Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I look forward to seeing the outcome of the Oireachtas committee's work. I hope that will be done on an all-party basis and not on a partisan basis. We are much more likely to see it produce a valuable outcome if it adopts an all-party, consensual approach rather than an adversarial or prosecutorial one. I hope it will start in that vein.

Tomorrow, the Minister, Deputy Naughten and I, and others, will launch the climate action fund. It is a €500 million fund that we are setting aside, funded by the National Oil Reserves Agency, NORA, levy that we place on oil. That fund will be worth €500 million, to be drawn down over the next ten years. We will encourage businesses, ITs, universities, NGOs, the community sector and anyone who has good ideas as to how we can bring about step changes in how we treat our climate to bid for that money. I look forward to the launch of that tomorrow.

We will also outline in greater detail how Project Ireland 2040 will help us to meet our climate change obligations and to move from where we are now to a low-carbon economy and society. The kind of measure we will pursue is that, from next year, any new bus bought for Bus Éireann or Dublin Bus will have to be a low emission or zero emission vehicle. We have also confirmed that, by 2025, we will take coal off the grid entirely, becoming one of the first countries in the world, certainly in Europe, not to use coal, a very dirty fuel-----

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