Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Government has put its money where its mouth is. Earlier this year, we published the National Development Plan 2018-2027, which is committed to €22 billion being invested in climate-related measures over the next decade. On top of that, we are spending €8.6 billion on sustainable transport. If one looks anywhere across Europe, the level of public investment in this area is second to none for the next decade. We are using a €500 million fund, the climate action fund, to look at innovative solutions to deal with the challenges that we have in Ireland. Yesterday, because I physically could not be there, my officials were in Luxembourg, and Ireland led the group of ambitious countries looking for a significant reduction in overall emissions from cars and light transport vehicles. We took the lead along with the Netherlands, Slovenia and Luxembourg. Disappointingly, the agreement that was reached late last night was for just a 35% reduction, but colleagues are impressed that our objective is that, by 2030, we will have taken new fossil fuel cars off our roads. We are determined to put a trajectory in place to do that and to take coal out of our energy generation systems by 2025 and peat by 2030 at the latest.

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