Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his response. I realise that this is outside of the remit of his own Ministerial work. I acknowledge that the report is not scathing. It does not necessarily paint a picture of a country that is doing badly. It is showing progress across most of the indicators and the report does acknowledge that there are areas, for example in education, where Ireland does extremely well. We should work to maintain that level of progress.

I would say that the word “shortly” is doing much heavy lifting in terms of the timeline on this. The second national implementation plan has been promised for a while. I would like to see it and I would like a concrete timeline on it. I would also like a concrete timeline on when it will be brought to the national stakeholder forum. I acknowledge what the Minister of State is saying about a broad and cross-cutting nature. I think that is one of the strengths of it. I spoke about policy coherence earlier, when we were talking about the town centres first programme. That is one of the strengths of taking an SDG-led approach to these issues.

I want to acknowledge, as I did earlier, the work of Chambers Ireland in producing a toolkit for businesses. What it does in a really meaningful way, which I think sometimes we fail to do on larger policies, is it takes a first principles approach. It does not just take the 17 SDGs, but it looks at the 169 sub-targets that are below those SDGs. It seeks to implement them in a common sense and practical way. I sometimes worry when I see Government documentation that includes SDG material that we engage in a retroactive badging. For instance, after we produce the policy document we ask beside which goals can we put the nice picture in the document. I would prefer to see us change our approach, to go back to first principles, to look at the goals, to look at the sub-goals and to design our policies accordingly to achieve that level of cross-cutting policy coherence. This would help our Departments work better to deliver for the people.

See this speech in context