Mr. Conor O'Neill:

I will respond to a couple of things Deputy Bruton said. Support for loss and damage finance funding is brilliant and we really welcome it. We have been looking at this over a number of months and the question is whether any EU state will step out in front of the common position. Denmark has done so. A key ask of this committee, and particularly of Deputies and Senators of the Government parties, is to raise this with the Minister so that we can, as Mr. Murtagh said, not be the first, but the second.

On the question of energy and the political reality, I recognise the political reality Deputy Bruton is describing. None of us think for a second that any of this is anything other than extraordinarily challenging. That is just a reflection of the position we are in. However, we also recognise the scientific reality. If those two things are not coherent with one another at the moment, we have to ask which is more mutable, the scientific reality or the political reality. The latter is often assumed to be more fixed than it is. Mr. McEvilly was spot-on in raising the example of Covid. What we had there was an emergency response. Politicians, the Civil Service and the public acted as if there was an emergency and the operation of the State and our society shifted to rise to the challenge. We did exceptionally well. However, there is not that sense of an emergency about this. We are still treating it as just another policy position to be talked about just as we talk about education, housing and healthcare when holding debates and discussing Bills. This is different. I fully appreciate where Deputy Bruton is coming from and that he is speaking in good faith but the question is which of the scientific reality and the political reality we can change, even if it is extraordinarily hard. In my view, it is the latter.