Dr. Pete Lunn:

I want to add to what Dr. Robbins has said about the importance of independence, which might be expected of an ESRI researcher who used to work for the BBC. The independence of any process that is using public money to train journalists and making absolutely sure that is not perceived in any way to have an agenda would be very important. It would actually require more than independence; it would also require diversity of input to that training from multiple scientific communities and disciplines to make sure that it was something that was perceived to be absolutely independent and above board. Something like that could very easily backfire and be perceived as having an agenda and it would be vital that it did not. I would echo that point and even take it a little further.

I apologise but I am going to disappoint the Deputy a little on the education idea because the evidence is not particularly supportive of environmental education interventions. They do not work very well. Increasingly, children have been exposed to more and more environmental education at school, including in Ireland, but when that has been evaluated in terms of their later beliefs, attitudes and environmental behaviours, what we find is that those educational interventions have, at best, marginal impacts. The best way to understand that it is to think about how much we recall of what we were taught at school. Studies show that we recall somewhere in the region of 10% to 15% of what we are taught at school. When we are children, almost all of it comes across as being important, with adults telling us that it really matters, has an ethical dimension and so on. The problem is that children do not actually retain a lot of that information, which is why, when we study it later, we find that the impact of them being taught it is only marginal. This is not just about environmental education. There are all sorts of policy areas that believe stronger education is a panacea, including financial literacy, for example, as well as various issues like diet, health and so on. A lot of these things are taught in schools. Indeed, they are taught pretty well in schools but they do not have big impacts on people's behaviour in later life. What is really telling is that there is no substitute for communication to adults, via public debate, through the media and from places like this.