Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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The Deputy makes a really important point about how we are going to move the dial.

He has acknowledged, as I have often said before, that Government cannot fund the level of change that we need. Much of the change that we need is good in itself. It pays for itself and produces a better, healthier environment and a more sustainable relationship with nature. We will definitely have to think about how we persuade people to make the necessary investments. I do not think we will always increase the grant levels in all cases by any means. The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland sees grants as an entry-level method to prime the pump. We need to come up with self-sustaining ways to fund it and ways in which we can get smart finance in and make it easier for people to undertake some of these investments. It talks about behavioural economics and building out our capacities to leverage change.

Regulatory change will also have a role to play to get people to think differently, such as with the near-zero energy buildings or the requirement that all employers with more than 20 car parking spaces will have to have electric chargers by 2025. Those sorts of nudges do not cost the State anything. They may cost the private sector something but they are key enabling technologies for the sort of changes that we have to make. Carbon pricing is another element of that. When I drove in this morning, even though I have a plug-in electric vehicle, I was still generating carbon. I am not paying for that carbon. There is a case that setting a trajectory for carbon prices will help people to make decisions about whether they choose electric, go for retrofit heat pumps or whatever else they change. There will be many elements in the mix to bring about the change.

With respect to the Deputies here, there is a sense that there is a broad political consensus that this needs to be done, is one of the challenges that we face as a community, and that we need to get behind the Citizens' Assembly as a process that has leveraged significant change in our community in the past, even things that we would not have dreamt of being possible ten years ago. We have been able to mobilise change and the model that is being used here with the Citizens' Assembly followed by the committee's work has helped us to mobilise change by citizens and I hope it can on this occasion again.