Professor Barry McMullin:

I thank the Senator for her comments. They are very helpful. Yes, there definitely is a role for better integration of research and knowledge in our institutions, universities, agencies and so forth to help to inform and have some sort of more clear prioritisation of that. In the Irish framework, much of academic research is funded through Science Foundation Ireland, which updates its research priorities from time to time and has increasingly attached more priority to research in the domain of sustainability, climate and energy. That is positive. There is scope to go further with that but - to speak to the point that is being made here - there is also scope to emphasise more the integration of social and physical science with political activity. While we have had a long-term focus on better integration and collaboration between academic researchers and enterprises, we have not had the same focus on integration between academic researchers and the political realm. It would be very helpful to explicitly add engagement and integration with policy as an output our academic funding agencies look for from relevant academic research activities. The EPA already does this and is very good at doing so.

It is a role model that some of the other agencies could learn from.

There is a particular issue about which I am concerned, which Professor Sweeney also raised, and that is the timeliness of information. In this new carbon budget system, we need to know where we are at in a very timely way. The current system of reporting on our emissions has quite a long delay before we get definitive numbers. That is completely understandable as it is a complex process. However, in our financial budget management, we benefit from earlier, albeit less reliable, almost real-time information on the economy, what is happening with financial flows, the price index, salaries and so forth. We get those sorts of data quarterly, if not monthly, from the CSO. There is scope for similar preliminary data for carbon budgets. The outlook for our performance against carbon budgets should be made available in a systematic way, at a political level in particular, in order that course corrections, to which Professor Sweeney referred, can be made in a much more timely way. If we have to wait a year until we know what the emissions were, and we are already one year gone and it will be another year on from our first budget period before we have definitive numbers on the emissions for 2021, that does not put politicians or the political realm in a good space for actively and dynamically managing that. I agree and endorse the views expressed in that regard.