Mr. Seamus Coffey:

To look at the estimate of the cost, it is the compliance cost for missing the targets and it is at the upper end. We have to make a lot of assumptions to come up with a figure. This is joint work between the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council and the Climate Change Advisory Council. We look at by how much a country is likely to miss its targets and then, crucially, when the targets are missed how much it has to pay for the credits. We do not yet know what this price will be. Looking at the price as it was at the time the research was done, and looking at by how much we might miss our targets, clearly an upper limit of the figure was suggested. It is a very broad range. The one thing we note is that at the time the research was done the range did not include zero. It was all positive values. Whether we put Ireland as getting close to reaching its targets, or the price of carbon credits as being relatively low, there would be significant fiscal cost to missing these targets by 2030. This will be transferred to those other countries which would have credits to sell. We will end up having to buy them and we do not know what the demand might be.

In terms of measures, we have various action plans for what can be done in the next couple of years. If fully implemented these would reduce the costs. They would reduce our carbon emissions and get us closer to achieving our 2030 targets. There are some ways we can look at this, such as, for example, a case where the economy is in a very strong position. Some of this requires resources that we have to have here and there are difficulties because we do not have spare capacity. If we look at transitioning our fleet of cars from fossil fuels to electric, the vehicles could be imported. If we have the financing to do so, we could get workers in other countries to make them and import them here. If we focus on measures such as retrofitting existing housing, we cannot get workers in other countries to do this and we have to do it here. Then, we might have competing commitments as we want to build more new housing. We then face the choices my colleagues have referred to. Climate change is significant. It is something where taking action has benefits. There is the benefit for the climate of reducing our emissions and another benefit is that the compliance cost will be lower. The 2030 deadline is coming very close.