Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Sure, but the Senator should consider the significant changes made in procurement practices. The Government has published cost control and carbon reporting templates and they are now a mandatory part of procurement processes. When capital projects are being considered now, there is the option to report the embodied carbon during construction. While this is not currently mandatory, the Government will make it mandatory by quarter 4 of this year.

To give examples of the kinds of changes that this has led to, 275 zero emission vehicles have been published by the State since 2021. Green procurement is taking place in the Department of Defence with solar panels being rolled out to 11 different Department of Defence locations. The Department has seen a threefold increase in the amount of electricity it is accessing renewably. The State is now replacing carbon-fuelled vehicles with electric vehicles. In the HSE, there is now a clinical waste initiative leading to the recycling of clinical waste as opposed to its disposal. These are just examples of the work that is under way where we have changed procurement policy to ensure that far higher recognition is given to the sustainability issues the Senator has referenced in a number of different contributions with me.

As for the Senator's point on the commercial mandate of the State sector, if their mandates were changed so that they no longer would be commercial, they then would become part of the State entirely. If that were to happen, it would undermine their ability to raise funding in different ways and to engage with the financial markets. They currently engage with the private sector to a higher degree than they would if they were purely State entities. I point to the work that Coillte is doing with the development of renewable energy and offshore wind. Coillte itself is undertaking this work. The company also has ambitions to expand forestry. It is my judgment that it can go ahead with this work due to its commercial status.

The State normally gains its dividends from commercial semi-State bodies after they have funded their ambitious investment programmes, now and into the future. Therefore, my sense is that this balance offers a lot of flexibility to the State and if we were to change that commercial mandate, it could undermine the semi-State bodies' flexibility and bring costs onto the State that we might, over time, struggle to fund in the way we can at the moment through the mixed mandate these organisations have.