Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 16 July 2026
286. Deputy Pa Daly asked the Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation the position regarding all actions in each of the Climate Action Plans 2021 to 2025 under the remit of his Department; to provide a breakdown of the legacy actions remaining, broken down by the year of the climate action plan they were initially included in; and the estimated timelines for completion, in tabular form. [54634/26]
View answerThe Climate Action Plans detail a range of climate policies and measures to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions and meet the Government’s legally binding national climate objective.
To track delivery progress, the Department of the Taoiseach continues to prepare quarterly progress reports on CAP25 (including legacy actions), in collaboration with all implementing Departments.
The most recently progress report for CAP25 was published earlier this year, and details progress on the new actions that were due for completion in Q4 2025. The report provides updates on sectoral Key Performance Indicators, emissions trends and high impact case studies.
My Department has responsibility for reporting for actions both for the Department itself, and for the Office of Public Works. Both my Department and the OPW had no new actions to report on for Q4 2025.
The Department and the OPW had 4 legacy actions incomplete from CAP23/24. These actions, and the latest updates on their progress, are presented in summary tabular form below:
|
Action # |
Action |
Lead |
Update at Q4 2025 |
|
BE/24/21 |
Develop a programme for the retrofit of traditional and historic buildings as part of OPW Pathfinder programme |
OPW (Reporting lead: DPER) |
The OPW has paused this study as resources have been needed to progress higher prioritised projects. It is planned to seek external resources to complete this study. |
|
BE/24/23 |
Integrate learnings from exemplar buildings into new OPW projects - Enhanced design and building plans for alternative construction materials |
OPW (Reporting lead: DPER) |
Tom Johnson House: In Q4 2025, OPW undertook a post-occupancy and lesson learned review of the energy performance of the Tom Johnson House retrofit, which was carried out by a team of external sustainability consultants. The review that was undertaken analysed two aspects of energy use/embodied carbon in relation to the retrofit refurbishment (i) Life Cycle Carbon Assessment and (ii) Post Occupancy Analysis. The findings of this analysis has informed the sustainability measures which OPW is adopting on upcoming refurbishment projects. Casino Marino: A preliminary design is being enhanced to improve its functionality while reducing the initial overall operational and embodied carbon, below current regulated requirements. The design will adopt innovative technology and will aim to reuse existing material (where possible) and adopt the principles of circularity. The OPW have agreed the principals of the land transfer from site owners Dublin City Council. The preliminary design is now complete and OPW will be making a submission for Planning Permission in Q1 2026 |
|
GV/23/4 |
Develop proposals on how individual sectors could bear any EU compliance costs for the State arising from failure to reach sectoral targets |
DPER |
In February 2023, DPER and DECC published a joint research paper as part of the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service (IGEES) Spending Review 2022 series titled “Estimating the Potential Cost of Compliance with 2030 Climate & Energy Targets”, seeking to estimate the cost of compliance with Ireland's EU climate & energy targets in the event targets are not achieved. Concluding that there was insufficient information available at that time on compliance mechanisms within all relevant legislation to estimate the total cost, the authors proposed a working model for estimating the cost of compliance with the Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR) alone. It was noted that the work was subject to considerable uncertainties. Future data requirements in order to accurately estimate, assess and monitor compliance and the existing data limitations are discussed in that paper, available at https://assets.gov.ie/246850/5982d0ec-1590-4caf-8c40-ce8bf178f5fc.pdf .D/Taoiseach are co-ordinating a working group to evolve the evidence base on the potential costs of compliance arising for the State from established EU energy and climate targets. This work will build on previous findings. All outputs of this work are based on current high levels of unknown variables and will be kept under review. |
