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

I thank Deputies for their questions. As was said earlier there are lots of conspiracy theories about Davos and the World Economic Forum, and particularly online. No big decisions are made there. In fact no decisions are made at all. If that was the case I would stay for the whole thing. As it happens I had to leave early and arrive late. I arrived late because the Chinese Prime Minister was visiting Ireland, and I had to leave early because I wanted to get to an event in Galway. I can guarantee that if the far right were correct I would not have arrived late and left early; I would have been there for the whole thing to sit in some secret room and make all these decisions they believe we make. I am a bit disappointed to hear Deputy Paul Murphy in some ways almost fuelling some of those theories by arguing that he almost understands why people believe these conspiracy theories. It is the far right and the far left working together again, which is not all that unusual.

With regard to what happens there, it is a gathering of political, business and NGO leaders, along with academics and experts. It is worth attending. It is run very efficiently. There are 30-minute meeting slots, which start on time and end on time. They stick to the agenda. To organise those kinds of meetings with the people who attend - perhaps ten meetings in one day - would take weeks to organise. It is a gathering where a lot of people attend and where one can fit in a lot of meetings and get work done that otherwise would take a lot of time to organise. There are also roundtable discussions and dinners.

I did not meet Hines at Davos or any asset management companies. I am not sure if they requested to meet me or not. The letter written to President von der Leyen was published this morning but we do not have a response yet. In fairness, it was only officially submitted this morning. President von der Leyen will need a bit of time to respond to it. I spoke with her by phone earlier in the week to discuss a number of different matters and I alerted her to the fact that Prime Minister Sánchez and I were writing this letter. I thought it was important she hear that from me and not from the media.

Deputy McDonald asked questions around climate. We are making progress and progress is now accelerating. Emissions from Ireland are falling and while they are not falling fast enough they are falling. We are seeing a real improvement in the amount of renewable energy we are producing. We have a target of 80% renewable electricity by 2030. I think we will meet that target. If we miss it I do not think we will miss it by much. People were very sceptical about electric vehicles a few years ago when then Minister, Deputy Richard Bruton, produced his climate action plan on behalf of the Government at the time but we are now in line to meet those targets, which is really encouraging. We also retrofit about 35,000 homes every year. Again that is in line or exceeding our targets for retrofit. We are also seeing emissions fall from agriculture. I thank and recognise farmers for that fact. The new forestry programme will be helpful too.

See this speech in context