Ms Ellie Kinney:

There are additional layers such as the lack of other forms of transparency. There is no framework within this to improve European emissions reporting when it comes to militaries. That is therefore a whole additional layer of a lack of transparency that will come alongside with this. Across the EU there is no standardised approach to reporting so we see a real variation in the quality of reporting. When I refer to the variation in the quality of reporting, those who are on the upper scale of doing reporting well are still not doing well. It is a scale from moderately okay to terrible. This is what we are talking about here. Equally within the UNFCCC, it is even worse. There are very few EU countries that report comprehensively within the UNFCCC.

I also want to point to something else within this. We talk about the repercussions for Ireland and we keep mentioning the UNFCCC. It is important to think about the role that Ireland has played internationally with its disarmament and peace-focused approach to multilateralism. This is very much not the game that the EU is playing in COP at the moment. It has become an increasingly hostile actor at the COPs. It was instrumental in the decision to allocate a really disappointing amount of climate finance which was considerably less than global south countries were asking for. This keeps coming up. It came up last year and I know it will come up at this year's COP that one can see EU countries or the EU on the whole funnelling money into military spending and not delivering on climate finance. It is not delivering on climate finance promises but also not committing to giving any where near as much as is deserved for the amount of emissions it has put into the situation we are in now.

Another interesting layer in this is that we see the EU prioritising military spending over climate finance on a global south level, but also what is happening here with this very proposal is the EU prioritising military spending over climate funding at a community level in Europe. It is coming out of just transition funding that could be beneficial towards Irish communities and communities across the EU that is instead being directed to military spending, something that will only in turn worsen the climate crisis. At the same time we will not have the reporting available to tell us quite how bad it is. We will just be reliant on the sort of work we do around pulling together estimations which will attempt to plug the gap of transparency that currently exists within military culture.