Joint Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth debate -
Tuesday, 8 Oct 2024

The next agenda item for consideration this afternoon is pre-Committee Stage detailed scrutiny of the Commission for Future Generations Bill 2023, a Private Members' Bill sponsored by Deputy Marc Ó Cathasaigh. As members will be aware, this Private Members' Bill was drafted by Deputy Marc Ó Cathasaigh. Its main aim is to establish an independent commission for future generations. The commission will report on how best to establish an office of ombudsman for future generations, which would act as a guardian of the interests of future generations of Ireland. We are joined at this meeting to discuss the provisions of the Bill by the sponsor of the Bill, Deputy Marc Ó Cathasaigh; by officials from the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, namely, Ms Lara Hynes, assistant secretary, and Ms Bridget Wilson, child rights and policy unit; by officials from the Department of the Taoiseach, namely, Ms Fiona Bourke, principal officer, and Ms Lena Jacobs, assistant principal officer; and by officials from the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, namely, Ms Fionnuala Callanan, principal officer, air quality, international and EU climate policy division with responsibility for sustainable development goals, and Ms Fiona McManus, assistant principal, air quality, international and EU climate policy.

We are also joined by Dr. Tadhg O'Mahony, assistant professor in environmental policy at UCD and adjunct professor in transformative sustainable futures at Finland Futures Research Centre, and Ms Jane Davidson, pro vice-chancellor emeritus at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, chair of Wales Net Zero 2035 and author of #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country. Ms Davidson is joining us via MS Teams. All of the witnesses are very welcome.

Before we begin, I have a few housekeeping matters to go through. I advise members that the chat function on Microsoft Teams should only be used to make the team on site aware of any technical issues or urgent matters that may arise during the meeting and should not be used to make general comments or statements. Members are reminded of the constitutional requirement that they must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex to participate in public meetings. I will not permit a member to participate where he or she is not adhering to this constitutional requirement. Therefore, any member who attempts to participate from outside of the precincts will be asked to leave the meeting. In this regard, I ask any members partaking via Microsoft Teams to confirm, prior to making a contribution to this meeting, that they are on the grounds of the Leinster House campus.

In advance of inviting the witnesses to deliver their opening statements, I advise them of the following in respect of parliamentary privilege. The evidence of witnesses physically present or who give evidence from within the parliamentary precincts is protected pursuant to both the Constitution and statute by absolute privilege. I must inform the witnesses appearing before the committee virtually that there is uncertainty as to whether parliamentary privilege applies to evidence given from a location outside of the parliamentary precincts of Leinster House. Therefore, if I direct them to cease giving evidence in relation to a particular matter, it is imperative that they comply.

Witnesses and members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable, or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in respect of an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

Witnesses will be allocated five minutes each in which to deliver their opening statements. This will be followed by a session of questions and answers with members. I will call on the witnesses in the following order: Deputy Ó Cathasaigh, Ms Hynes, Ms Bourke, Ms Callanan, Dr. O'Mahony and Ms Davidson. That completes the housekeeping matters. I will now proceed with the meeting. I invite Deputy Ó Cathasaigh to make his opening statement.

I congratulate the Chairperson on her ascension to the role. I thank the committee members for the opportunity to address them regarding my Private Member's Bill, the Commission for Future Generations Bill 2023. I acknowledge the important work this committee has done over the course of this Dáil term and thank committee members for taking the time in their work schedule to consider this legislation.

My pathway to developing this Bill began with a conversation with Jane Davidson, former Labour minister for environment and sustainability in the Welsh Assembly, who will be addressing the committee later. We were speaking about how to embed well-being frameworks into policy-making and decision-making in a meaningful way and she described to me the process whereby she legislated for the creation of the office of Future Generations Commissioner for Wales. I subsequently learned a great deal more about the power and potential of that role and had the pleasure of meeting both Sophie Howe, the previous holder of that office, and Derek Walker, the current incumbent. These engagements convinced me of the potential for a similar office in the Irish context to champion the implementation of our own well-being framework, to embed the sustainability principle into all that we do and to be a voice for the voiceless, advocating for future generations who cannot yet speak for themselves.

I must be honest and say that the scale of this Bill's ambition does not match that of the Welsh legislation. It would be well beyond the resources of any individual TD's office to address such a piece of work through a Private Member's Bill. Instead, this Bill is intended to be the first step along the road towards that end goal, providing for the funding and resourcing of a body to fully explore the potential of creating an office of ombudsman for future generations in the Irish context.

The central ambition behind the Bill is to establish an independent commission for future generations to consider and report within 12 months on how best to set up an office of ombudsman for future generations in Ireland. The proposed commission for future generations could also make recommendations on a number of areas, including: measurement of the progress of the overall well-being of our society; how best to ensure best practice among public bodies and Departments while adhering to the principle of sustainable development; and the potential role of an Oireachtas joint committee on future generations. Many of the sections in the Bill are technical in nature and set out the necessary administrative structures needed to underpin the founding, reporting and dissolution of such a commission. I am happy to explore them in detail should the committee so wish but they are standard provisions for the most part.

Section 3 sets out the functions of the commission, specifying that it should have regard to the well-being framework as well as any intergenerational issues, including the climate and biodiversity emergencies, the provision of care to children and older people, demographic changes and intergenerational income and wealth distribution. This list is not intended to be exhaustive, and this may be an area where committee members might want to suggest changes or inclusions by way of amendment.

Section 5 sets out various criteria for how members of the commission should be appointed, taking into account experience and knowledge of areas such as climate science, ecology, economics, intergenerational equity, public health, culture and the arts, community development, spatial planning and some other areas. It also stipulates that the Minister should ensure, as far as is practicable, that a balance be struck in the composition of the commission to take account of gender, age, ethnic and cultural background and speakers of the Irish and English language.

