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

I have two brief questions. Would the Minister be agreeable to bringing the circular economy and biodiversity strategy under the same monitoring umbrella as the climate action plan?

I see a lot of mutual gain in having that level of integration. Both struggle for the lack of biting with the president's teeth, or whatever you like to call that more central monitoring and observation. In the context of communicating and mobilising, I put my next question to the Minster for agriculture this morning and he was sympathetic. Does the Minister think we should look at geographic areas and area-specific measures and try to involve local communities? The big successes in Ireland are organisations like the GAA, which is organised on counties, parishes and so on. At one stage it was going to get involved with retrofit, which would have been an interesting example. We respond to lower-level community-based ambitions even if, as part of a communications thing, it were only to be done in a particular county or river catchment. To test the model, can we bring processors, farmers, consumers and others into this sort of county or catchment effort that might leverage a level of interest and commitment that is harder with high-level plans? They are welcome, but they are legalistic and we are trying to hold people to account. It does not quite generate bottom-up enthusiasm.