Ms Sarah Clancy:

Sorry about that. I was uncustomarily silent there.

In response to the question about the sustainable development goals, a few other concepts and internationally agreed or nationally agreed ideas, one of the things we find within our PPN - this is contrary to what others say - is that by the time we have explained the public sector duty, the sustainable development goals, the just transition concept and so on, people have lost the will to live. That is our problem. I am not talking about when we are preaching to the converted but when we are trying to convert the unconverted. On that, the more concepts we introduce like that, quite often the further we can get from talking about what is happening to our people in our communities. There needs to be a way of using these such that they do not become another barrier to people's participation. That is not contradicting the ideologies or the work that has gone into them, but what we find is that if we try to convince our community and voluntary sector on climate action and they are not involved, by the time we have gone through that, we have lost them, whereas if we say we would like something to happen around, let us say, the Ennis post office field, we can keep people's interest on that and possibly introduce the wider concepts as part of that process. It works the other way around in that the concepts that might be useful can be probably introduced after the practical applications.

As for the funding and the resources, I am absolutely not point-scoring, but €60 million over three years that was allocated for the community climate action fund is equal per year to the amount greyhound racing gets. I know that that keeps coming up, but the climate action fund is not a big fund for the times we are in. There is €19 million for greyhound racing and €20 million for communities climate action. Lots of the PPNs have been involved in applying for projects under that grant, and I see that three of the PPNs are linked in partnership projects happening under the community climate action fund, but if we could get one key thing coming out of this meeting, it would be a whole-of-government approach. That means that our agriculture policy and our planning decisions would be linked to climate action, that climate action would come on top and that socio-economic rights for all marginalised communities would come just underneath that. Economic development has to be relegated beneath that because at the moment we have economic development which may deliver us the other goals or may not. That is the problem we have at the moment. If our climate action will be only the crumbs from private industry, it will not work. I think our communities know that. Our communities fully understand that. There is a lot of resistance even to wind energy in Clare. I do not personally agree with that resistance but I understand where it comes from. It is because wind energy is being done on an extractive basis. One would think a renewable resource could not be done on that basis, but it is, in almost the same way in which fossil fuels were mined for. The community was given a few crumbs and away they go. We need a regenerative approach happening in all those areas: climate action at the top, socio-economic rights coming underneath that and economic development, which is obviously necessary to ensure we have the finances, coming in and complementing the two on the top.

I fully agree with the point made about issue of the pilot projects. I am absolutely delighted and despairing to see a pilot project in community development programmes from the Department of Rural and Community Development being rolled out this year. I am delighted to see it because we so badly need it, but it is not a pilot project. We have had 40 years of community development projects in Ireland that were pretty much disbanded under the austerity years. We are back here with a pilot of something we tried that worked extremely well but was defunded under austerity. That is what people find frustrating. We will not get climate action without community development. If we think of marginalised communities, even just in their hierarchy of needs, while many of them are clued in, if you are trying to deal with the immediate thing you need today, you cannot say, "I wonder what this place will look like for my children". That is where community development approaches that build the power of those communities to understand the structural analysis of their circumstances are needed. I know that that was probably like my speech for running for President, but it is completely related.

There are two things probably worth mentioning here today because there is a lot of really good work being done. Sinéad Mercier has done really good work for the trade union movement on what a just transition might look like in Ireland. That work is not getting enough attention or application at the moment.

The second thing is that while working for the Think-tank for Action on Social Change, TASC, Seán McCabe did a really good project on people's transition and on how climate action can happen without waiting for communities to become devotees and buy into it. Both of those are really worth-----