Dr. Seán Healy:

If Ireland is to succeed in addressing its climate challenge and other challenges, the pathway to doing so must be founded on consensus. It must be well managed and properly evaluated. Ms Murphy made those points in our introductory remarks and they are critically important. Reforming governance and widening participation is key to a successful just transition. An increased recognition of the need to include all stakeholders in the decision-making process is needed. A deliberative decision making process, involving all stakeholders and founded on reasoned, evidence-based debate, is required.

One component of real participation is the recognition that everyone should have the right to participate in shaping the society in which they live and in shaping the decisions that impact on them. In the 21st century, that involves more than just voting in elections, referendums and so on. Ireland would greatly benefit from a structure that would engage all sectors at a national level on an ongoing basis across the gamut of policy. Social dialogue helps highlight issues at an early stage, which allows them to be addressed promptly. More importantly, it ensures that the various sectors of society are involved in developing mutually acceptable solutions to problems that emerge, which, in turn, would be most likely to ensure their support for such solutions when implemented by Government. There are a couple of important things in that. The major weakness in the national climate dialogue forum is that it is just about climate. The problem is that Ireland has to deal with a series of other challenges as well. We are aware every day of the issues around housing and health. The increase in the older population is not drawn to our attention every day but there is a major challenge coming in that regard. These issues must be dealt with as well as those relating to the climate. They all interact with each other. It is fundamentally flawed thinking to imagine it is possible to have a dialogue on one of those issues while omitting the others. That is simply nonsensical.

There is one other piece I want to highlight. At a local level, it is now possible to have a genuine engagement with people. The public participation networks, of which there is now one in each of the 31 local authorities, have more than 16,000 registered organisations. These are community, voluntary, environmental and social inclusion organisations. More than 16,000 of those organisations have engaged and signed up, and are active. They have personnel, their own structures and all that sort of stuff. The issue is that the public participation networks are supposed to engage with local authorities on policy. There is a great opportunity there to take up a point that Ms Murphy made in our original presentation. These kinds of discussions should not be kept to a national level. We need to go to a regional level and to a more local level, certainly a local authority level, where the participants can all be there and can be heard.