Ms Colette Bennett:

I will be brief. On the subject of tools for assessment, the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform has a framework in which it can look at policies and their impact in other policy areas and Government Departments. They demonstrated that to the National Economic and Social Council, NESC, working group on the well-being framework. That is perhaps something to explore further with them. That capacity is there, as is the template. That would lend itself to that whole budgeting piece, in terms of how it is brought in to frame the budget as opposed to tagging the budget.

The piece around local development and local authority climate action plans is very welcome, but given how centralised our Government is the leadership has to be led by central government. They have to be properly funded and resourced. The staff need to be there to implement it. They have to be enforced where enforcement mechanisms are appropriate. There is a lot to do from the perspective of central government to get the local development plans up and running.

Finally, on climate finance we have been arguing, along with others, for the decoupling of climate finance from our ODA commitments, because they were agreed under separate declarations and agreements. They are essentially separate. However, the Overseas Development Institute, ODI, published a report in 2021 stating that at that point Ireland had paid just 33% of its climate finance share. Even if, therefore, we met our commitment to another €80 million we would only be meeting 26% of our share. There is a huge amount of work to be done.