Ms Marie Donnelly:

I will respond on that specific question. To some extent it jumps a little towards the end. The legislation sets the ambition for Ireland. It sets up the carbon budget and the structure that will put in place the sectoral ceilings. It also puts mandates the Climate Change Advisory Council to conduct, as part of its annual review, an assessment of where we are on achieving our budget by sector. This is a new mandate for the council. It is one we are structuring and putting in place. It means we will be following each of the sectors individually as part and parcel of our annual review process. Without pre-empting what will be in it, I will take heating as an example. It has been debated at great length today and represents almost 40% of our emissions. There are a number of issues to consider.

Where are we starting from? What are the policies in place? Will the policies deliver? Are they being put in place to deliver? Are they sufficiently ambitious to lead to an outcome? We are developing a number of indicators that can be used across each sector to precisely monitor and track the performance of the sector against its sectoral ceiling. The Chair mentioned the greater Dublin area targets, which would classically be one area. I have not done the analysis so cannot comment specifically. However, where the ambition of a policy falls so far short of a sectoral target, that kind of issue will be called out by the Climate Change Advisory Council as part of its annual review.