Mr. Conor Linehan:

With regard to the timing of the committee's involvement in the legislative process, there was obviously a roadmap in November 2011. I refer to the roadmap and finalising policy and legislation. I am not sure what the reason was at the time for getting the committee involved at this stage. It is a new experiment. To some extent, this is unique legislation. Whatever is contained in it will ultimately be unique. Passing primary legislation that addresses a global environmental problem and that will have a physical and economic impact in Ireland and make a multi-decade provision for an economic transition that will have an impact on every area of economic life is a unique legislative experiment. It is probably no bad thing that the committee gets to express its views at a relatively early stage.

With regard to climate change litigation, there is an increasing amount of climate change litigation internationally in different jurisdictions. There is none that I am aware of that focused specifically on a government failing to meet a particular interim or long-term target or which tried to compel it to do more to achieve the target. There is an enormous range of climate change litigation. Much of that is emerging because legislatures are not passing domestic climate change legislation. There are various legal strategies that really take the form of legal cases to try to force governments to pass legislation. It is in the absence of domestic legislation that a lot of it is happening.

In my opening statement, I sought to outline how existence of a target will not give carte blancheto the public or interested parties to go into court at every hand's turn to say that not enough is being done, or to say they cannot have a gas or CCGT plant, or must have a wind farm because of influencing targets.

Under existing legislation, planning authorities making a decision on any application must have regard to a range of matters, including Government and ministerial policy. Since this will be Government and ministerial policy, they will have to have regard to it. It will operate at that level, so it is appropriate that the planning authorities' role should not be taken away. They must make their decisions only by reference to a particular target. After all, it is a multi-decade target. If it adds to gas emissions, the Minister can say that it can be offset, but the courts will not want to get into that type of distributive stuff.

I take the point, however, that post-McEvoy and Smith, there was a change whereby planning and development plans had to be consistent with regional planning guidelines. There has been a move away from language like "Having regard to the legislation...". It may be helpful to state "Consistent with the legislation..." instead.

The certainty of targets is one issue but there also needs to be some in-built flexibility when one is dealing with a multi-decade period.