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

No one is biting with the president's teeth, as they say in America. The reality is the pressure of today's budget squeezes out all the desirable principles. The targets are not even ambitious; they are quite modest targets in a lot of areas. We need to shift something here.

I saw from the SEAI's projection that the cost of securing some of these targets is between €9.5 billion to €13 billion. Where is that in the NDP? Is it the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform which factors that in? Is anyone factoring it in or is it left to the individual year-to-year budgets to find that €13 billion? That is the equivalent of nearly a year's capital programme. It is not spare change. I presume this is robust and that someone is kicking the tyres on these numbers. If we are going to have to achieve this over whatever period, is it being factored into some investment plan? Is that the job of the OGP, the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform or of the individual Departments? Who has the capacity to do that?