Professor John Sweeney:

As someone at the coalface of climate change, the Deputy is very much aware of the importance of the topic we are dealing with today. Ongoing sea level change, which we now know will last until the 23rd century, will threaten many of those coastal communities and habitats. The more we can do about it in the short and medium term the better.

What I was referring to in terms of sanctions was that the Bill has no real accountability. Nothing in the Bill provides that when the carbon budget is exceeded, the Minister or the Government will have to do remedial action or will bear any responsibility. Ministers, on average, may be in office for two to three years. Governments may be in office for four or five years but this is a long-term issue where we need some guidance in terms of accountability to be built into the Bill. I suggested it might be worth considering a provision that if a Department exceeds its sectoral budget, it will be forced to suffer some financial penalty in terms of its budgetary expenditure and that might be the necessity to buy carbon quota. It is only one of many suggestions. It could be that the Minister for Finance would penalise it by the same amount relative to its ongoing budget. We need some accountability to be built into the Bill. In the case of a carbon budget being exceeded, there is no real accountability to take the next carbon budget and reduce it by a corresponding amount. There is no accountability on the part of a Minister who may only be in office for a few months to take the hard decisions necessary to ensure we do not go further into the red in the next five years. That is important. I am not being drastic about it but there must be an incentive for Departments. As we know, Departments can be mini empires on their own and it can be hard to bang heads together between different Departments, which is why I have always argued the Department of the Taoiseach should have a role in changing that. We need to have something to make accountability important in this Bill.