Dr. Robert Mooney:

I thank the Deputy for the points. I will just build on the points made already. As I said earlier today, at the core of the national dialogue is the establishment of the social contract on climate action. What this really means, as Mr. Walshe said, is the recognition that there are core responsibilities of the State to provide infrastructure, supports, and accessibility. Only when it is accessible to a broad range of people and especially people with disabilities can we talk about things like behavioural change and people taking up specific line of actions. This is only when they are accessible. That is clearly recognised in the work that we do.

Other points were raised, including transport, the cost of living and so on. Equally, one of the purposes of the climate action plan being a whole-of-government programme and establishing specific acceleration delivery task forces across these areas, including transport, the built environment, and land use is to bring together the right people from across these different Departments to ask what we are doing around climate action, what the key barriers to action are, what we need to do to accelerate and deliver these in a very practical and real sense, and how we measure that. This holds those policies leads and the Ministers accountable to that at that level. Equally, I very much appreciate we must also look at how it is delivered at a local level and how it is measured.

A core part of the local authority climate action plan programme is the recognition that each local authority area has different challenges and different demographics, and that climate action needs to reflect exactly what the nature of the local authority is. Those local authority climate action plans have the capacity to reflect those particular challenges and the national requirements to deliver on our ambitions to become carbon neutral.

As Ms Gilmartin mentioned, we are trying to bring a lot of these core elements together, bringing the right policy leads together to develop key policy initiatives and actions to deliver them and linking the local and national delivery. One of the core reasons the climate action plan is delivered annually is so we can engage actively with a broad range of people across society, identify the barriers for them delivering on climate action, and reflect that in the next iteration of the climate action plan. It is a very fast evolving space but we have the mechanisms to ensure this is not like a five-year plan where we do not come back to it. This is about engaging actively with people every year, listening to understand the challenges, addressing them and iteratively changing the actions we are trying to take.