Professor Barry McMullin:

An Taisce, as a nominated member of the Irish Environmental Network, is very pleased and appreciative of the opportunity to appear before the committee. We have provided a detailed written submission, so in these opening remarks I will confine myself to the national mitigation plan's overriding objectives and overall fitness for purpose.

We agree with the quite trenchant criticisms of the plan that have been expressed by the Climate Change Advisory Council but we would prefer to be even more plain speaking about it. It is our view that the national mitigation plan, as currently constituted, is so fundamentally flawed that it should actually be withdrawn and reformulated in its entirety. This process could be integrated with the preparation of the national energy and climate plans, NECPs, that are required this year anyway. We think they should be formally integrated together in recognition that the current plan is not fit for purpose. The underlying basis of the plan - and our colleagues in Trócaire have already referred to this - is the quantitative climate mitigation targets adopted originally in the national policy position of 2014. We are particularly concerned that these self-adopted national targets are now clearly inadequate and obsolete. It is widely agreed that the current collective commitments expressed by the parties to the Paris Agreement fall far short of what is required to meet that agreement's temperature goals. As a good faith participant in the agreement, it is therefore essential that the mitigation targets in the Irish national policy should be urgently updated to reflect this new reality. Concretely, we propose, as applies to carbon dioxide in particular - and there are different nuances to different greenhouse gases - that the national target should be expressed quantitatively as a limit on our national "fair share" of the global carbon budget, as it is called. This basically sets a limit on the amount of carbon dioxide we as a nation will ever emit at any time into the future, a fixed limit within which we guarantee we will live. We will have exited completely from fossil fuels by that time. Just such an approach has recently been proposed by the European Parliament for adoption at European level as part of the governance regulation.

Based on our own assessment of the scale and urgency of action that this now implies, we suggest that the required rate of mitigation, that is, the rate at which carbon dioxide emissions in particular must be reduced year on year, is now an absolute minimum of 6% per year and, to take proper regard of equity, global justice and a prudential approach to the uncertainties in climate change, should probably be closer to 12% per year. A very rapid exit is now required. This fundamentally changes the way one would approach the matter and the steps one would take, and we need to be clear about that. This would absolutely require wide social understanding, acceptance and co-operation. We think the model of the Citizens' Assembly can be scaled up as part of the national dialogue or otherwise, and many lessons can be learned from that. We are very heartened by the response from the citizens in the Citizens' Assembly, and we commend that to the committee as a model.

In conclusion, we really are pleased and delighted that the committee is engaging with the national mitigation plan and with this issue and holding hearings on it. If there is anything further we can do at any stage to support that, we would be delighted to do so. I will hand over to my colleague, Mr. Oisín Coghlan, now.