Christopher O'Sullivan (Cork South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Thank you. I appreciate that. There are two other matters after the public transport element in rural Ireland. Farmers are still being penalised for having bits of biodiversity, habitat and wetland areas on their farms. Farmers are getting rid of those bits of habitat or biodiversity because they are being incentivised to do so. We must flip that on its head. That transformation plays a really important decarbonisation role and it is not happening fast enough. I would love to know if the Government has a plan to accelerate that.

There are steps and procedures that can happen at a really fast pace and which we can implement straight away, particularly for solar power in our education facilities and schools. We could roll out solar in our schools overnight. The schools are high energy users in many respects. Some type of emergency legislation could in some way circumvent the planning procedure so we could see the immediate roll-out of solar to schools. That would be fantastic. We really need to see change on the ground. I will leave it there and I thank the Chairman for his indulgence.