Mr. Brian Carroll:

Dealing with the question then as to how that translates into targets for Ireland going forward, we intend nationally to bring the next iteration of the climate action plan to completion by June of next year. That is to reflect the ambition shown in the programme for Government. It needs to be acknowledged that the programme for Government very specifically recognises that all of the technologies and emerging science in how we realise the ambition in this programme is not yet clear. The climate action plan will be updated on an annual basis, and as new policies and measures to fully specify as to how we will hit the ambition in the programme for Government become clear, they will be incorporated into future iterations of the climate action plan.

Separately, the climate action plan will have to take account of whatever our EU legal obligations are and will have to have sufficient policies and measures within it to ensure that we are hitting our EU binding target in a timely fashion. There is a lot of uncertainty as to what that binding target will be, particularly around the proposals on the table to alter the architecture. In responding to Deputy Bruton I outlined some of those. If we were to assume that the architecture was to remain as it currently is, the next step for the EU is to engage in analysis of member states’ capacity to deliver. They will be very much focused on delivering the target at EU-level and coming to some type of effort sharing decision in due course based on factors such as technical feasibility, cost effectiveness and fairness on an EU-wide basis, and will distribute the effort taking account of factors such as those.