I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. I also thank Maura Quinn for her report, which is welcome. The Government, in its entirety, accepts without reservation the recommendations of Maura Quinn in respect of this entire issue and also in respect of the broader issue of secondment within the public service and the Civil Service in particular. There are issues around the secondment policy area and we need to be stronger in identifying pathways for those who may, for example, have retired early as a Secretary Gene…

In respect of the recommendations, they will be implemented by the Government. The Secretary General of the Department of Health is clear they will be implemented by the Government and accepts the decision of the Government to accept all the recommendations of the report. The report focused very much on doing this in a far more effective and better way and to learn lessons from it. That was the purpose of the report. There is an obligation on everybody now to get down to it and make sure proper procedures are in pl…

First of all, I did answer Deputy Cairns's questions in respect of the report.

In terms of the Secretary General in the Department of Health, when I came into office as Taoiseach, for the first six months we did not have a permanent Secretary General at the Department of Health. To put it mildly, in the context of Covid and other issues, this was-----

The Deputy has to allow me answer the question. I am coming to the point.

My point is that stability has been brought to the Department of Health. The Secretary General has, in terms of the administration of the Department of Health, been effective on a range of fronts. That has to be acknowledged. That was required when we were coming out of Covid and dealing with the consultants' contract and the Sláintecare implementation, etc. That is why I am saying I believe it is important that the Secretary General of the Department of Health continues to work on the bigger issues facing health. …

-----and also the recommendations in terms of health itself. In terms of accountability before committees, my understanding is that the Secretary General appeared in front of other committees in respect of this issue. Of course, a Secretary General should be accountable to the relevant Oireachtas committees in respect of issues that come under their administration or their specific Department.

Apart from ideology or whatever, we need to analyse what has happened in terms of waste in this country over the last 20 years. The Deputy has said that she opposed what transpired in 2003. I was reading recently Mark Henry's book In Fact: An Optimist's Guide to Ireland at 100 . We have made extraordinary progress in terms of recycling, in terms of reducing our dependency on landfill and in terms of how we manage waste. Irrespective of whether it is private, public or whatever, the story around waste in Ireland has…

We have reduced quite a substantial number of charges across the economy, particularly public service charges in health and in other areas, such as education, over the past 12 months.

I would make a general point in response. Many Irish companies provide services all over the world. Deputy Boyd Barrett can nod all he likes but we do. Our economy depends-----

Irish companies provide services all over the world, such as wastewater treatment, high-technology solutions, and you name it. That is what Ireland does today. The Deputies should talk to Enterprise Ireland officials and a number of its client companies that export their services all over the world, including to Australia and Canada. That creates jobs in Ireland. The Deputies' model of the economy would damage our model, which produces full employment.

The Deputy raised the argument about a company being problematic because it is international.

It is a consistent thread which I am not going to take anymore; it needs to be challenged. This country has full employment. The enterprise model we have developed over the past 30 years has worked, broadly speaking.

Deputy Smith has been against the enterprise model all the time. I am entitled to challenge her fundamental premise, which Deputy Boyd Barrett shares.

The Deputy does not have a monopoly on wisdom of how economies get managed. Nobody does, but I am sure of one thing.

We have a small, open economy in this country and if we are going to take a protectionist view that no foreign company can provide any service in this country, that would destroy the Irish economic model, because we are basically saying that no other country in the world should tolerate Irish companies providing good and high-quality services elsewhere.

I did not say that at all.

On our position in respect of climate, there is no question that in the past two and a half years, the actions taken by the Government have been a watershed in Ireland's response to the climate crisis.

Without question, our response will have an impact in the years to come. One of the challenges we have is that our population is growing. We have gone from less than 3.5 million people in the early 1990s to 5.2 million today and that is a factor across public services, housing, climate and economic growth. Maintaining and supporting that population creates its own challenges for us with regard to climate change. I have been at the European Council and the EU has been clear about the targets for 2030 and 2050 and, m…

Our general approach has been to work in concert with the European Union collectively. That will be our position in respect of the Energy Charter Treaty. In other words-----