Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I can only imagine the complexity of 169 targets across scores of Departments and agencies. It is a truly formidable task to try to co-ordinate those in a coherent way. One of my suggestions, on which the witnesses could comment, concerns each newly-appointed Minister having to provide a strategy statement within six months. Under the 1997 Act, there is supposed to be a rotating evaluation of programmes within those Departments. That has fallen into disuse. I suggest that this is a tool that could be used very effectively to influence how Departments embed the SDGs in policymaking. The strategy statement must go to the Government. Every Department, including that which the witnesses represent, gets the opportunity to have an input. This seems to provide a high-level tool to allow the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications to penetrate into whether a Department is seriously failing to address issues, as others have mentioned, and is just ticking boxes. I suggest that the Department revisit the Act. The Act is a legal framework and Departments are obliged to follow it, as is the Cabinet. It does provide some additional instruments for the Department.

Mr. Carberry knows I have an interest in the circular economy strategy. To my mind, this may serve to illustrate some of the problems in this regard. As I recall, the Circular Economy and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2022 commits to circular economy strategies in many sectors. When I table questions to Ministers, however, the reality is that there is no sense that they are engaging at all with the development of a circular economy strategy. It is being shunted back to the witnesses' Department or the EPA. This suggests that there are barriers in the system which the Department must address. We provided it with this power only in recent times. It may be necessary for the Department to revisit it with us and to ask where these strategies are at and how stand the targets for reuse and the others in the food and construction sectors, for example. In the Oireachtas, there is a sense that those are not emerging fast enough. We met representatives of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and there was a sense that it has a hand-off approach and is waiting for Europe to come up with a solution. Is there a way in which our committee and the witnesses' Department could perhaps co-operate in exploiting the opportunities in legislation already passed by the Houses to build momentum?