Section 15 is perhaps the most consequential section because it details the proposed output of the commission established. It specifies that the commission shall report not later than 12 months after the appointment of its members. Within that report, the commission should make recommendations on a number of matters specified in section 15(4), which reads:

(a) the progress of the overall well-being of society while adhering to the principle of sustainable development,

(b) the collection of data and measurable parameters in relation to well-being in order to measure the progress of the overall well-being of society,

(c) the predictions of likely future trends in the economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being of the State,

(d) how to ensure best practice amongst public bodies and government departments in their practices and actions to progress the well-being of society while adhering to the principle of sustainable development,

(e) the potential role of a Joint Oireachtas Committee on Future Generations,

(f) the adequacy and effectiveness of legislation and practices in the State relating to the principle of sustainable development,

There are further provisions that the members can read themselves.

These are the principal provisions of the Bill as I see them. As stated, the Bill is intended as a stepping stone rather than a destination. It is a way of meaningfully resourcing a national piece of research and a national conversation about how we can counter the short-termism of our democratic cycle to make sure that the needs of future generations are not sacrificed for present-day political expediency. It is an opportunity for Ireland to join the vanguard of nations that are making legislative change to take account of those generations that will come after us.

I thank the staff of the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel for their patience and support in drafting the Bill and my research team, Síle Ginnane and Séafra Ó Faoláin, who put extensive work into the preparation of the Bill.

There is an old Greek proverb which states a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. I believe in this Bill and in this approach because I believe that future people matter even if I cannot meet, hear or know them and I believe that young people count even if they will not count at the ballot box in the next election or the election after that. The choices we make in the here and now must balance the needs of today with the challenges of tomorrow.

I thank the Cathaoirleach and the members of the committee for the opportunity to speak on the work of the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth as it relates to the Commission for Future Generations Bill. I am the assistant secretary in the child policy and Tusla governance division with responsibility for child rights policy, the implementation of Young Ireland, the national policy framework for children and young people, parenting support policy and the governance of Tusla, the Child and Family Agency.

The functions of the proposed commission under this Bill would cut across a number of policy areas across Government including that of children and young people and, in light of this, I will speak to ongoing work within the Department that aims to achieve good outcomes for children and young people both now in their present lives and in their future lives as adults.

Section 15 provides that the commission shall prepare a report providing advice and making recommendations to the Government in relation to the establishment of an office of ombudsman for future generations and advice or recommendations as it considers necessary or appropriate in respect of, among other things, an assessment of how public bodies can better safeguard the ability of future generations to meet future needs and take greater account of the long-term impact of such bodies practices and actions.

In Young Ireland: the National Policy Framework for Children and Young People, the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth has committed to a number of actions to embed the consideration of children and young people in decision-making across government. These are referred to collectively as the enabling environment because they involve changes at a systemic level to place their rights and well-being as a core part of policy and decision-making. They include the participation of children and young people in decision-making, the development of child and youth impact assessments, the development of child rights training for civil and public servants, child budgeting and the further development of data and research for children and young people.

Ensuring that children and young people are taken into account in decision-making is an important part of safeguarding their future needs and well-being. The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth ensures that children and young people have a voice in the design, delivery and monitoring of Government policies, programmes and services, at national and local level, and is committed to ensuring the inclusion of seldom-heard children and young people in participation structures and initiatives.

The Bill also provides that the report would make recommendations on the collection of data and measurable parameters in relation to well-being, and the prediction of likely future trends in the economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being of the State. The Department undertakes and supports a range of research activities which help to anticipate and inform our response to the needs of future generations. Key activities include the Growing Up in Ireland study and other projects looking at the impact of ageing on different groups of the population. The Department is currently working to identify strategic research priorities to help ensure that evidence is available to inform future policy decisions.

The commission would also provide advice or recommendations as considered necessary with respect to: the progress of the overall well-being of society while adhering to the principle of sustainable development; how to ensure best practice among public bodies and Departments in their practices and actions to progress the well-being of society while adhering to the principle of sustainable development; and encouraging best practice among public bodies in taking steps to meet well-being goals and objectives in accordance with the principle of sustainable development. The Department contributes to the achievement of the sustainable development goals, through its current activities, particularly in the areas of poverty and inequality, through the provision of affordable, quality early childhood care and education and also through investment in youth services. I thank members for their time and welcome any questions they may have.

I am grateful for the opportunity to address the committee on the well-being framework for Ireland, which is the result of a programme for Government commitment to develop a set of indicators to create a broader context for policy-making and to utilise these in a systematic way across government at local and national levels in setting budgetary priorities, evaluating programmes and reporting progress. The framework was developed over two phases of consultation. The first phase was a stakeholder and expert consultation led by the National Economic and Social Council which consulted with approximately 450 stakeholders and experts. The second phase of consultation involved a wider group of stakeholders, including the broader public. This phase also included a seminar organised by the Parliamentary Budget Office. The resulting framework, approved by Government and launched in 2021, is modelled on the OECD approach and is made up of 11 dimensions covering different aspects of well-being, with a cross-cutting focus on equality and sustainability. The vision of the initiative is to "enable all our people to live fulfilled lives now and into the future".

The framework is led by the Department of the Taoiseach, with the Departments of Finance and Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform as co-sponsors. The CSO supported the identification of the indicators and hosts these on its Well-being Information Hub. The framework is a cross-government initiative, supported by an interdepartmental group, and some of the implementation work that we will outline today is being driven by other Departments and agencies.

Regarding implementation, the framework is supported by a dashboard of 35 indicators, hosted by the CSO, which brings together economic, social and environmental statistics. Fifteen of these indicators have been identified as particularly important for sustainable well-being - environmental, social and economic. Each year, the Understanding Life in Ireland report is approved by Government, published and laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas. It assesses Ireland’s well-being performance across these 35 indicators.

This year’s assessment was published on 31 July and we have circulated a copy to the members of the committee. The analysis shows that Ireland’s overall performance is positive, in particular in the areas of work and job quality, and our social connections and community. Only one of the 11 dimensions, the environment, climate and biodiversity dimension, shows a negative performance. Of the 15 sustainability indicators, seven perform positively over time. Ireland compares favourably with other countries in respect of four of the indicators. The report also highlights that progress is unequal for some groups, including people with long-term illness or disability, single-parent households, households in receipt of lower incomes and households in rented accommodation.

