Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

That is the big question. We are starting to see the ship turning around. I am seeing progress across a variety of areas. It is not as fast as I would like but momentum is starting to build. If the Deputy does not mind me providing a lengthy answer to his question, which is broad, I will provide examples. It is in the context of an increasing challenge. One of the key issues is that all our targets are based on the Paris Agreement, climate science and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The emissions reductions that have to be achieved under that agreement are not on a per capita basis but, rather, on a state or nation basis, that is, a national declared contribution. Ireland is growing rapidly. There is no country like us at the moment in terms of the expansion in the economy. Admittedly, the GDP figures are questionable but even to bring it back down to modified domestic demand or some other mechanism, our economy boomed last year, with full employment and approximately 150,000 people coming into the country, as well as natural population growth. That is a real challenge in the context of how we achieve our targets. In addition, in the previous decade we did not achieve the reductions other countries achieved, so we have to catch up to get back on track. That presents a difficulty. That said, I will give some brief examples.

In agriculture, my expectation is that the figures to be released in April will not show a significant change from 2021 to 2022. There may well be a reduction in the context of agriculture because there was a reduction of approximately 14% in fertiliser use, which would reduce emissions. However, I am certain the dairy herd continued to expand, we have a continuing issue relating to land use issues that is not directly connected with agriculture and our forestry is starting to go from being a sink to being a source. Those are some of the underlying difficulties. A sign of progress is that the ACRES scheme under CAP was massively oversubscribed. Irish farmers are starting to see the sense in this. In the past two and a half years or three years, the volume of organic farming has increased by 300%. I am going on memory so the Deputy should not quote these figures. That is the scale of expansion, however. Hundreds of people turn up to farm visits with farmers going in this smart and lower carbon direction. There is really clever and good grass management in the context of the development of mixed sward farming systems. The constraint now is not related to farmers wanting to do it but to getting access to the seed. Many examples are pointing towards the country changing and moving in a greener direction. Complacency would not serve us well, however. There will not be a significant reduction in the overall numbers, even with the fertiliser reduction, because the national herd, particularly the dairy herd, increased.

As regards energy, the Deputy referred to offshore renewables. I attended a conference held by the Irish Wind Energy Association yesterday at which there was broad agreement that there has been incredible progress in the past year. We have had the passage of the maritime planning legislation, the establishment of the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, MARA, and the start of the first of our three auctions, to be held in 2023, 2024 and 2025. In the context of offshore development, it is a question of resourcing, and it is only starting. Deputy O'Rourke stated that we are probably too focused on the financial crisis management and not enough on this decarbonisation shift. An example of that is An Bord Pleanála being too small and needing to scale up. Interestingly, a survey presented at the conference to which I referred indicated that the biggest issue was the planning system. Undoubtedly, massive progress is occurring. My Department is at the centre of that in terms of what it is doing.

One of the progress issues is that as part of the governance structure, which I should have mentioned earlier, we are establishing six task forces to accelerate different elements of the clean and decarbonised transition to renewables and the one that has been most effective is the offshore renewables task force. We are on track, subject to us getting the planning system working effectively. Last year, there was a record volume of Irish renewables. We never installed as much renewables as we did last year. It is starting to move to solar at scale. We will see that again this year. There is real progress. The only constraints relate to the booming economy. The order books of photovoltaic, PV, companies that are installing are out the door at the moment. They are incredibly busy. The biggest constraint is getting the workers in to install the technology. It is the same in retrofitting. We met our target last year. We did 27,000 houses on the nose, which is the challenge we set ourselves, and we will do 37,000 this year. Again, there is no restriction on the public demand for it; the restriction is whether one can get enough workers. We now have 2,000 workers on apprenticeship schemes. The Minister, Deputy Harris, has done a good job in providing those workers through Skillnet. It is absolutely going gangbusters. There is significant progress to which I could point.

The downside is that we are still running Moneypoint, again, because we are a growing economy and we have very tight energy supplies. Those coal emissions are still crippling us and we have to turn Moneypoint off as quickly as we can. The direction in energy is heading in the right direction and starting to pick up speed.

The two sectors that were most problematic in 2021 were transport and agriculture where emissions rose as we came out of Covid. Transport will continue to be the biggest challenge because we have created an imbedded car-dependent system. That is not easy to shift. I will give a couple of examples of where I see the ship turning. We are ahead of our target for the number of EVs. That is actually happening. In addition, 80% of charging is done at home, which is good because then we can use power at night and, in turn, that balances our significant wind power. We have the Zero Emission Vehicles Ireland, ZEVI, scheme now and we are rolling out €100 million worth of charging supports in the next three years but it is happening.

I will give an example of progress. Recently I met a leading international expert on transport who is head of EY transport consultancy or whatever. He noted that, interestingly, Ireland is an outlier because most countries have not seen public transport numbers return to where they were pre Covid. Ireland is the exception. There are loads of examples where public transport has taken off here. Yesterday somebody told me about Cork metropolitan rail and the other day I talked to this committee about the situation in Navan where the figures are spectacular for the number of people using the local bus service. Every week we are rolling out a new Connecting Ireland rural bus transport service because there is public demand.

I am in no way complacent. We are still not going to meet the scale of reduction that we need to make, which is going to make the budget for 2025 all the more challenging. This is beyond compare challenging but I am convinced that the ship has started to turn.