Two years of drift leads to a Climate Bill which gives us the worst of both worlds, the Green Party stated.

Green Party leader Eamon Ryan said: "After two years of drift on climate policy, we have ended up with the worst of both worlds.

"The Bill is a carbon copy of the legislation prepared by the Green Party in Government, but the omission of any 2030 target means it is not going to work. That target is needed to give certainty on immediate investment decisions and to give the whole system a signal that we are for real on this issue. The new innovation model proposed by the National Economic and Social Council is being ignored and instead we will have a toothless advisory body which the rest of the system can ignore."

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"Neither Labour nor Fine Gael have any credibility on this issue. They have weakened the draft legislation while making a series of day-to-day decisions that will see us missing out on the new low carbon economy. They will continue to avoid the issue because it is outside the electoral cycle. We will have another year of the Heads of the Bill going through committee when they could just as easily have published the original draft law. The NESC Report got it right in their analysis of how our administrative system delivers on political priorities. The unfortunate message from today is that climate change can now be ignored."