While every effort has been made to include data that represents the topics raised in the development of the framework, we acknowledge that, due to data availability, there are areas that are not represented in the indicator set. We continue to work with the CSO to identify where data could be improved.

The framework and analysis are integrated into the budgetary process to help inform discussions and decision-making. It features annually at the national economic dialogue, in the summer economic statement, in budget day documentation and as part of expenditure reporting.

The Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform has undertaken a tagging initiative that uses the dimensions of the well-being framework. This will help Government’s understanding of expenditure allocations, inform prioritisation considerations and enhance transparency. The results of this process are published around the time of the budget and the Revised Estimates Volume. Other Departments are progressing work to implement the approach into policy development and decision-making, using sectoral approaches aligned to the well-being framework to improve performance measurement, support policy analysis, and better understand Government’s impact on quality of life in Ireland.

Regarding international co-operation, other countries have developed their own approaches to integrating multidimensional sustainable well-being into policy-making. As a founding member of the OECD Knowledge Exchange Platform on Well-being Policy and Practice, we are learning from other countries which are working on similar initiatives, as well as sharing Ireland’s experience to date. Ireland’s approach is still relatively new compared with other countries, but it is seen as a leader in terms of the speed of integration into the Government system thus far.

On next steps, the Government has committed to a formal review of the framework in 2026, allowing time for the initial dashboard to be used and tested. The degree to which the framework has been integrated into the government system to date has been encouraging but we recognise that this is an iterative process. We will continue to progress initiatives to further embed the framework across the system, thus ensuring it has an impact on policy-makers, and ultimately citizens.

I thank the committee for its time today and for the opportunity to give an overview of this work. We look forward to any questions.

I thank the Cathaoirleach and members of the committee for the invitation to appear today. My focus today will be on the role of the sustainable development goals, SDGs. The 2030 Agenda, agreed in 2015 by all 193 United Nations member states, highlights that “The future of humanity and of our planet lies in our hands. It lies also in the hands of today’s younger generation who will pass the torch to future generations.”

The 17 SDGs represent the international community’s collective roadmap towards a safer, fairer, more prosperous and sustainable world - a world capable of meeting our current needs and those of future generations.

Agenda 2030 uses a five-dimensional model of sustainable development, known as the five Ps, which includes people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership. It is a universal agenda, which takes account of the growing interconnectedness of development challenges which need to be addressed in a co-ordinated and coherent manner. Grounded in human rights, it aims to meet the SDGs for all nations, people and all segments of society and it pledges that no one will be left behind. The 17 SDGs aim to protect the planet from degradation, including through sustainable consumption and production, sustainably managing its natural resources and taking urgent action on climate change, so that it can support the needs of present and future generations.

Governments have primary responsibility for implementing the SDGs, but the goals belong to everyone, and governments will need to work in partnership with society to achieve them. In Ireland, a whole-of-government approach has been adopted for implementation of the SDGs, with each Minister having specific responsibility for implementing individual SDG targets related to their ministerial functions. The Department for the Environment, Climate and Communications has overall responsibility for promoting the SDGs and overseeing their coherent implementation across government, including the development of the national implementation plan and voluntary national reviews.

The UN High-Level Political Forum, HLPF, convenes annually, and is responsible for the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda at international level. In July 2023, Ireland’s second voluntary national review was presented by the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, at the HLPF under the theme of "Building Back Better while Leaving No One Behind".

The VNR process provided an accessible and inclusive space for our national network of stakeholders to review Ireland’s progress and offer their feedback on how they perceived Ireland was doing in progressing the SDGs. A specific youth consultation took place as part of the VNR process. It was developed by the National Youth Council of Ireland and our Department with the support of Ireland’s UN youth delegates, the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and Comhairle na nÓg. A youth chapter was developed and included, the first year such a chapter has been included in any country’s VNR. Among the key issues highlighted by Ireland’s youth voices in this chapter is that the only solution that ensures the needs of people today and in the future can align in equilibrium with the needs of the planet is for everyone to work together. Their hope for the future is that young people in Ireland are taken seriously as stakeholders and that leaders at local, regional, national and international levels can come together to work intergenerationally for a safer and fairer world.

The UN Summit of the Future, which took place in New York in September, was described by the Taoiseach as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enhance global co-operation, reaffirm commitments to the sustainable development goals, and reform multilateralism.” At the summit, world leaders adopted a pact for the future that included a declaration on future generations. The pact covers a broad range of issues, including peace and security, sustainable development, climate change, digital co-operation, human rights, gender, youth and future generations, and the transformation of global governance. It recognises children and youth as agents of change and the need for intergenerational dialogue and engagement, including with and among children, youth and older persons, to be taken into consideration in policymaking and decision-making processes in order to safeguard the needs and interests of future generations. The pact recognises that the well-being of current and future generations and the sustainability of our planet rests on our willingness to take action and aims to turbocharge implementation of the sustainable development goals.

I thank the committee for the invitation to contribute to its pre-Committee Stage scrutiny of the Commission for Future Generations Bill 2023.

The future is an undiscovered country, a journey replete with hope and promise as with hazard and peril. Two decades ago when I began my journey in the field of foresight, a popular quote was circulating from the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke: “The future is not what it used to be”. Clarke recognised that, while generations had known that many of the patterns of life would repeat, a new unpredictable epoch was emerging. This fundamental change has become known in public policy as VUCA as the world becomes more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We have many examples in recent years of major systemic challenges to public policy across housing, transport, health, migration, climate change and biodiversity, and in the surprises of the financial crisis and the Covid pandemic. In response, public policy must become both better prepared for change, but also more adept at building vision for change and creating the change that we desire. Public policy needs the opportunity to move from firefighting the day-to-day to exploring new vision, to building coalition and consensus and to strategically devising the means to achieve our preferred future. Responding effectively requires four things from public policy, those being, moving from short-term reactions to long-term planning, from narrow approaches to holistic ones, from siloed Departments to co-ordinated missions, and from top-down policy to participative governance.

