Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. I appreciate and acknowledge his experience as a Minister and also his interest in this sector. I remember his efforts to tackle issues like air pollution and so on in the past.

The sectoral targets will be decided by the Government, but that will not happen in a vacuum. It will have to comply with section 4 of the legislation, which sets out a long list of criteria that have to be complied with. The process is highly technical. It will be a complex undertaking to make a legal sectoral division because of the need to satisfy the many criteria listed, including the overarching one of international agreements, but also climate justice, biodiversity and best scientific knowledge, among others. It will be more expensive to get emissions reductions in some sectors than others. There will be requirements to reduce at a certain rate in some sectors based on European directives and on international agreements. It is not the case that we could just decide to move some emissions from one sector to another. I am not suggesting anybody would do so. It is not an opportunity to play politics and to decide it would be nicer to have some of these emissions moving to transport or agriculture. It is a highly technical exercise and it must comply with all the criteria. What the legislation is doing is setting out the way that the sectoral budget is made. It is setting out what all the rules are to make a sectoral budget and it is up to the Oireachtas now to decide what those rules are going to be and what it wants to put in or to take out. If we moved towards the Oireachtas agreeing sectoral budgets, we would have a bureaucratic overhead. It would slow the process and, worst of all, we would be in danger of coming up with an answer that was either illegal or not in line with our international agreements, or that did not fulfil the many objectives we are trying to include in section 4, which many Deputies have referred to in previous amendments.

I know the Deputy has good intentions in this regard and I can see where he is coming from but I believe that this amendment should be refused.