Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach's answer that the committee on climate change and the green economy has met only once gives the lie to the claims he made earlier about the Government's commitment to employment creation because clearly when it comes to doing the practical work to deliver on promises the Taoiseach made in the programme for Government about the potential to create a huge number of jobs in the renewable energy sector, the green economy and through NewERA - a figure of 100,000 jobs was mentioned - the committee is not even meeting on a regular basis to discuss how the Government can deliver on them. Contrary to the Taoiseach's earlier suggestions, some of us on this side of the House have been very specific in making suggestions on how the Government could deliver on its own promises to deliver jobs in the green economy. During the debate on the Private Members' motion I tabled on forestry we argued about the huge potential to create tens of thousands of jobs if we delivered on our own agreed targets for afforestation, a public works programme in this regard, provided for investment through semi-State companies in areas such as renewable energy and afforestation. The Government speaks about the pay-as-you-save scheme, but it has not rolled it out. Many jobs could be created through a major installation programme and it could contribute to meeting our climate change targets for 2020 and 2050 which the EPA now believes we will not do because the Government is not taking it seriously as an environmental issue or an area in which we could generate desperately needed employment. The hope that it will arrive from the heavens in the form of foreign direct investment if we are nice and do not ask companies to pay any tax is not materialising. We have told the Taoiseach that we need to use semi-State companies as major vehicles for public investment in public works programmes in strategic areas of industry, particularly the green economy. The Government is failing to do this and even failing to meet to discuss it. This is useless.

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