Our institutional structures were formed in a very different era of the State's history in response to 20th century challenges. We can say with unflinching confidence that we now stand at an inflection point in history. We live in an era of climate and ecological breakdowns, threatening economy and society and the natural world on which they rely. We also live in an age of threats to democracy, underlying economic vulnerabilities, growing inequality, geopolitical instability and the acceleration of technological change. We live in an era where the impacts of decisions that we make today will resonate for decades, marching down a voiceless line of unborn generations.

Globally, the scientific literature is robustly clear. Addressing our current challenges demands transformations of what we do and how we do it. However, it also highlights significant cause for optimism, because within these transformations are voluminous opportunities for win-win outcomes that improve our well-being, restore the natural world on which we depend and bring us to a flourishing and sustainable well-being. In my work on transformational governance and policy for the Irish climate change assessment, which has been signed off on by institutional stakeholders, critical gaps in Ireland’s national foresight capacity were identified across three major functions in our ability to foresee change, proactively respond to change and articulate desirable visions and the means to achieve them. In the same report, I had the opportunity to identify significant livelihood and economic opportunities that transformations could offer Ireland for both urban dwellers and rural Ireland while cautioning that these would be forgone without a new approach to policy. We know that the old certainties of 20th century policymaking are breaking down and that we need new knowledge to understand and envision change and new capacity in public institutions and structures to create it. The commission for future generations offers a response appropriate to policymaking in the Ireland of the 21st century.

I am the author of #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country, which tells the story of how Wales became the first country in the world to put into law the Brundtland principle for sustainable development, namely, development that meets the needs of the present without compromising on the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This principle still underpins everything that the UN does. I was also involved in enshrining in law our interpretation of the UN sustainable development goals through the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, which I proposed in 2010. On the back of that, I have spent the past two years as chair of Wales Net Zero 2035, a group established through a formal co-operation agreement between the Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru to look at how Wales could achieve net zero in a just and nature-positive way 15 years earlier than 2050. If members are interested, our reports were published on 16 September and are currently being considered by politicians in the Senedd. Without the Act, our group was unlikely to have been commissioned to do work that accelerated the response in these difficult and challenging areas of climate and biodiversity.

I will provide a brief history of the law in Wales. We started with a duty to promote sustainable development in the exercise of our functions when I became an assembly member in 1999. It was included in the first Government of Wales Act. We discovered over our first decade that the duty to promote meant nothing in law, so although we may have been promoting sustainable development considerably, as I am doing today, it was clear that, if we were really serious about it, what we needed was a duty to deliver. Since we had made the political decision to put sustainable development as our central organising principle of government, I proposed that law to deliver.

The relevance of all of this to the committee's discussions is that the accountability mechanism included an obligation on all public services in Wales, including the Welsh Government - we may wish to revert to this in questions - to be held accountable by an independent commissioner for future generations, by the auditor general and, ultimately, by the courts through judicial review.

I welcome the discussion on this Private Member's Bill to report to the Government on what the establishment of an office of ombudsman for future generations in Ireland should look like. The committee has heard about the pact for the future, but it is probably worth setting out the last commitment made in that pact. It speaks of appointing a special envoy for future generations to support the implementation of the declaration. This is something that civil society across the world fought hard for and I am delighted to see it was taken forward.

This proposal came about because of global interest, particularly from young people, in the Welsh model.

The duty is now on the UN Secretary General to report back on implementation by 2028, but he has made it clear he is going to progress with that now. That means that Ireland and other countries working out their own models could be really useful to the UN in the global international context, if this was to proceed to a next stage and look at what Ireland wants to do with this sort of approach. I want to make it clear to the committee that it is never my intention to suggest that any country should adopt the same model as Wales. Our model is right for us. It was developed for us and by us. I am happy to explore it in further detail in questioning. In essence, we have four pillars, which include culture, society, environment and economy. We have seven goals laid out on the face of the Act. We have five ways of working, also laid out on the face of the Act. We have what we want to achieve and how we want to achieve it. In the paper I submitted, there are pictures of both of those.

Since we are the only country in the world to have legislation to deliver on the sustainable development goals and to have a statutory commissioner, I hope that some of our learnings may be of use to the committee. My key learnings, to start the process off, as a founding minister, include that if a country is serious about looking after current and future generations alongside each other, there needs to be a clear role, with statutory obligations on government and public services. The architecture of the system chosen is very much a matter for any individual country. It will find different ways to the way that we have been doing it. It must take into account the culture and values of a country, because no country can borrow those fundamental aspects of value frameworks from another. There has already been a mention of the importance of engagement with the public. The importance of engagement with public and civil society in endorsing the approach has been critical. We started this journey in 2009, through the One Wales One Planet scheme. In 2014, the government handed the UN conversation on the world we want over to civil society. Those civil society outcomes are there, in the law, on the paper, in the Act. It is legislation that is for us and by us, but there still needs to be much more engagement between the government, its public services and the people of Wales to deliver on those five ways of working.

Going back for a moment to the what and the how, the what to do is often very clear and we prepare processes to do it. In Wales, all organisations subject to the legislation are also required to maximise their contribution to all the goals. They do not sit with individual ministers. They sit as a collective responsibility. It is a holistic approach. They have to demonstrate those five ways of working in all their decision-making and think long-term and preventively, involving people in how decisions are being made, collaborating and integrating outcomes. The committee may wish to consider whether there is an opportunity at this stage of the discussion on establishing a commission to see if there could be further consideration of the "what" and the "how" together, in an explicit way, and how all organisations are charged with the responsibility to maximise their outcomes in all the goals. Interestingly, there is an increasingly strong view in Wales at the moment that it is the five ways of working, rather than the goals, that are becoming the missions of Welsh organisations and really releasing the imagination, particularly of young officials, with a new kind of vision for a Wales which can adequately deal with complex problems. In that, those five ways of working could have much more impact than the more traditional approach of using goals or target-setting that we have all been involved in.

