Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Minister, but the cost benefit analyses within the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform are out of date and at fault. We need a whole-of-Government approach, but if the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport does not seem to have the slightest interest and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine wants to be counted out, we have a problem. If so, why is the Minister playing this as a question of ambition being the problem? In response to criticisms of the national mitigation plan, why did he claim that our ambition and economic analysis were the core of the problem when the core is actually in the heart of Government, the public service and Departments that do not care about climate change and do not see it as an opportunity for this country to modernise and lead? Surely that is what we need to draw attention to, not an excess of ambition in government, but a lack thereof. That is the core of the problem and must change, starting with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and its economic analysis, with which I have fundamentally disagreed over the years.

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