Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I believe this is the biggest challenge we face as a community. It will take a sense of urgency not just here in the House but in every home, business, school and public service in respect of thinking about the challenges and how they can contribute. While the climate action fund is very important, it is much more about priming the pump. The Deputies will see that we chose demonstration projects like the electric vehicle network, the gas initiative and LED lighting. These are demonstration projects. The public service and the State cannot do all the heavy lifting in terms of funding the change we need to make. That is something we need to admit. With €30 billion on climate action and sustainable transport, the national development plan will reduce the target by 22 million tonnes. It is about a third of the journey we must make.

Clearly, it is very hard to sign up to more ambitious targets, when we are 95% off the target we set for 2020. What we need to do is face up honestly to the policy instruments we need to put in place to get to where we committed instead of making the hollow gesture of saying it will be even more when we have not got our house in order. I am not opposed to setting more ambitious targets and I hope we will be able to set more ambitious targets for the future, but I need to get delivery of initiatives. I had a meeting yesterday with all the assistant secretaries from all of the Departments involved to start to tease out what we can do. There are obstacles. This is going to be a challenge politically and in terms of coming up with policy ideas.

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