I hope this Bill is able to proceed to Committee Stage. I look forward to members' questions and comments. Diolch yn fawr iawn.

I remind members that when putting questions to the witnesses, they should adhere to the agenda items scheduled for discussion. I now call on members to put their questions in accordance with the speaking rota circulated in advance of this meeting. Each member has been allocated seven minutes and should allow time for the witnesses to respond during the seven minutes.

I first wish to apologise because I had to leave to make up a quorum on the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence. People there were presenting on some of the issues that the witnesses were referring to regarding how volatile things are at the moment and how febrile the world is. Even though I missed some of the presentations, I felt it informed some of what I caught from Professor O'Mahony. We have a hurricane approaching the Florida Keys at the moment. It has gone through Yucatán. Allied to that is all the geopolitical instability in the Middle East, with the potential for further escalation in time and possibly a nuclear exchange either in Ukraine or if Israel gets its way, because I think it is ultimately seeking confrontation with Iran before it goes nuclear. We have all these challenges on a macro level. On a micro level, we have people sleeping in doorways. I have four adult children and a teenager who have no prospect of owning their own home or making the decisions that we possibly took for granted about starting a family and so on.

In another life, as an academic, teaching moral philosophy, looking at the half-lives of cultural epochs, such as the Egyptian, Greek or Roman periods, the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment, or Renaissance, they all roughly halve in their duration. In referring to the 20th century, the age of modernism came to an end in 1945 and we have this post-modern period, but really, I think the post-modern period probably ended 24 years ago, around the turn of this century. I do not think we have a name yet for the space that we inhabit now. I like the acronym VUCA, for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It is certainly all of those things. We are at a point where there are existential questions about our survival as a species. It has never been harder in the history of political, cultural or philosophical thought to know what the right thing to do is, to distinguish between right and wrong, but it has never been more important that we distinguish between right and wrong.

In a very long-winded way - I was an academic - I thank the witnesses for putting this together. It is an attempt to go from the passive and reactive to the proactive, and to go from the tactical to the strategic, and to try to get to grips with this. I have a couple of small questions and welcome a response from anybody. In section 5(4), paragraphs (a) through to (d), relate to the composition of the membership of the commission, including gender, age, ethnicity and either English or Irish language speakers. Could I suggest including disability as a category of person? Every single one of us will be disabled at some point in our life. The World Health Organization tells us that everybody in the room and elsewhere will spend at least eight years of their lives disabled, normally towards the end of life, but increasingly with improvements in medicine, such as they are, they include people with acquired brain injuries, people who survive road traffic collisions, and people who survive the mass-disabling events that are taking place in the Middle East and elsewhere. When talking about universal design and how we move forward, it would be important, if possible, to incorporate that into it. I put that out to see what the witnesses think.

Regarding advisory and consultancy roles, I do not know how it could be incorporated, but I think it should be compulsory, every now and again, to include disruptors, that is, people who are not a seamless extension of the establishment, who are provocative and have views and opinions that maybe cause disequilibrium. That would be useful. With the groupthink in recent times, in this new period that we inhabited after the turn of the century, the Celtic tiger era, with all of its intellectual and ethical failures, everyone was ad idem.

I do not know whether there is a profession of disrupters yet. I do not know what we would call them. That is it. I want to thank the witnesses for their presentations and congratulate Deputy Ó Cathasaigh on the initiative. Do the witnesses have any observation on the possibility of including these types of categories in the membership of the committee or appointment as consultants?

I thank the Senator for his positive comments. It does say in the section he referenced "including but not limited to". I was very conscious that I was bringing a particular perspective to the Bill I was writing, and that by bringing my perspective, I was surely missing other people's perspective. If that makes it as far as Committee Stage, and if Senator Clonan's suggestion were to be brought by way of amendment, I would certainly be opening to accepting an amendment along those lines. I do not have the full solution here and other perspectives may bring value.

I agree with the Senator that disruptive voices can be very useful because we can engage the same research and it will give the same answers on everything else. I will point to the public consultations run in Wales. Sometimes public consultations can be very much going through the motions, with the same people in the room. The Wales We Want approach, on which Ms Davidson will be able to speak much more authoritatively, reached into communities in a way that many public consultations do not. It was extremely important to get the disruptive voices and to secure buy-in. As I said, Ms Davidson will speak on this far better than me. There is a real sense of ownership around the Office of the Commissioner for Future Generations in Wales, which comes from the fact people in Wales really were invited to engage with it in a meaningful way while it was being developed.

The Senator made a very interesting point on various lenses, perspectives and value systems bringing in different people. We can have disruptors. I would call it the field of foresight or future studies. It is not necessarily about making things disruptive or difficult for people but pushing away from the groupthink. We think back to the housing situation after the financial crisis. In some ways we feel we should not be where we are now, and if we had had more disrupting of our thinking on various scenarios of where this could have arrived at, or where we would like to go, we may have put in measures to prevent arriving where we are now. In a very short space of time we went from complete oversupply to complete overdemand. There are disruptive modes we can put in. Citizens' assemblies are one and there are also participative exercises through foresight and future studies to push where this can go in the future and where we would like to go.

The only thing I would like to add, if I may, is when a government consults - and I have been Minister for 11 years and have done a lot of consulting - as has already been said we tend to get the usual people responding. What we did in The Wales We Want campaign was hand it over completely to the voluntary sector in Wales. All of those thousands of people in their own organisations the length and breadth of Wales were the ones who responded to it. They said what kind of vision they wanted for Wales for the future. I was delighted because it accorded very much with the vision we consulted on in "One Wales: One Planet", which is available for anyone to read. That was back in 2009. For us all of this has been a long journey from 2009 to now. The very important point is how we get to participatory democracy to have a real role in this. There are many more tools for it now than we had available to us in Wales in 2014. It was also part of a much bigger agenda in terms of the world we want, which was an important aspect also.

