Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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Without trading the books metaphor, I will use Ms Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economistto raise two points.

It is looking at economics in a new way whereby we have to live in a safe space that is both socially sustainable, on one side of the doughnut, and environmentally sustainable, and creating that safe space in which to live. It is a good book and well worth reading. It questions how economics is taught. Economics as taught is all about profit maximisation, growth and material measures of progress, and that is the first thing that must change. I arrived late to the meeting because we were setting up a climate advisory committee next door. That is going to do interesting work, including inviting the Department's Secretary General to appear before it in the autumn, to consider our new national energy and climate action plan. We must have a first draft of the plan for the European Union by the end of this year and finalise and sign off on it next year. From my knowledge of what is happening in Brussels that will be the primary plan and we will have to vary our national mitigation plan to ensure it works.

At a meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment yesterday we heard the latest analysis from civil servants. Not only are we going to miss our 2020 targets by a country mile, we will be 50 million tonnes short in 2030. It is clear from the analysis that has been presented by the European Commission and experts such as Marie Donnelly, a civil servant in the Commission, that we are facing €500 million a year in fines. We are giving out €500 million in the fund announced by the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, yesterday, but that is the amount in annual fines we will face in the not too distant future because of this issue. In addition, everybody I spoke to with an expertise in this area at the national economic dialogue admitted that while the national planning framework got it right in terms of having to bring development back to the core, going low carbon and strengthening local government involvement in decision-making, the national development plan threw all that away and reverts to the same old model. With 63 motorway and national roads projects, the national development plan is sprawl as we go. Everything must change. It is neither environmentally nor socially sustainable. The commuting times and congestion we are about to experience will cripple our economy. That and housing are the two big constraints and they are connected.

How can the Minister set out a budget when he knows that the national development plan on which it is based is no longer fit for purpose and must change? It is a serious economic issue because if we do not do that not only will we be seen, as we are, in international leagues as one of the worst countries on climate it will also have a material effect on the budget. The Commission is not going to go easy on us on this because we have no capital left. We have used up all our political capital in trying to get a soft deal and the European Union and others are saying that Ireland can no longer do that. We are going to get hit by those fines. How do we change our national development plan and the capital plans to start making the changes we have to make to move towards the low carbon economy, which will be a better economy in a range of ways?

I wish to make another point.