Mr. Joe Boland:

I will reiterate the importance of being strategic and what is expected of the 30,000 local authority staff and 950, I think, elected members. Building the capacity of the sector is key. We have about 18,000 people trained between elected members and staff, and I can go into the training structure in more detail. There are different methods used to calculate staff numbers. In the case of senior staff, elected members have a heading in the training plan, which is funded by the Department of the Environment, Communications and Climate Action, and is called championing leadership. There are other streams to that as well.

Policies and legislation are in place. The whole bottom-up aspect is very important and particularly involves municipal districts, Tidy Towns fora and different fora at local level and public partnership networks, PPNs. That is very important when encouraging innovation at local level. There are community capacity building pieces, which are very important. As for what some local authorities have, Kildare County Council has a graduate who works full-time with local communities so there is a whole link with creativity in the arts, for example. That is just a very high-level overview.

Another important point is strategic collaboration and reaching out at other entities at national, regional or local level. One example of strategic collaboration is the GAA green clubs initiative and there are other examples that we can progress.

One must realise that while there are challenges, as the Chairman has rightly pointed out, there are significant opportunities, particularly in the area of economic opportunities, which is an issue we can go into in more detail. We have done a lot of work on that aspect. A lot of that work can be rolled out through the local enterprise offices. We must also not forget just transition and that no one is left behind.

Mr. Mahon mentioned governance. Most local authorities have a climate action team and an energy efficiency officer. Climate action is a standing item on management team agendas, corporate policy group agendas and even on the agendas of full councils. There is also a strategic policy committee on climate action. Therefore, the whole governance piece is very important.

Earlier the adaptation piece was mentioned. Our adaptation plans were adopted in time. We have a lot of statistics and roughly about 85% of the actions nationally have been either delivered or are in the process of being delivered. As Mr. Mahon has outlined, the focus henceforth will be on mitigation and reducing the carbon footprint. We can go into those aspects in more detail. A key important message is that we must be strategic. I have referred to the big-ticket items and we can go into them in more detail.

The Chairman made worthwhile observations and I appreciate there can be disagreement at times. The strategic piece is very important, however, because there are significant challenges ahead, particularly in the context of the new Government targets.

I hope that is helpful.