I thank the witnesses for coming from various bodies, and in particular Ms Davidson, for being with us. We met in Wales when I spent quite a number of hours speaking to Sophie Howe, who was then the Commissioner for Future Generations in Wales. She is a very energetic and articulate person. I believe she held the role from 2016 to 2023. Derek Walker is now in the role. I support what Deputy Ó Cathasaigh is trying to do. It is sensible of him not to try to draft a Bill to produce what the end product will be and, instead, to limit the ambition for now and put in place a process that will then put something comprehensive in place which, hopefully, all parties can support. This should not be seen as a Government versus Opposition issue. It is an entity which, I hope, will be in place for many future governments, made up of many colours, shapes, parties and individuals. This is the right approach even though, like Deputy Ó Cathasaigh, I am impatient to get on with it rather than having a long drawn-out process.

I have number of comments, if I may. I am not as pessimistic for the future as Senator Clonan.

I believe my children will be able to buy their own homes. Even though we face housing challenges in Ireland today, we are seeing many people every week buying their first home with the assistance of the State. We need a lot more of this. The Senator is absolutely right about the state of the world today internationally and the impact of this here also. It is very hard to predict what Ireland, Europe and the world will be like even in a year never mind five or ten years. We speak about Ireland's role in agreeing the sustainable development goals of the UN, and Ireland was very central, along with Kenya, when the goals were agreed to. There are also, of course, many of the laudable policies mentioned today with regard to the national well-being framework, a pact for the future and other work we are doing. The truth is the reality of this must be about implementation as well as putting together plans.

Many of the SDGs are not goals we are closing in on; in fact, we are moving away from them in many cases. Approximately 13% of the planet's population lives in the type of democracy that Wales and Ireland enjoy. The rest of the world is living in countries that are either autocratic or moving away from democracy. We live in extraordinary privilege in this part of the world and in this country. We make mistakes in how it is run but in comparison to most of the planet we have extraordinary opportunities ahead of our children and the next generation. We are trying to prepare for them. Having a champion for these future generations is a good idea, not only as watchdog on government policy, policymakers and ministers, which is an important role for any future ombudsman or commissioner, but also somebody who can paint a picture of the type of future we want to work for and towards, and can generate public interest, excitement and momentum around some of the messaging. In this legislation we need to try to ensure the commission is not just designing a policing body, although this must be part of assessing any future policy change in terms of its impact in ten years as well as in a year.

Politicians often tend to make decisions linked to election cycles rather than future generations. I refer to having a champion that is constantly pulling the debate back to how this will impact on future generations whether that is on climate, economic development, the approach to geopolitical change - something like a definition or an approach towards Irish neutrality in the future, for example. These are debates we are having now and having a champion, an office or an ombudsman for future generations as part of that discussion would be a very healthy thing. It will be seen by some in the Government system as an inconvenience - that is the politest way I could put it - when they are trying to put together their own policy documents and they are being questioned and pulled and dragged in different directions by someone who is not part of that silo, if you want to call it that. That is a challenge. I remember when we put the programme for Government together we tried to move towards a mission-type approach towards outcomes, as opposed to individual Departments doing X, Y and Z. It has worked in some areas and not in others.

I am not quite sure we should call it an ombudsman's office. That signals to me a complaints or a policing body which has negative connotations to it. Someone, or an office, representing future generations should be a place where inspiration and optimism comes from, as well as challenge and having a hard edge in terms of its relationship with Government.

On ensuring this works, there is an argument that this body would be funded by or be the policy responsibility of the Department of the Taoiseach rather than the Departments of environment, children, enterprise or education. My experience across five or six ministries is that if you are trying to do something that crosses multiple Departments and do not have the Department of the Taoiseach making sure that happens, it gets stuck in the mud. What happens is one Department simply does not take instruction from another and it becomes a sort of a pecking order issue around who has the responsibility for a certain policy. That changes when the Department of the Taoiseach takes charge of something. That is what happened during Covid and what has happened from a climate point of view in setting up a Department with responsibility for climate in which the Department of Taoiseach has been very involved as well. If this is to be an ombudsman linked to Government or to policy development, the sponsoring Department should be the Department of the Taoiseach. It will then be taken seriously across Departments; it may not otherwise be. The last thing we want to do here is to set up a new body that looks good on paper, feels good but of which nobody takes any notice. I do not want to be in any way cynical in saying that but a real danger here is that this will not be seen as part of the real business of Government. The danger is that we will have somebody who will be having consultations around the country, meeting youth clubs, chambers of commerce and environmental NGOs. They will produce report, come in to this committee and talk about what we need to do for the future. However, will they really have a edge to them that actually determines how Secretaries General of Departments shape policy and recommendations to Ministers? If we are going to do this, we need to have an outcome that has punch and influence and shapes future Government policy, even if it is inconvenient, difficult and raises hackles and so on. That is part of what this office, this individual or team of people should be doing whatever we decide to call them.

Having met Sophie Howe who was the future generations commission for Wales, I was quite inspired by the whole concept. What Wales was trying to do is different and it is worth pursuing in Ireland. I would warn against designing this in a way that does not give it real clout because it will essentially be seen as a lobbyist, almost like an NGO, and that is not what we need here. What we need is something that Ministers feel they have to engage with as an office and by which they can be challenged. If you have the imprimatur of the Department of the Taoiseach behind this entity, it is a much stronger entity from the outset. That would be my view but I look forward to the future debate. I may not be around for it but I will follow it with interest.

Deputy Coveney may not be around for the debate but hopefully he will engage in the consultation that it seems we are going to undertake. I have questions on the consultation that I will come back to.

