Dr. John O'Neill:

The Deputy mentioned the seven adaptation plans across the 12 sectors, which is an important point to raise on the policy coherence side of things. We have a national steering committee in place with all the sectors, that is, all the Departments which can interact on that, and it met only yesterday, in fact. It meets quite frequently, and the whole idea is to have that cross-sectoral interaction at the sectoral level. Taking the governance point a bit further, the local authorities are also represented on that group, as are the regional assemblies. As Mr. Griffin mentioned in his opening statement, the Minister made €10 million available this year to set up four regional climate action offices, which were set up on a regional basis initially to deal with the climate risks. Cork County Council is dealing with the south west, while Mayo County Council is dealing with the north-west region. Dublin City Council is co-ordinating for the Dublin region, while Kildare County Council is controlling the midlands. The role of those regional offices is to co-ordinate activity on the climate action agenda with all the local authorities in their respective regions.

The initial focus of these offices is on adaptation. Not only do the sectors have to do their own sectoral plans for adaptation by September next year, but the local authorities have the same deadline. The idea behind the local authority offices is to put some capacity building at the local and regional level. It has been mentioned several times as part of the overall climate action agenda. It will span not just the adaptation side but will include the mitigation side as well.