Ms Marie Donnelly:

I thank the Deputy. I will start on the issue of membership of the council. We have 14 members, comprising seven women and seven men with a diverse and extensive range of experience across many aspects relating to climate. That has been a positive development that brings a lot of experience to the debate and discussion in the council.

The Deputy asked about resources and whether we have access to data. I have mentioned that we benefited enormously from the support of MaREI in Cork, University of Limerick, Maynooth University, UCD and TCD. That was hugely useful. If I may make a digressive remark, many of the models we used were built as a consequence of successful competitive bidding where they would get funding for, say, three or four years. It is probably something we need to think about. If you are in competitive bidding you cannot retain staff, PhD students and others. You need a constant source of funding to do it. That is an aside I bring in because it is important to mention it.

On data generally, in the early part of this year there was a memorandum of understanding set up by the Taoiseach's Department and signed by seven other Departments and us to share data. That is a useful initiative because we are a small island. It does not make sense to have people going in different directions and not sharing information. Being able to do that is a big factor and an important step forward.

On resources generally, I do not suppose anyone has ever come to the committee and said they have more than enough resources. Likewise, I will not say that. The resources of the Climate Change Advisory Council are small. We have recently had some supplements coming through but we need additional resources. We have five or six sectors that we will monitor on an ongoing basis and to do that we need sectoral expertise within the secretariat. Then there is the general overarching type of construct and legal and communication issues to look at. Resourcing is an issue and the secretariat of the council delivered the budget on a shoestring this year. They worked days, nights and weekends.

There were no holidays for anybody in the council secretariat until we got the budget out. I would like to mark the contribution its members made because they worked above and beyond the call of duty. I know they were all personally committed to delivering the budget and they did so.

In terms of other stakeholders, this is a challenge going forward. In some councils or their equivalent in other member states there is a role for outreach to stakeholders. It is not clear whether that is part and parcel of our role, although it is clear we should not be closed. However, it is a small group and the resources for constructive outreach do not exist within the secretariat. We are debating this issue. One of the items on the agenda of our next meeting is how we will ensure, given that the annual review will comment on sectoral targets, we are able to monitor and understand what happens within each sector and how we will interact with the sectors, the relevant Department and its agencies as well as the industry and consumer groups. What is the mechanism for doing that? One of our current challenges is identifying the most efficient mechanism. Do we use an existing structure and build on it or should we have our own structure? That is one of the questions we face and the Deputy is quite right in that context.

That is before we get to discussions with local authorities. We have had good discussions with the local authorities on their adaptation plans but as members will know, they will now do mitigation and adaptation plans. I presume the climate action regional offices will support them in that context as well. The local authorities are on the ground. They can see this happening and can support people in making the change. Their role is hugely important in this context. The extent to which they are integrated into the policy and the dialogue will probably be one of the most important elements going forward. That is certainly an issue that we are considering.

The Government, rather than the council, proposed the sectoral ranges. Like the Deputy, we would ask the question as to whether the overlaps are sufficient to ensure that in the event of failure on one side, we would get compensation on the other side. It is an ongoing question.

The Danish black box is a question. We know there are technologies in development and we hope they will deliver. If we consider wind-generated electricity in 2010 versus today, it is simply not the same thing. There is some justification for thinking we will have innovation that will help us and make things easier. We will look carefully at the black box of 4 million tonnes because it is not an opt-out.

We need to think about hydrogen. It is the new natural gas, if you wish. It is currently expensive to produce and more difficult to store and ship. However, it is flexible as a back-up for electricity and a back-up source for heat. There is also potential for hydrogen to be the route forward for transport, particularly heavy duty transport. The challenge is to get some sort of pan-European view because we have manufacturing facilities in Ireland where the goods are delivered to consumers on the Continent. They are placed on a truck in Ireland and then delivered by truck. Irrespective of which low or zero emission fuel we ultimately use in heavy-duty transport, we need to ensure it ties in with whatever happens at a European level n order that we are on board. We also need to identify what we will use for ourselves. Hydrogen presents a real opportunity. There is a lot of talk about it at the moment but perhaps not enough strategic planning around it. As I said to Senator Dooley, we need a plan. We need to get the picture on the page so that we can see what it looks like.