Ms Sadhbh O'Neill:

I am willing to have a go. I may not be entirely representative of all my colleagues. Regarding the UNFCCC question, whatever about the legal interpretation of it, which I am sure Dr. Kelleher will outline, by any metric Ireland is using up way more than our fair share of the planet's finite resources and carbon budget. Whether it is in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, the basket of six greenhouse gases emissions per capita, GDP per capita, carbon dioxide emissions per capita, energy use per capita or resources consumed per capita, we are way above the European average, and this is already very high. The significance of this is that it is our total ecological footprint that we need to consider, that is, the total carbon footprint, and not just the carbon budget impact.

Senator Higgins is absolutely correct in saying that our ultimate obligation under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is to prevent dangerous anthropogenic warming. There is a differentiation between the responsibilities, obligations and commitments of developed countries versus those of developing countries. Ireland is clearly a very wealthy country. We have the potential to make this rapid transition, particularly on the energy side, happen fast. Ultimately, then, what needs to be done is a massive capital turnover and this must be done much faster than would normally be the case. We are talking about radically changing our infrastructure and our energy system. The acceleration of this process requires upscaling in renewable energy. Upscaling the renewables aspect is critical to delivering the solution to the sectoral decarbonisation challenges in heating and transport. There is a real danger, I think, that we might miss those targets because of the failure to do so.

We could look at the planning issue that exists in this context, but it is really more about policy and sequencing and putting everything in place to deliver the target. Much detailed guidance is available from industry and planning experts and from the legal experts with the committee today. They can advise on all of this. It is not, therefore, about sacrificing anything but about having team spirit and recognising that this is our number one challenge. Just delivering on the renewables, however, is not going to deliver everything that needs to be done. We still need to scale up our retrofitting programme. Interestingly, the EU obligation is to target the worst-performing housing, so this is an opportunity to address energy poverty. These two areas, and at least it is two and not five, are the ones I think could be taken as the priority areas to move forward with immediately.