Ms Susanne Rogers:

It was just a discussion of the digital disadvantage and the policy coherence piece. As was said, there is a big push to get us all online, a big push to get everybody and every child a tablet and there was a big push for older people to get online throughout Covid. However, that requires data centres. It requires for all of that stuff to be held somewhere and that is somebody else’s Department to do that. The impact of that is brownouts and on our climate action goals. Those three things are linked. Three separate Departments are doing a great job getting us all online, bringing in foreign direct investment and then trying to meet our climate action goals but they are in tension with each other. That would be a national policy and I do not know where that can fit in at local level.

On waste management, there was a piece of research done by Fingal County Council – again at local level – I think in 2017. It showed it would be cheaper to go back to remunicipalisation of waste collection services in Fingal because the council was spending so much cleaning up from fly-tipping. That has not gone anywhere at a local or national level. Dublin City Council is now trying hard to make the move back to doing a local council waste collection. It is coming up against barriers in what it can do within the free market and private market in respect of competition. There is a real struggle between the types of decisions that are made. It is about weaving all of this into every policy decision and having oversight. For example, it is about asking where that sits in with our SDGs. It is about embedding into local government probably but I do not know whether that has to come from national down or, as was said, from the public participation networks, PPNs, up. There is a limit sometimes as to what sort of decisions can be made at local authority.