Mr. Ian Talbot:

On the sustainable development goals or climate change front, I empathise with Mr. McKeever on the Brexit issue. We have been banging the drum about the goals since they were introduced in 2015, and our global organisation, the International Chamber of Commerce, got observer status at the UN based on its willingness to promote the goals globally among businesses. We have done all manner of things. For example, for the past several years we have produced our pre-budget submission aligned not on the traditional headings but on the goals that our recommendations impact. Members will see on the front of our presentation today the five goals on which Chambers Ireland, our micro-organisation, is focusing. All our chambers around the country are doing events on them, we produced a toolkit, all our chambers signed a pledge to support the goals, and Mary Robinson was involved in one of our launches in 2019, just before the Covid crisis broke. We are doing an enormous amount of work on why more businesses have not adapted. I have not seen the EIB report yet, but I think a lot of what has been said here already counts. I think someone said people have bigger issues, as they see it, ahead of climate change. There was still for some organisations a fear of debt. They had just paid down their last debt and did not want to borrow more and get into more debt problems when there were crises looming on the horizon.

There are more cost-effective green loans coming into the system only quite recently, so perhaps that is good. Sometimes, for a lot of companies, energy is not necessarily the biggest stand-out cost on their profit and loss account; wages, salaries and other cost of sales are. There has been a shortage of construction workers to get things done. I worry about our message about deep retrofits and whether we are letting perfection be the enemy of good, and if we should be encouraging people to do more basic stuff. We did get most people to change to LED lights a couple of years ago. We must look at whether there is more simpler stuff that we can get people to do rather than say it is all or nothing and that people must move out of their premises or house for six months. There is nowhere for people to go if they move out of their house for three months to do a deep retrofit. That is a real barrier.

That brings me back to Mr. McDonnell's point about taxation. Tax matters to a lot of people. Perhaps we should look at speeding up capital allowances for work done. At the moment, businesses get a write-down of one eighth of the expenditure over eight years. Perhaps we should speed that up for certain types of expenditure. In the past, when corporation tax was 40%, capital allowances were more meaningful than when tax is at 12.5%, but it is still an encouragement.

I also agree with what Mr. McKeever said about legislation. When it comes to packaging, I still get annoyed on the rare occasion when I get a takeaway coffee cup and it says on the outside that it contains plastic. There are symbols but all I want to see is whether it is compostable or recyclable. How do we speed things up legislatively in that regard? Two years ago, everyone said it would be too expensive to have a compostable cup. Now a lot of places have them and it does not seem to be a big deal.

There are a lot of small things. The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland ran out of money a couple of years ago, quite early. That put people off as well as they were concerned about being left hanging. A lot of things have contributed to us being way behind our European peers but many of them are quite easily fixed.

On the management skills in this area, I am not 100% sure but I do not think it is that difficult. I think it is about the motivation and the choice as much as the management skills to deliver on projects in this case. That is it. I thank the committee very much.