Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 152:

In page 22, between lines 30 and 31, to insert the following:

"Reports on annual targets

16. (1) The Minister shall lay before the Houses of the Oireachtas a report in respect of each year in the period 2015-2050 for which an annual target has been set (a "target year").(2) The report shall state whether the annual target for the target year has been met. If the annual target has not been met, the report shall explain the reason for same.

(3) The report shall also state whether the domestic effort target has been met in the target year to which the report relates.

(4) If the domestic effort target has not been met, the report shall explain the reason for same. The report shall also contain the information mentioned in section 17.

(5) The report under this section shall be laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas no later than 31 October in the second year after the target year.".

We are seeking to have inserted a requirement for reports on annual targets. The amendment requires that the Minister shall lay before the Houses of the Oireachtas a report in respect of each year in the period 2015-2050 for which an annual target has been set. The report shall state whether the annual target for the target year has been met. If the annual target has not been met, the report shall explain the reason for same. The report shall also state whether the domestic effort target has been met in the target year to which the report relates. If the domestic effort target has not been met, the report shall explain the reason for same. The report shall also contain the information mentioned in section 17. Finally, the report under this section shall be laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas no later than 31 October in the second year after the target year.

The detailed guidelines for reports on annual targets also come from the Scottish climate change Act of 2009. The amendments are fairly self-explanatory. They set out the details of the reports that wold be carried out if we had national emissions reduction targets. Apart from the fact that it has ambitious targets, what is interesting about the Scottish Act is that it has copious detail as to how their advisory group would operate, the work it would do and the contents of the reports it would compile. There are chapters on the duties of public bodies relating to climate change mitigation, adaptation programmes, land use, forestry, energy efficiency, waste reduction and recycling. In effect, what Scotland did was write the framework for the mitigation plan into law as part of their climate legislation. This begs the question as to why we are here, six years later, discussing a Bill that has no targets and no details of any plan and specifies that the plan, whatever it consists of, does not have to exist for another two years after this Bill comes into force. By the time we have monitored our progress on our first mitigation plan the EU will be knocking on the door telling us to pay up for non-compliance.

We need joined-up thinking on the issue and we need to start taking action as soon as is humanly possible. Never has an issue hammered home the idea that everything is connected so powerfully as climate change and yet here we are shirking our responsibilities to the wider world. Anyone who has read This Changes Everythingby Naomi Klein will see how this connectivity is very important because everything is connected. It relates to many areas of how we organise society and the planet.

We are near the end of the debate on this Bill. It is not going to be the Bill we would like to have because it leaves much to be desired. One of these days a group of politicians in Government will wake up and see that things need to be different. We do not suffer from severe flooding and do not get huge hurricanes or droughts but the truth of the matter is that many parts of the world do and, sadly, we are not playing our part to change that. We seem to be walking with our eyes closed. We do not even seem to have an appetite for doing anything about it and it is very frustrating for anyone who takes a long-term vision of where we are in the world today.

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