Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for coming in and for all his work in this area. We are moving on from setting targets to delivering on them. This is a more important phase than target-setting. I ask him to provide a rough picture of compliance with the plan across the sectors in 2022. I may be wrong but it seems that certain measures we thought would be relatively easy to get mobilised seem to be slow coming, such as, in particular, the commitment by local authorities to electric vehicle, EV, charging, the funding underpinning retrofits for the long term to make them cheaper, the carbon rewards system to farmers and offshore renewables. One gets the sense that there is a loss of momentum in those areas. What does the big picture show? Is the Minister seeing significant failure by Departments, for whatever reason, genuine or otherwise? Is there a lot of slippage? When the 2022 numbers are published, they are bound to show there has been bounceback and that, post Covid, we will not have as good a year as we might have expected. The important thing is whether Departments are genuinely delivering the actions that can underpin progress in 2023 and 2024 and so on.