Mr. James Kiernan:

The question on the implementation of the current plan and siloed thinking within Departments was directed to me. We need to do a lot of work within the various Departments to educate people about the interdependency of the SDGs. An example of this would be us talking to businesses about life below water. This is an SDG that businesses thought would not affect them, but it actually does. An example of this would involve the plastics produced by businesses. Much plastic finds its way into our water systems in the form of microplastics. Businesses can have an effect on this. There are education programmes in that regard. We could do something similar within Departments in order to get away from siloed thinking and get an understanding that there is an interdependency between all 17 goals and 169 targets. If we increase the knowledge in that regard, the concept of siloed thinking will be broken.

Chambers Ireland contributed to the voluntary national report; we wrote a chapter on businesses' application of it. We would love to see an urgency around this and around the fact that, in July, we should convey the urgency of where we stand in 2023 while looking towards 2030. There will be a review, as the Deputy said, in September. We need urgency on this and we need to outline the actions required in order to hit our targets, otherwise we are not going to hit any of them. That urgency will need to be conveyed in July.