it, only land-based sinks were included in the definition.

On early dialogue and societal buy-in, I think we have already discussed this. It is not my area of expertise. From my area of expertise, I know that early dialogue ultimately will help accelerate mitigation through accelerating the transition by the adoption of energy efficiency, retrofitting of homes and other more radical technology changes, as well as the expansion of onshore and offshore wind farms.

Without early dialogue and acceptance from Irish citizens, ultimately, the decarbonisation rate will slow down and we will probably miss our Paris Agreement targets. As I said earlier, there are a few ongoing projects, including the Dingle project, being run by colleagues within MaREI, looking at this on a very person-by-person or household-by-household basis, and there are a few other projects ongoing within MaREI. I am happy to put the relevant project leaders and principal investigators, PIs, in contact with the committee to talk a bit more about that.