Mr. Alan Ryan:

The SEAI runs the national monitoring and reporting, NMR, system where 350 public sector bodies report annually. That has been in operation since 2013. We track the individual performance of each of the 350 public bodies against the 50% energy efficiency target and the 51% greenhouse gas target. The system will track future energy efficiency directive, EED, targets.

One piece of functionality that has been added this year, at the request of the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, is to track public bodies' compliance with the climate action mandate. The 2023 climate action mandate has about 30 different requirements. From about November of this year the new functionality will be ready. The climate action mandate applies to about 291 of the 350 public sector bodies and they must report their compliance against these 30 different climate action mandate requirements. Three to five of them are energy related and the rest of them are environmental. One of them is green public procurement, GPP. For the procurement of goods, services or works in 2023 for which national GPP criteria is available, they have to show whether the organisation included GPP criteria and publish tender documentation for individual contracts. There are some questions about whether GPP criteria were used in construction projects in 2023. The next CAP mandate, which will come out next year and with which they will have to report compliance, has even more requirements regarding GPP.

At the end of this year and into next year, we will have the data to give some sort of basis of what public bodies are reporting. That will be factored into the NMR report system every year. There is a 99.5% compliance rate. Public bodies are very compliant. We hope to get good figures and a good basis and start-----