Sooner or later, the penny was bound to drop that we would have to do something about the greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to the phenomenon of global climate change. There was no way we could wriggle out of an international commitment to tackle the issue.
In June 1998 the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, agreed at an EU ministerial council in Luxembourg that Ireland would cap the increase in its emissions at 13 per cent above their 1990 levels by 2010, as part of an EU "burden-sharing" arrangement to implement the Kyoto Protocol.
It has taken more than two years to produce a strategy to put flesh on the bones of that commitment. Much of that time was spent by Mr Dempsey and his officials trying to convince other Government departments and the social partners that the issue would not go away. No doubt earlier drafts of the strategy were watered down considerably during this bruising process.
Certainly, the document unveiled yesterday bears the hallmarks of bureaucratic infighting; many of its proposals are hedged by qualifications insisted upon by the various interest groups.
Take agriculture, for example. A reduction of 10 per cent in the national herd would clearly be one way of reducing methane emissions from cattle, but that is not what the strategy says. The measures it proposes would only be equivalent to a 10 per cent reduction on projected cattle numbers in 2010.
Similarly, though an explicit commitment has been made to introduce greenhouse gas taxes across the board, there are no specifics on tax levels; that will be left to the Minister for Finance to announce - not in next month's Budget but next year, perhaps. In any case, carbon taxes are also to be phased in.
It is fair to put people on notice that such measures are on the way. Any switch in tax to fossil fuels, long endorsed by the ESRI as a progressive measure, would have to be flagged so that everyone could prepare themselves.
Earthwatch, the only major Irish environmental group running a climate change campaign, strongly endorses the imposition of a carbon tax, whatever truck-drivers may have to say about it. For the sake of equity, as the strategy itself concedes, it would have to be applied equitably, across the board.
However, Mr Pat Finnegan, Earthwatch's climate change campaigner, is deeply suspicious of the strategy's reliance on "voluntary agreements" with industry on emission reductions. This has been tried with recycling, through the industry-supported REPAK initiative, which has clearly failed to achieve its targets.
If a carbon tax is the stick, emissions-trading is the carrot - and we'll be hearing a lot more of that. This is a mechanism whereby an industrial firm in Ireland could "trade" emissions with other firms at home and abroad to meet target reductions; it must not, however, be used as a substitute for domestic action.
Other measures in the strategy, such as linking new house grants with higher energy efficiency, are so sensible they could have been adopted long ago. We have a big mountain to climb, though, if Ireland, with its still burgeoning economy, is to achieve the greenhouse gas emissions target for 2010. The likelihood is that we won't.