Professor Barry McMullin:

I endorse everything said by Professors Sweeney and Anderson.

We have seen the emergence of this much greater civil society awareness and engagement in the past few years, and that is hugely encouraging. Here in Ireland, the experience of the Citizens' Assembly was extremely positive. We should not sit on our laurels in that respect. I recall that Professor Sweeney and I and a number of other academics, as long ago as the 2016 general election, were involved in an academic group promoting the idea of, essentially, a citizens' assembly on steroids, that it should be a standing assembly and that what was done on the Citizens' Assembly at a national level should be happening in every county and parish in Ireland. Compared with the amounts of money we are talking about, real money we will have to spend, what does it cost to facilitate communities and local groups to get access and to debate, discuss and review their local situations? The Sustainable Energy Authority Of Ireland does Trojan work through the sustainable energy communities, but this is about allowing communities to be much more politically engaged. We have pieces of that jigsaw already in place in Ireland, but there is huge potential to ramp this up to a much greater opportunity for citizens to inform themselves, to engage with experts, to challenge one another, to challenge politicians and to organise. It is not all about top-down political leadership by any means whatsoever. I encourage the committee to engage with all the possibilities there are to provide support from the top down for civil society engagement on this issue that concerns us all.