Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Briefly, making sure the legislation is justiciable is an important tool. Taking legal action against a Government to try to force it to do things is a reasonable thing to do but it is insufficient. My fear is that in the past decade, having legal obligations and even fines was not enough to make change happen. We also need a focus on the actions, the monitoring and the yearly continuation and constant management of our climate budgets and targets. I am reminded of how John Gormley brought in climate budgets a decade ago and after the financial budget he would read out his carbon budget. When a new Government came into office, the Fine Gael and Labour Party Government, it simply dropped that right away because nobody really cared. It matters when the establishment's view or the general mindset is that there is no value to climate action. What is important is those actions are carried out and managed and monitored.