Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I both apologise to the Commissioner and thank him for his patience. I will follow up on what the Chair has said and on some of what the Commissioner has said himself. He framed it well in the sense that he did not refer to the usual green and digital recovery but to an equitable green and digital recovery. That is absolutely necessary given the difficulties we had during the banking crisis, particularly in this State. As Deputy McHugh said, there are still a considerable number of people who fear for the future on that basis. We are talking about energy costs and difficulties relating to the supply chain. Obviously, in this State, we also have our own housing crisis which will be greatly impacted by the increased costs. The European Commission cannot deal with every one of these issues but they must be taken into account.

When we talk about this in its entirety, we are also talking about making the changes that are necessary for climate action and for rebalancing how our economies work.

The Commissioner spoke about tweaking some of the rules and so on, but we might need to examine something much more fundamental into the future, such as recalibrating the rules in order that they will enable us to get agreement on what we need to do to bring about those necessary changes, to deal not only with those short to medium-term problems but also with the long-term difficulties we face in regard to climate change.