Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Dr. Brennan for her opening statement. I will shortly invite colleagues to ask questions. The committee is very happy to hear the witnesses' opening statements and, if necessary, to put the points raised to the Department and the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, to ensure that we are doing as much as we can as a state within Europe.

I want to raise the issue of a prospective future generations commission. This has come up several times at this committee in the past few years and seems very relevant to this discussion. It may be that there is a gap that can be filled. It seems we are not having that national conversation about what we want this country to look like in two, three or four decades time. That is a real problem for politics. Whether we like it or not, we are in a game where we have to renew our mandate on quite a short-term basis, every five years at local or European level and less than that at parliamentary level.

It pulls from the airtime, I suppose, for critical and important conversations about the long term. It seems to me that a simple public consultation where a Department advertises that it is submitting a document to Europe concerning what Ireland is going to do in agriculture, heating and transport over three and four decades is not really going to cut it and perhaps we need something like a future generations commission. Is this something the witnesses have considered in their analysis of the challenge we have in the public participation context and the public conversation that must happen?