Ms Sarah Clancy:

It is a big issue. This is thinking out loud in a way but if you take agriculture, which is something we have been looking at, there is a huge class analysis to be done of the farming community in Ireland. There are huge differences between small beef farmers with jobs off-farm and large dairy farms which are practically agribusinesses.

I do not know if the Dáil committee is the place to be talking tactics but in a way, it is to split those groups. There is not a big homogeneous middle class. It is about asking whose interests are involved. Campaigning tactics are always that if people firmly know what they think, you are probably wasting your time on them. People who are in doubt or changeable are the ones to work with and they eventually will change the other people's view. It is about finding where is the inroad.

In middle-class Ireland, of which I am part, many people of my class and background care about climate change and will make the changes. It is about raising those voices, because it has to happen, along with those of the marginalised who campaign because they have to in many cases and the activists, who campaign because they are fully bought in. We will not get 100% of Ireland agreeing with everything. If we have policy coherence and a Government that knows exactly what it is doing and if each Department knows what it is doing and that this is a priority, that helps. It could get voted out, of course.