Dr. Diarmuid Torney:

Before I address Deputy Bruton's comments, I will say a quick word on Senator Higgins's point. I direct her to some research by the National Economic and Social Council, NESC, conducted a couple of years ago, in the area of transport-oriented development. This is the idea that rather than transport infrastructure following urban development, one does it the other way around by building the transport infrastructure first, with the urban development coming afterwards around the high-quality transport infrastructure. That work by the NESC built upon a wider international body of research on transport-oriented development. I encourage the committee to look at that work, which I believe was published in 2019.

Deputy Bruton is right that if we leave it all to a bottom-up process. it will almost certainly be too slow for the kind of transformational change that we need to deliver. What I was trying to suggest in my opening statement and what we try to suggest in our research in this area is that we need a combination of a top-down and bottom-up process. The fear I have with the very strong focus on the climate action Bill and the carbon budgets process is that we think that is the end of the story, the carbon budgets are self-enforcing and as soon as we have a system-wide constraint, it will deliver the change. That is not the case. We need to think through, sector by sector, what governance arrangements we need to deliver the transformational change that will add up to the targets to be set out in the carbon budgets. We need an element of bottom-up approaches but we need to infuse those bottom-up initiatives with the scale of ambition set out in the carbon budgets. It is a question of trying to marry the top-down and bottom-up processes.

On the question around resistance within the system, I agree with Deputy Bruton that we have a legacy of a culture of decision-making that is not very well-equipped for the scale of transformational change. I do not have a magic bullet to overcome that. We need strong political leadership but we also need strong leadership within the Civil Service. We are seeing elements of this emerge but we do not have the luxury of time. We cannot wait for the next generation of civil servants coming through the system. We need to find ways to reinvigorate the policy system to deliver this transformational change.