Mr. Oisín Coghlan:

For clarity, first of all, the 7% average is what is required to hit the Government and climate law target of a 51% reduction by 2030.

For clarity, purely mathematically, that is not our fair share of a Paris Agreement-aligned just transition climate carbon budget. Perhaps we should be doing 11% per year at this point in order to do that. There are various ways of calculating it. If we take into account issues such as just transition and fairness, and the effort required to get action going and emissions reductions, I am not sure that we can achieve much more than 51% by 2030. That is nine years away. It takes time, and this is not about delaying action. It is absolutely about early action. As I said earlier, every time the State faces a choice at local and national level between options that may reduce emissions or may not reduce emissions, we must choose the option that reduces emissions. We have no more time to waste.

Even if we do all of that, it is hard to see us reducing emissions by more than 50% by 2030. That is a doubling of the rate of reduction compared to the 2019 climate action plan proposals, which is less than three years ago. I do not believe that any more is practicably possible, or politically possible, or possible with regard to a just transition. If we are saying that we are to get to 80% or 70% by 2030 and 60% by 2026, we must ask if it possible to do that in a way that does not massively impact on the poor and the vulnerable in Ireland, or on sectors in the context of shutting stuff down. The 50% reduction by 2030 is probably all that is possible, but we need to acknowledge that it is not our fair share. Many of the models around fair share date back ten or 15 years. This is the typical Irish directions of "I would not start from here." We have lost a decade that we should not have lost. Many of the models of fair share, even going back 15 years, said that there was always going to have to be an element of climate finance also, and we are not giving a fair share of climate finance. That is particularly necessary if we are not able to do our immediate fair share of emissions reductions right now.