Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

When will that work conclude? This is critical. I am not sure the Minister and everybody in his Department, or indeed the Minister for Finance and his Department, understand the absolute centrality of their Departments in meeting our climate change ambitions. The Minister mentioned that the reference cost of carbon will have to change again if we are to align the national development plan and the Government's ambitions more generally with our climate goals. When precisely will that happen?

Fiscal policy, tax spending and climate are all intertwined, and the Minister's Department will have to get used to saying "No" to projects it would routinely have passed and promoted until relatively recently. On that note, it would be useful to understand how involved his Department was in the making of the recently announced carbon budgets.

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