Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I welcome the Minister of State and thank him for his presentation. I am interested in the output indicators that have been presented to us. I think the Minister of State needs to look at them afresh. There are two for the EPA: the number of environmental and radiological decisions and the number of air quality monitoring visits. The EPA is an organisation of 473 people. It is delivering a range of services that are not adequately reflected in these indicators. The other aspect that worries me is that under context indicators and impact, the data offered to us for greenhouse gas emissions are from 2020. I know the Department is constrained by delivery but 2021 is published. We need to get more timely data from the EPA. If we are to have Ministers in here to account for their stewardship, we need a more accurate picture. That is more a comment than anything else. When were these output indicators last reviewed? It seems that they are slightly out of date for what we are confronting in the climate action programme.

On governance, to what extent in 2022 were the climate action plan deliverables on target and delivered? The 2023 plan is now published. To what extent are we off target on some of the 2022 actions? How is the governance system dealing with that? The sharper question in the medium term is the proposed approach in respect of Departments that miss their climate budget. We will undoubtedly see some Departments performing well and some badly. We will call in Ministers, no doubt, and examine what has gone wrong or right. If a sector misses its climate target, how is it proposed to deal with that? Will there be a financial or other penalty if they are proposing that they should carry over and borrow from the next climate budget to make up for what went wrong in this one? How is that going to work in practice? A lot of this will come down to the level of accountability and the consequences for not making a move on some of the policy actions. We could have a picture of policy actions not being delivered and potentially no consequences beyond coming in here and being asked why it happened and the Minister doing the best he or she can to explain. We need an effective governance model if the targets are to become real.

I would be interested in the progress on the land use research. The research the Department did last year dramatically changed our picture. We thought land use was generating approximately 4.8 million tonnes and now it is heading for 11 million tonnes. Does the Minister of State know why the estimates were so far wrong in the past? Is any light being shed on the potential actions in a land use strategy as a result of this new research?