Ms Justina Corcoran:

It is likely that the Minister will issue a direction to the local authorities, probably in November or December of this year. The Act was brought into force in July 2021 so it is likely that one will reach the decline, which is before December of this year, and then there is a year so we should have the local authority plans in place by the end of 2023. There are a couple of reasons for us leaving it that late. We have worked with the local authorities, the EPA, Climate Ireland and the CAROs to devise a set of statutory guidelines. They will cover mitigation or adaptation annexes and set out how the local authority should go about doing this in a coherent and co-ordinated approach. The guidelines have been signed off by the local authorities but we are going through them internally in the Department. Once we have those, the Minister will probably issue them along with the direction. The timeframe gives local authorities a little time because a 12-month period is quite short when one considers all of the different steps they must take to get the plans and, therefore, they can do some work in the background in the lead-up time.