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

I cannot disown them because he is not my employee. The city council, as the Deputy will know, is controlled by Fianna Fáil, the Labour Party, the Green Party and the Social Democrats. They have an opportunity to disown him if they wish, censure him if they wish and, more importantly, if they wish, do the opposite of what he has proposed, by planting more trees rather than knocking them down, although I understand that thus far the commitment and agreement to plant more trees in Dublin has not been honoured.

It is significant that there is approximately 10% to 12% tree coverage in Ireland, which is the highest in 350 years, or at least that is what the science tells us, although it is still much lower than in other European countries. We have an ambitious plan to plant approximately 440 million trees over the course of the climate action plan and there is a great deal of money there to do that, and to incentivise landowners and farmers to do it. We need to work with them to find ways to encourage them to do it because it is hard to convince farmers and landowners to plant trees. In certain counties such as Leitrim, for very understandable reasons, people feel they have already taken their share and that more should be done in different parts of the country.

Air quality is an important issue on which we are very much working. We all need to recognise that it is about much more than smoky coal. Smoky coal is not an issue in this city, for example. The major cause for-----

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