Róisín Garvey (Green Party)
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I thank the officials for coming in. I will focus on a couple of specific areas. The climate action and energy policy unit fed into this White Paper. Did it give the Department targets? How much of that was taken on board? I am thinking specifically of the constant challenge of economic growth, the climate emergency and reducing our carbon emissions. Let us call a spade a spade - that is a huge challenge. Seeing how fickle the multinationals have become of late, especially with Meta and all the others dropping jobs like flies in Ireland, it is time for us to take the SME sector much more seriously. To date, there has been a major emphasis on the multinationals, which is understandable, but that does not make us resilient and they are not sustainable.

I have huge concerns about the LEOs. They are great in theory and there are some great LEOs but, and I got this from the horse's mouth from people running LEOs, there is no expertise in climate or energy reduction. Mentors are going in for green measures, although uptake has been slow, but they themselves admit they do not have the expertise. I brought this to the attention of then Minister, Deputy Varadkar, two years ago and he put some funding in the budget for it, but you cannot teach people how to care if those teaching do not themselves understand why it is important they should care, or what they can do to make a difference to people's bills. That is the way. Teachers cannot teach something unless they know it themselves. We need to upskill people in LEOs, specifically around climate, energy reduction and, I will add, biodiversity, which nobody has mentioned yet. I did a lot of voluntary work with large companies - I will not name them but they were significant employers - to help them reduce their waste around single-use cups. I designed things for them free of charge. I noticed these vast areas of lovely cut lawns at these companies. Is biodiversity coming to the Department too? We have an emergency in respect of that.

It is a huge Department and probably the single most influential Department in the country, in some ways, because it covers everything. Enterprise, energy and use of space come into it and, although this sounds very small compared with a big White Paper, farmers' markets, which are struggling. It is always a battle to set them up. If we are serious about resilience, local economies and local jobs, we should put farmers' markets on a pedestal and make it easy for them. So many farmers' markets are battling with local authorities and battling for space, with zero supports. You would be surprised how many jobs farmers' markets keep going. It is amazing. The ones in the villages and towns that have them are so good in so many ways, not just as regards jobs but community resilience, not to mention the social and mental glue they are for people. Are there specific targets in the White Paper around fossil fuel reduction or increasing biodiversity?

I know this is not really to do with the Department - it is more under the Department of Higher and Further Education, Research, Innovation and Science - but I struggle to find proper information on it. Guidance counsellor associations are looking for and struggling to find proper information on apprenticeships, which we need if we are serious about employment in green jobs and green economies. Guidance counsellors are looking for that information. I know many of them personally and am meeting the head of their association next week. They keep hearing about these new apprenticeships, and green economy apprenticeships and jobs, and would like much more information and knowledge on that. Maybe something the Department could do with the guidance counsellors' association is to let counsellors know how to steer students into the areas where we will need them, past 2030 and into 2040.

I worry about the fact it does not seem to be anybody's job in the local authorities to develop jobs in the county. If you go to the director of services for economic affairs, he says it is the LEOs. The LEOs say it is not them because they have to focus on developing companies that are preparing to export. I am not sure where to send people, or what we are doing to support indigenous industries that are small and want to stay in the Irish market. They might expand but that is not their mission in life. Their mission in life is to survive and supply jobs.

Many small businesses do not need any more mentoring by LEOs; they need financial supports. People in business for 20 years do not need to be told what to do. They probably should be paid to be mentors because they know what to do. Many of them get annoyed with all these offerings and more and more mentoring. These people are experts and the ones with the high knowledge of how to keep a small company going in a fluctuating economy. The LEOs need to look at that. They should offer mentoring to new businesses of course, but not to people who have been doing it for 20 years.