Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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I must apologise. We were at that meeting. Unfortunately, the timing clashed but it was important for our own work to attend that meeting. I was then stuck in priority questions to the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport and I will be running out the door shortly for another engagement. No disrespect to the Minister or officials is meant; it is just one of those days.

I will make one broad point. I think the Joint Committee on Climate Action, of which Deputy Dooley and 18 others are members, as well as myself, did really good work. Even though there was not consensus on a couple of the issues about taxation, there was widespread agreement on some other measures. Critically, it provides a good roadmap for how we organise ourselves and the governance of how we will make this leap. I hope the Government will find it useful when it is drafting its national energy and climate action plan, or whatever it is called now. I do not know if it is the same as the Minister's plan that is due out around Easter. We know we have to do the national energy and climate action plan under European governance rules. I am keen for the Government to open up that process so some of what we have learned from the committee can allow other Members of this House to tease out some complex and difficult issues.

These are Revised Estimates for the present time but the State, Government and this Department in particular should be scaling up and we should be looking at completely different Revised Estimates next October for the following year, and an almost completely different Department. It should scale back and shut down the exploration division and switch some of the expertise and resources to peat restoration, for example. I have said a number of times that the Department needs to scale up to do what we want it to do with regard to energy or programme F, environment and waste management. That might include legislation needed for offshore wind licensing. We have to be quick to get the resources for that. I know from personal experience that there are approximately 250 or so civil servants in the Department. I fear that is not enough. We should be taking 300 officials from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and 200 from the Office of Public Works, and transferring them in. We should build up a Department that is at the centre of this transformational leap that we need to make.

The Minister and his Secretary General suggested in this all-of-Government action plan that the Minister's Secretary General and the Secretary General at the Department of the Taoiseach have a key role in co-ordinating and organising transition on this scale. I could go on about some of the governance recommendations for the next half an hour. The key leap is not just the Minister's Department but pulling all the agencies and regulators with it. We do things well in this country when everyone is on the same page and everyone understands that there is a long-term political commitment to the scale of change that we need to make. We are getting close to having that. I have been asking all along about where our Whitaker is. We need a Whitaker today to provide the same sort of leadership that was provided in the past in our public service for the scale of change that we need to make now. It is very substantial, it is urgent and it is almost agreed. It is not fully agreed but there is a lot of agreement in our political system. There is an opportunity and the Minister should go for it.