One of the debates that frequently pops up here is around a constitutional amendment to allow young people to vote at the age of 16. It is a very sensible idea. However, the point was made that this is about children even younger than 16 or those who are perhaps not even born yet. It is a very welcome thing to extend our timelines, our thinking and the way we view the consequences of our actions and the work that needs to be done. I agree with the idea of being focused on missions, outcomes and the role the body plays. One of the things I would like to, and could be interesting to, explore, are the reporting levels. Deputy Ó Cathasaigh spoke about reporting after 12 months. I look at the Policing Authority which has quarterly engagements with An Garda Síochána where there is a robust exchange, an interrogation, a detailed exchange of numbers, data and questions to really drill into things. That is a really important thing. It could be a really positive thing. On the idea of being more outcome-focused, I will pick up on the point made by the Department of the Taoiseach about the tagging initiative that uses dimensions of the well-being framework. Is that done as a kind of post hoc analysis of the budget or does it in any way influence the budget? As was said before, it is about setting an outcome. There is a big difference between setting an outcome and trying to achieve it and delivering a budget through the normal framework, applying it after the fact saying how good we are for ticking particular boxes. They are very different ways of thinking about the process and they produce different outcomes and consequences. Asking if this is a post hoc analysis; the tagging exercise and how it can be expanded and how it interacts with this kind of work, I would love to hear a bit more about that. I am conscious of allowing time for answers so I will leave it there for the moment. I may jump in towards the end with another question.

Our approach to the budget is twofold. First, we have a pre-budget part which is about the indicators. What that is trying to do is set out how we are doing. That feeds into the national economic dialogue and it features in the summer economic statement. That is trying to influence that discussion in advance of the budget. The point there is to influence the discussion based on what the indicators are.

We are still at early days on the tagging initiative. Last year was the first year it was published. It is a post-budget evaluation of the well-being dimensions that are covered in the budget and at how the cross-governmental expenditure looks according to those well-being dimensions. In time, we hope that we will be able to use it to look back. How did the budget look last year? What does the overall capital and current expenditure, based on the well-being dimension, look like? It is not just about that little bit extra. It is about the full amount and how that influences the future. It is an ongoing, iterative thing about the whole process of the budget across the year but we take that joint approach, pre-budget and post-budget.

Again, it influences but does not necessarily guide or become a target. If there is a particular thing one wants to achieve, for example, in the area of child poverty, it has an influential role. As was said, it is like an NGO lobbying as opposed to an actual target whereby there is a specific outcome that we must hit and we will frame our thinking to actually hit it, if that makes sense. What I am looking at is trying to explore something more prescriptive and that guides the budget more than influences it. Where would that fit in and can this office help to achieve that?

This goes to the heart of the matter. Some very good work is being done in the Department of the Taoiseach on the well-being framework. I acknowledge that. Ms Bourke and Ms Jacobs will know that I have particular views around the inclusion of language and culture and never pass up an opportunity to bring that up. It is a question of where that work goes and how much it influences the budget. The strength of the well-being framework should be the idea that we become more outcome-focused so that when the budgetary spend is made, year on year, we should be able to measure that against progress within our society, based on the well-being framework and whatever dimensions we have chosen to bring out in that. Deputy Coveney's point about implementation is absolutely key so that we do not create an office that is a talking shop. We do not need that. We do not need another one of those. If we invest in the creation of this role we have to find a way to ensure that it takes the well-being framework and really gives it teeth and makes it sit down into our policymaking. There are some very interesting approaches in Finland, whereby the Prime Minister has to come before the committee of the future and report on the strategic objectives they want to achieve. Similarly, in New Zealand, which is further down the road in terms of the well-being framework, the Prime Minister has to respond to those reports. That is absolutely key. What we are trying to get at is twofold. We are trying to allow for cathedral thinking whereby we think longer term than any one government. We look to a 50-year time horizon and begin to think about that. At the same time, we are also trying to really get into that implementation piece. We are trying to get our well-being framework to really sit down within the legislative or policy context and deliver outcomes for people. That is why I think the role can be so important if it is properly resourced and empowered.

That is an absolutely critical question because in essence, once we start changing the way we do things, it becomes almost obligatory to start creating new ways of doing things. It is no longer satisfactory to the people of Wales to be asked by government what they want when they are just given the normal choices that government puts into consultations. They now feel that there has to be a lot more engagement in terms of delivery. The focus in the first commissioner's role was very much about being a critical friend to the public sector charged with these new responsibilities. Nobody has mentioned yet that one of the things she did particularly well was to create an army of young people in the public sector. They were called an academy and they actually helped to advise her on different ways of engaging with people. Some of those ways have been mentioned already and include participative democracy and citizens' assemblies and others. Really getting into the heart of rural communities in Wales has been very important. That builds the trust. As some may know, we have had a very big issue in Wales recently around speed limits of 20 mph. That was something for which there was massive support across the whole of Wales. None of the communities want to return to faster speed limits. It has saved children's lives very dramatically this year. People now feel able to say to government that it did not do this with them but did its normal consultation. The Government is very much on the back foot at the moment because of people's expectations around those five ways of working, namely, thinking long term, integrating outcomes, collaborating, involving people about whom decisions are being made and being preventative. People are now seeing that it is their right to call on the Government and public services to do more. They will be disrupters by the very nature of this but that helps us all to sharpen our vision.

There was an interesting strand of conversation there. Deputy Coveney mentioned vision and Senator Clonan mentioned "strategic". These are different parts of the policy process. Ms Davidson mentioned working on the what and the how. If we focus on the UN SDGs and the well-being framework, they are indicator frameworks. They are programme evaluation and investment appraisal tools but they do not lead to different policies. They lead to, at the margins, some slightly different conversations but this is about fundamentally different policies. We have to come up with a higher level re-conceptualisation. What are our policy priorities? What policies can potentially achieve this and how can this play out? How can we implement it? What stakeholders do we need on board? Is investment required? If not, what strategy do we need? It is a different process and it is likely that to really make this a substantial commission, it needs something leaning towards what Deputy Coveney mentioned in terms of vision. The well-being framework and the SDGs are definitely useful but they are not tools that allow us to create something different.

There is one thing I have not mentioned yet that might be relevant in this context. Part of the reason that it took us so long was that in our first decade it was very difficult for us to understand what we all meant by sustainable development. We all agreed that the Brundtland definition was the definition, as adopted by the UN, but people's interpretation of that differed. It is a kind of journey that we have to go on when we want to change the parameters.

