Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)
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Regarding the green transition, the fund for which the Senator mentioned, there have been 340 interventions for audits from January to May. Absolutely, that needs to ramp up significantly on a national level. We will provide the impetus to do that. Obviously the LEOs have a service level agreement with Enterprise Ireland in terms of adjudicating on their performance and how they go about their business. As I said, we have a lot of work in the SME package tailored toward the SME sector and encouraging it to go green. Nationally, we continue at pace with our decarbonisation through our €300 million fund. We have a responsibility for about 9.7% of emissions in the industrial sector. We have done a huge amount of work to tackle that, be it decarbonisation of cement, the industrial heat roadmap or ensuring that big and small companies can transform how they go about doing their basic business and get the opportunity and research, in conjunction with tertiary education, to inject productivity and more green methodologies into their processes. That will be critical. We will continue that funding, which is very important, through the LEO structure.

Also, it is critical to note that the climate toolkit for businesses has issued about 12,400 plans, as I mentioned earlier on. Again, we need to continue ramping up activity in that area and show people this is a necessity. Second, as there is so much change in supply chains and what many companies require, it is important that our SME sector really embraces this change. It will be a demand into the future, including on the part of consumers. We can see that starting at the very top. It will absolutely trickle down to the smallest SME in the country. That is how we have to work, encourage and ensure that we meet our targets by 2030.