Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I join with others in complimenting the Minister, as I have done on a number of occasions, for his tenacity and his ability to chart out a course that needed to be taken. He has been dogged in his approach. He has had electoral success and failure along the way, but it never thwarted his vision or his ambition to achieve it. When he started out on that relatively lonely journey, he and others in his party were considered to be “tree huggers”, and other comments were passed that were less complimentary, perhaps, but he has made it a mainstream issue. Like so many other things in politics, as a citizen, he was ahead of where politics was at the time. To some extent, the citizens have caught up with the Minister and caught up with this agenda so that, now, it is everyone's idea and everybody is an expert on this area but, without a doubt, he has been a pioneer in this House.

What I have found in my interaction with the Minister is that he has never taken a fundamentalist approach. He has been prepared to listen to sectors of society because, from the outset, he understood that climate change had to be for everyone. It was not for the academics, the environmentalists or the lobby. It had to be made mainstream, and he has done that in his own, very professional way. He has engaged with groups with which he might have had disagreements, and he brought a central plank of understanding around what we have to do. By signing up to the Paris Agreement, as we did, and by the continued efforts right across society in continuing to lobby, even when he was outside this House, he has made it possible and real.

It is not going to be easy. Anybody who thinks the passage of the Bill is the job done would be missing the point. It will take continued vigilance around the Cabinet table to ensure that every line Department, notwithstanding the vested interests, meets its challenge head-on. Even in the announcement he was part of yesterday in the midlands, the Minister has shown that for an industry like Bord na Móna, the devastation of the area that was expected from a progressive climate policy does not have to be such. He has always said that we must look to the opportunities, and they are there. They are there in the constituency of Clare, where it was very difficult to get the ESB to move on Moneypoint. With a change of thinking in the Department and a new Minister with a different vision, lo and behold, it was able to pull out plans that I am sure it had been working on for some time in terms of the capture of offshore wind in the Atlantic Ocean, with no impact on homes, which is a difficulty with onshore wind. The real opportunity for Moneypoint now comes out of the opportunity to develop a base level for the creation of green hydrogen and the impact that will have, because it is only in the early stages.

I had the pleasure to participate, with other Members of the House, in a demonstration by Bus Éireann just this week of three hydrogen powered buses that it is testing.