A number of people have made the point that if we want to plan better outcomes, we have to do it in different kinds of ways from the way we have historically. The ways we have operated previously, particularly in the context, for example, of issues around climate and nature, which are hugely relevant to all of us in our future, have been to have them as sort of separate elements of our governments' policies. One of the things that has been most successful in Wales has been the idea that if we really plan our way to do this well, which is what we have aimed to do through the net zero 2035 in a just and nature-positive way work, is that it is far better for Wales than having to respond to the unintended outcomes. I have become firmer in my view over this journey that having the kind of imaginative approach Ireland is taking, where the commission can determine what the characteristics would be - it would still have to go through a properly parliamentary process anyway - is that the journey will help you see how you want to respond to some other areas. That was a massively important lesson we found. Ireland can accelerate it. We have taken a very long time to do it.

I am interested to hear Ms Davidson speak about what they are doing differently in Wales. It would be good if she could outline how the approach taken in Wales has made Wales different from, say, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It would be good, if possible, to have a comparison. What is the dividend from going down this road in policy, decisions, vision and outcomes? They have been at it now since, I think, 2016. There is nearly a decade of experience of setting up a new approach effectively, which was quite a visionary thing to do. Regarding outcomes, is Wales a more progressive place than Scotland or England from the point of view of climate, future generations and youth vision as a result of having a future generations commissioner and as a result of the legislation put in place requiring the Welsh Parliament to consider future generations in all key policy decisions? Has it delivered that dividend in real terms or is it still sort of an outlook change towards how policy and how decisions are made? Is that a fair question?

Since we have Ms Davidson with us, and she has experience of academia, politics, legislation and years of campaigning in this space, it would be good to get a sense of what changes when going down this road. What can Wales point to that other states have not managed to achieve because they have not gone there yet?

Regarding the nature of Wales, we are a very different country from Ireland. We look at Ireland in envy in terms of its per capita income and so on. There is a strong community approach and Wales. One of the things that has happened through the legislation is that people have felt more able to go to their public services and ask for changes. Those changes might be as simple as, for example, we suddenly discovered there are hundreds more allotments that have been created in Wales at local level since the Act. There are huge efforts to produce more sustainable food. From the government's perspective, when I was a politician, for example, I wanted to ban smacking, which most of us agreed on. We initially did not have the powers and then there was not a sufficient majority for it. Those kinds of things sailed through once we had the Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act. The 20 mph proposition was strongly supported by politicians, but there are implementation issues. The big challenge for Wales now is moving from having a policy that people broadly like – they like being able to hold their politicians to account – but they also feel we are on a journey that is speeding up and they want greater action and definitely greater public engagement.

The Deputy made the point that only 13% of the world's population have democracies like ours. I often feel that we are almost daily at risk of losing that 13% in a way because we are becoming increasingly bipartisan. That is something we are trying to head off by keeping this much wider engagement.

I refer to things like deciding rather than putting money into new motorway roads; repairing other ones in local areas; changing the way businesses are supported if they do things that are more sustainable; and designing out emissions – the pathway work that we just finished. It was commissioned by two thirds of the members of the Senedd and would lead us from a point where currently we would be far behind other nations in the UK and we would then be ahead because we would tackle some of the key problems in an holistic way, not department by department. That is an underlying theme that has come through in the dialogue. We cannot expect either the First Minister of Wales or the Taoiseach to hold the ring for everything, but if they hold the ring for the complexity of the way the rest of us have to work in our departmental silos and keep ensuring that we maximise our impact on each other, that in itself would be a massive culture change. People like the fact that these things are all part of decision-making, not just at government level, but at public service level, local government level and all the way down to parish council level. There is a chain throughout Wales and the big opportunity now is about how we improve public health, for example, rather than look at health in terms of how many more doctors and nurses we need. It shifted the character of discussion in every frame of work in which we are involved.

I wish to pick up on a few comments. I thank Ms Davidson. It was very interesting to hear from her. We have good ongoing co-operation with Wales. We met with the future generations commissioner last month. It is always a good opportunity to share experiences. Ms Davidson talked about a journey, and Wales is further along on a journey. However, equally, we have experience that the future generations commissioner was happy to learn from us. We are looking at opportunities to deepen that co-operation through the Ireland-Wales bilateral relationship. We are earlier in our journey. We recognise there is much more to do to embed the well-being framework across the system. We are looking at developing indicators for a place-based or subnational approach to build the local level approach that Ms Davidson talked about in Wales. We are also looking at how to further embed sustainable well-being into policy and have continued engagement with stakeholders. We recognise that embedding this across government is an ongoing process.

I will be brief because I will have a final word again next week and I do not want to repeat myself too much. What motivated me and drove me towards this approach is that there are larger problems we will face as a society and as a species that cannot be solved in a five-year time horizon. Dr. O’Mahony said to me a number of years ago that we might all disagree and be at each other’s throats politically about what we should do today, tomorrow and next year, but if we take a 50-year vision and ask what we want things to look like in 50 years, most of us will agree or come to a place where we can have a conversation. From there, we can begin to work backwards.

That is the type of thinking I am trying to unlock through this office, whereby rather than just have the general political around-the-houses that we tend to get we look at a longer-term vision and we can open up a space where we can have a conversation about a longer-term vision. Then we can begin to work backwards and begin to figure out the steps we want to take in order to achieve that kind of 50-year outcome we desire. I will not say much more than that because I will be back at it again next week. I thank all the witnesses, and in particular Ms Jane Davidson, for appearing and speaking to us today. Hopefully it is something we can progress, perhaps not within the lifetime of this Dáil but it may carry over into the next Dáil, depending on how we go.

I thank Deputy Ó Cathasaigh. I propose to publish the opening statements on the Oireachtas website. Is that agreed? Agreed. I thank all our witnesses for their engagement and really important input here this afternoon. It is fair to say a special thanks to Ms Davidson. I thank her for her time and for being here sharing her expertise with us this afternoon. All of the witnesses' engagement will greatly assist us when the committee is drafting its scrutiny report on this Bill and I thank them.