Professor Michael McMahon:

Can I also chip in a few things? I want to be very clear that in the report, the opening statement and at the conference Mr. Conroy mentioned, we were not the people standing up making statements about whether or not we have done enough. I have qualifications in economics, not in climate science, but we had people such as Marie Donnelly, chair of the Climate Change Advisory Council, Lisa Ryan, professor in energy economics at University College Dublin, Hannah E. Daly, professor in sustainable energy at University College Cork, and Laura Burke, director general of the Environmental Protection Agency, and they are the people who are giving us their assessment of how close or not we are to achieving targets. I agree and I tried to stress the fact that these changes do not have to break the economy but they have to be done in a planned and phased way in order to make it manageable. However, they are manageable. Part of the concern from sectors like agrifood or others is because they see change coming but they have a lot of uncertainty about how they will bare the costs versus someone else. There is a role there for Government to make clear what supports will be there. In fact, a bit part of the supports we mentioned in our note are related to supports for the farming sector and that is a policy decision that would be usefully made soon but in a sort of joined-up way. Globally warming is the title we often give it. For Ireland, global warming means warmer summers, colder winters and possibly more water because we will not have the same Gulf Stream protection. We have to plan for the drainage and the water aspects of that. We can do so if we invest in a manageable and phased way without breaking the economy but we also need to have policy take the lead by providing certainty.