Mr. Brian Carroll:

There are a couple of pieces to that. The point I made the last time was that if, for example, we put the current legally binding target, which is a 30% reduction on greenhouse gas emissions in the non-ETS for Ireland, into legislation, it will very shortly be overtaken by the next EU target that we get. The point I was trying to make was that at any time we have an EU target, it is liable to be increased. The Senator's formulation of "at least" gets around that problem, but in terms of the way the climate Bill is framed, which I know is not the subject for discussion today, there is very strong governance around carbon budgets. Carbon budgets are the way to achieving the sort of outcome in which the Senator is interested. If we have this objective in the programme for Government of at least 7% per annum over the decade, and this is reflected in the two carbon budgets 2021 to 2025 and 2026 to 2030, those budgets set a very hard ceiling on the amount of emissions we can have for those two periods and effectively deliver a certain outcome for her by 2030.