Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

It is wrong to look at the Kyoto Protocol targets and the issue of the climate change strategy in a negative way. They would provide a great opportunity for this country if we had a Government with the imagination and will to act upon them. I refer to the opportunity and challenge to become self-sufficient in energy production, to change our agricultural focus from the production of food to the production of raw material for energy, to move to the top in terms of energy conservation and to have an environment of which all of us can be proud rather than the litany of embarrassments to which we are subjected week in, week out on the publication of every new report by the European Commission or some European agency. These reports point, rightly, to the abject failure of the Government to deliver on the important issue of climate change and its own climate change strategy. It has failed by its own standards.

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