Ms Lorna Hayes:

On climate, we have been surprised not just this year but also in the past two years that climate change has not come out high in terms of the EU's performance. Rather, it has actually been quite low. We see this in a few questions this year. This is particularly unusual given that, at least under the previous mandate, the green deal was a massive priority flagship for the EU. It is interesting that this does not have more prominence but maybe there are other issues, such as the cost of living and housing, that the younger demographic of our population in particular have chosen as top concerns.

We do not have more analysis that would explain why climate change is coming out so low as regards performance. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years because there are shifts to water down quite a lot of the climate change-related commitments, including both corporate and social responsibility in reporting and other areas of regulation. We will do more work on the MFF. We will reach out to civil society groups. One of the priority areas, in addition to support for civil society and civil society funding, will be climate change.

In other analysis we are doing separate to this poll, we have seen that reporting in Irish media on the issue of climate change has reduced in recent years. That might also be a contributing factor in public awareness and public interest.