Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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Could the Deputy show me another Department that has doubled in size in four years? That is what ours has done. We need to go further. One of the biggest problems we have had in the past four years has been that An Bord Pleanála had a very difficult period. We all know the reasons behind this. The body was not resourced enough. It has since been resourced, and my understanding, particularly regarding offshore energy, is that it has the necessary staff now to take in the six planning applications. One has already gone in and the other five are to go in during the coming weeks. The board will make quick decisions on these, I expect. Therefore, many of the resource issues have been dealt with.

There is another resource constraint, a financial one. Particularly in transport, this is going to be our biggest challenge because projects worth €100 billion are in development and we have €35 billion in the capital budget for transport. We have to prioritise, and again that has not been hugely popular. One of the greatest difficulties I have had as a Minister in trying to meet our climate ambition is people saying we should not be prioritising the way we are, but it has been the right thing to do.

On Connecting Ireland, the National Transport Authority has been provided with significant additional staffing resources. I agree with the Deputy in that the State had not scaled up, but I would argue that the record of the past three or four years shows huge increases in staff numbers in my Department, the SEAI, the EPA, the National Transport Authority and An Bord Pleanála. All five of those agencies have probably been the key bottleneck points, in addition to local authorities. We provided 250 additional staff for the active travel offices in local authorities and there was a similar large increase in the number of climate officers in local authorities. Therefore, our problem has not been getting additional staff resources from the system. Our real problem has been getting the planning decisions in a timely manner and getting public support for many of the big changes we need to make, which is a challenge.