Mr. Conor O'Neill:

I cannot believe how many questions there have been about tax. It is like Christmas. On the loss and damage fund specifically, we try to come at this in a spirit of constructive criticism. We are trying to focus on what is still be improved. It is important, however, to recognise the role Ireland played. Ms N'Zi-Hassane referred at the beginning of the session to the role played by the committee. I appeared before the committee last year. It is fair to say the issue of loss and damage was not as deeply circulated across many parliaments throughout the world. A clear demand came from this Parliament to the Irish Government. It was not an accident that when it came down to the lead negotiation for the whole EU bloc, it was Ireland, at ministerial level, as well as senior civil servants, that played an important role in getting that agreement over the line. Civil society was constructive in recognising that was an historic moment. In essence, it was the first time the global north in particular said it was going to do this and set up a fund. We now have this kind of empty bucket. The past 12 months have involved detailed technical negotiations on how we can fill that bucket and do so fairly. Something coming out of that process should be rubber-stamped in the next two weeks but I will keep my fingers crossed as one can never be sure.

On the fund in particular, yesterday I spoke to one of the lead negotiators from the Department of Foreign Affairs, who emphasised it is extremely fraught. We could see that from following the technical negotiations . The previous climate finance targets were better in certain respects in terms of their specificity than the text that has been sent to COP. It is an achievement in terms of the political centre internationally, where the committee is, and how difficult it was to get agreement on even basic matters.

Certain advances have been made. There is a floor, for example. It is a kind of a prioritisation in the fund for least developed countries and states, which is important. There is a representation held on the governing body that should direct these funds for those same countries. They were two things that Ireland prioritised and brought to the table.

At the same time, if you look at the text, what is being sent to COP is a voluntary fund with no clear obligation to pay into, no specific amount of money that ought to be raised and no deadline for when that should be done. If the Irish Government put a plan like that in front of this committee or Parliament then people would, understandably, say that it is not convincing or good enough. That is not supposed to be a criticism of Ireland because that might be where the floor is at the moment but a lot of our partners are, understandably, very worried about a fund that is designed like that and whether it is going to be able to provide the finance needed at scale. That is where the national action comes in.

I will finish with the following because I am conscious of time. The COP process is really useful because it gives a yearly focusing of minds, of Governments, Parliaments, journalists and civil society on climate but the policies do not change in Dubai, Egypt or Brazil. They change in the Parliament here and other Parliaments around the world when you get home. It is easy to be frustrated at the COP process and the multilateral processes like that but what COP gives you is the floor. What COP gives you, is this is the position that pretty much every single country in the world can agree on by consensus. From Ireland to Iceland, to India, everyone signs on to this. What matters then is what happens on the Monday morning on the day we get back, and finding out how far above the floor can we go. That is what we are trying to do with this report being propositional. If what we get is a fund that sounds good but lacks detail, then we have to fill in the detail and our contribution, in Ireland, can be to do that with some specificity here.