Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

There is a long section in my brief that deals with it, but I am not going to read it out. The State does not claim to own carbon credits. Since this is a complex matter, I could read three pages here and the Deputy would think I was talking nonsense. We do not have a system of carbon farming in this country yet. A system is being developed and that will have to establish some sort of framework for certifying emissions reduction and carbon credits for people. It will also have to determine how they are traded. From the State's point of view, it is critical when talking about national emissions reduction that we can count emissions that occur on this island. They have to be counted here. It is up to the farmer if a company wants to pay him something for ESG or give some other benefit, but we have to ensure that if there is an emissions reduction in forestry, we can include it as part of the overall emissions reduction. It is not a question of ownership but of how to account for emissions. Maybe that is not a satisfactory answer, but there are things we have to figure out. There is a carbon-farming framework being developed at EU level, and it is complicated stuff. The State does not claim it owns carbon credits and will not be trading carbon credits from forestry, but we need to be able to count carbon reductions in our inventory so we can say that, overall, the State has reduced emissions by X.