On 30 August, the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Naughten, admitted that the Government's climate mitigation plan was not working. Earlier in the summer, the head of the Climate Change Advisory Council, Professor John FitzGerald, said that we are off course and heading rapidly in the wrong direction. At last week's Joint Committee on Climate Action meeting, we asked for the Secretary General of the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment to appear in advance of this afternoon's committee meeting and if we could see a first draft of the plan that the Government has to present to the European Union by Christmas, only to be told yesterday by the secretariat that no such plan exists yet. Ms Marie Donnelly, a former Irish civil servant in the European Commission set out a vision of how we could turn this into an opportunity for our country at last week's meeting. By being ambitious and going for a zero-carbon Ireland, we could create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We have to have the draft by Christmas but in truth this is a question for Deputy Micheál Martin as much as for Deputies McDonald, Howlin and every other Deputy in this Dáil because the final sign off on this new climate action plan, which is the one we have to do, will not be agreed by this Government but by the next Government towards the end of next year.

My question is whether we are able to make the leap that Ms Donnelly set out. We have done it previously. In the late 1950s, we went from a closed economy to an open economy and Fine Gael played its part. The Taoiseach's party appointed Dr. T.K. Whitaker before Fianna Fáil and supported Seán Lemass when the Dáil at that time collectively set our country on a new course. That is the scale of the historic moment that we are in now and we must organise ourselves in the next 16 to 18 months. Then we must repeat it for the subsequent six Governments because the reason that Whitaker and Lemass were successful was that there was a stable political agreement in this House to invest in education, join the European Union, set up the Shannon tax free zone and so on.

That level of co-operation, ambition and joint effort is needed and the people are ready for it. They are good at tackling climate change; they just need some leadership, help and support, which this Dáil must provide. In going green, which we can do as an island, it will be 40 shades of green. We must change everything, including our transport system, energy system, food system and business system. Work must be done in Killybegs, Galway, Shannon, Waterford, Cork, Drogheda, Dundalk, Belfast and Derry to turn them into ports that will bring us energy from our seas. It will happen on every street where we change them from the current car-dominated streets to greenways such as the one in the Taoiseach's area of Blanchardstown which I am sure he knows. It is a beautiful cycle path and we need those in every area so that our children can cycle to school and do not have get asthma growing up. Similarly, instead of looking at the future of farming where the average age of a farmer is 67, let us be bold and ambitious and pay them properly for storing carbon and reduce the average age of farmers in ten years to 37. This is the front-line of this global challenge, which is the biggest that humankind has ever faced. We should engage Bord na Móna to retrofit our homes, double the size of the company and start immediately storing the peat in the ground. We need to make that level of a leap.

I ask the Taoiseach in the spirit of collaboration to follow the example of those who appointed Whitaker. We need a Whitaker today within the public service and we need a Lemass in every party to get agreement on this climate leap we need to make. Is the Taoiseach willing to make that leap to think about everything and think big about how we write this new plan together by Christmas?

I am not entirely clear what the Deputy's question is. I will await the report from the all-party committee, which is being ably chaired by my colleague, Deputy Hildegarde Naughton. On the Government's commitment to climate action, it is important to put the kind of initiatives that the Government has committed to on the record of the House. We do not need an all-party agreement to make the commitments that we have made. Under Project Ireland 2040, the largest single bloc of investment is in climate action to the tune of more than €20 billion in investment in infrastructure that will allow us to tackle climate change. We have confirmed that Ireland will become one of the first countries in the world to ban the use of smoky coals, for example. Moneypoint will be taken off coal in 2025 and we will be one of the first countries in Europe to come off coal as a means of generating power. We will take peat out of electricity system by 2030, if not before. From next year, any new buses that are added to our bus fleet will be either low emission or zero-emission vehicles. The first few will arrive this year and we will buy no new ones from the middle of next year other than low emission or zero-emission vehicles. We have agreed to begin electrifying more of our railways, including the Maynooth and Kildare lines. When BusConnects is looked at, it is not just to do with busses; one quarter of the programme relates to cycling because along those high quality spines and bus lanes, there will be space for bikes as well. The Deputy is right to acknowledge the enormous investment that this Government has put into greenways, not just in my constituency but also around the country in places such as Waterford, and there will be many more similar investments. We also have plans to retrofit public buildings and homes to make them more energy efficient. We have the new renewable electricity support scheme to deliver an additional 3,000 to 4,000 megawatts of renewable energy and we have renewable heat as well. We have a pretty good plan but we need to implement it. We also need the co-operation of the Opposition in doing so and perhaps even some encouragement and acknowledgement as well.

I would love to stand up here and give encouragement and acknowledgement but maybe I should have been more clear. The Government's development plan sucks when it comes to climate action and it will not do the job. We need ambition that goes way beyond what the Taoiseach has just set out. We also need political support. I support the BusConnects project but we all know in this House that it is politically dead in the water at the moment because the real story there is that we will take the cars out of our cities and move towards car sharing and public transport. We should have the level of ambition where we will turning Dublin city into Copenhagen and the Government's plan does not do it. It is the old model of more roads with 63 big motorways and more sprawl.

The Taoiseach said that we are taking the peat out of Ireland by 2030 but that is not good enough because there will be no peat left by 2030. The Taoiseach should listen to all the advice that has been offered to the Joint Committee on Climate Action, which says the Government has to stop the peat production now.

The Deputy would like that all right.

In the privacy of the national economic dialogue, the rural people were saying to us that they are sick and tired of the peat economy being dug up. We cannot even get the workers to do the retrofitting we need and the scale of the retrofit-----

The Deputy is raving; that is wrong.

That is what I heard and I was at that meeting. The scale of the challenge and what I am looking for is for us to agree with Professor John Fitzgerald when he said that we should spend €5 billion retrofitting our social housing so that we end fuel poverty. Let us do that and provide €30 billion in financing for retrofitting every other home so that it generates its own power and has an electric charging point. We should move to this new economy with skill and élan just as California and Jeremy Corbyn are talking about doing.

The Deputy must respect the House.

Will the Taoiseach change his development plan because it will not work in terms of the climate?

The Deputy should not take advantage.

The Deputy is a very excitable gentleman, is he not?

It is kind of important.

That is unnecessary.

The Deputy can be passionate but he can also be measured and logical.

Does the Taoiseach understand passion?

I encourage the Deputy to read Project Ireland 2040 because I would love to know where these 53 big motorways are going.

It is 63 and national roads.

I can absolutely guarantee there are not 63 motorway projects-----

And national roads.

-----in Project Ireland 2040. The Dublin-Cork motorway, the M20, the Galway ring road and a few others need to be done. I may be totally wrong but I highly doubt that as things are going all the peat will be gone by 2030. There is a lot of it out there.

I remind the House that we are moving on to questions on promised legislation and not Topical Issue matters.