Mr. John McCarthy:

To follow up on the Deputy's last point, she is correct in that an adequate response to climate change cannot come from the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government or the Custom House because we all know the key sectors for emissions giving rise to climate change are in transport, energy, buildings and agriculture. Although some elements of the building trade are controlled by the Custom House, the rest are not. That was a significant factor in the approach the Government decided to take to require the sectors and the Departments leading the sectors to prepare roadmaps for the sectors. It is a fundamental principle of environmental integration that in policy development, account should be taken of the environmental aspects, including climate impacts. That is the appropriate area, as the Deputy correctly points out, for planning in those sectors, including climate planning.

The clock is already ticking for 2020, as the Deputy mentioned. As I stated earlier, even in the most optimistic of the two scenarios presented by Dr. McGovern, there is still a significant gap between where those measures will take us and where we need to be in 2020. The retrofitting of homes is led by our colleagues in the energy Department and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI. It is still going on and being funded, and there is a smaller ongoing programme in retrofitting public housing stock for better energy efficiency, which colleagues in the Department are leading.

The Deputy spoke about simple mechanisms that will help in getting buy-in from people, and they are crucial. As I mentioned, we are talking about a fundamental societal change. One of the areas we must tackle in parallel with legislation and roadmaps will be how to put in place ways to assist various players, including the public, in taking a part in becoming more climate friendly, as we have done in the past with waste and other areas. It is a matter of how to get it into the public mind and how we can get traction, as we have seen with waste recycling and recovery rates shooting up over the past decade from a very low base.

The institutional arrangements were referred to in the National Economic and Social Council, NESC, report and I will ask Dr. O'Donnell to comment on how those institutional arrangements might work.