Mr. Seán McCabe:

I am happy to jump in. I totally get the Deputy's point about larger countries. I will tell a little anecdote. I spent two years working in a hospice in Calcutta in India and I saw the effects of energy poverty there. In fact, one of the communities where the hospice was built burnt to the ground, due to someone trying to link their shanty to an overhead power cable in some rudimentary manner. It caught fire and burnt 200 people out of their homes. While we can look at the enormous collective carbon footprints of these places, as individuals their footprints are much lower than ours. Our personal footprints are much larger than anyone in China or India, though much lower than people in the US, so we have to keep that under consideration, but it is a key point.

On the Deputy's first point, personally, I would absolutely borrow to save the planet but it is not really the planet that is in trouble; it is us. The planet will be grand but we cannot be held back by human constructions when the laws of thermodynamics are what we will actually be held to account on in this crisis. We cannot continue the way we are going. We need to radically change course. All signals from Europe seem to be that a green recovery will be supported. As the Deputy mentioned earlier, even the concept of excluding green infrastructure from the fiscal rules bodes very well. It comes back to the points made on transport earlier. We should be dreaming as big as we can in terms of transport. A railway network across the whole country, and linking villages big and small with light rail, will transform the country in a decade. It would be unbelievable and would be great for all of us. It is possible. The money would be accessible to us if we went about it the right way. That is my perspective.