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

I will deal with each question in turn. Do I believe there should be two different processes of business cases, one for sustainable projects and another for projects that should be less sustainable? Unfortunately, I will disappoint the Chairperson and say no. I think what would happen is that most Government Departments would argue that their projects are sustainable and that they should be going into one process and not the other. I believe we are better off having a single approach that puts a lot of focus on carbon cost, which we are trying to do with a change in our investment guidelines, and to try to do that work as quickly as we can.

As for the question around harmful effects in the work my Department did, we concluded that work and we published it in February 2023. We will include that as an ongoing accompanying process to the Revised Estimates Volume, REV, beginning in December of this year. We did it for last December. It has already been done but it will be ongoing now and it will be an accompanying piece of analysis for each REV. For example, in the REV, which was published a few months ago, we laid out what were the different shares of expenditure that could have a positive effect on our climate objectives and what were the ones that would be damaging to our climate objectives and what we are aiming to do.

As for Deputy Farrell's question, it reminded me that when I was speaker to Senator Higgins earlier, I said Coillte when I should have said ESB as an example of commercial semi-State bodies. Do I think a new entity is needed to do all of this work? I believe we have entities like this, such as ESB and the work it is doing, as well as Bord na Móna. Do I think we need an entirely new organisation? I think it would run the risk of duplicating the work that they are doing. If there are new organisations with a different mandate from ESB or Bord na Móna, we run the risk of them competing with bodies that have been around for a long time or creating organisations that do not have the ability to collaborate with the private sector. I believe the private sector will be essential as the amount of money needed will be so big that it will not be possible for the taxpayer to provide it on its own, which is why we collaborate with and try to organise the private sector. That is an essential element of what we are going to be doing in the future, and it is already happening.