Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Incredible scenes have emerged from Germany over the past few weeks. The German Government has decided to destroy and demolish a village called Lützerath to make room for a coal mine. It has been met by brave resistance. Some 50,000 protestors turned up to resist, who in turn were subjected to incredible brutality by the German police. Indeed, yesterday, Greta Thunberg was arrested. In the town of Lützerath, we are seeing the brutality of the police against climate protestors while the Greens are in government in Germany, which is a dramatic illustration of the failure of the Greens really to deal with a climate catastrophe.

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This plan is less dramatic. It is less clear to people and less brutal than the police but its failure, which is an indication of the failure of the Greens in this country, is no less profound. If the justification for the Greens' participation in government with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael was action on climate change, this plan, in its own quiet way, blows that out of the water. We must compare, as we always should, the scale of the crisis versus the response and it is the equivalent of advising a patient bleeding to death from a gaping wound to use some tea tree oil on it. The failure is not an accident; it is built into this Government's management commitment to the capitalist system to allow the big business decisions on agribusiness, data centres and private energy to take priority over the needs of ordinary people and the need to avoid climate catastrophe. The only things the Government has are wishful thinking about the market delivering and wishful thinking on the future technology that will come down the line. The latest EPA report confirms that up to quarter 2 of 2022 Ireland's emissions grew once again, making it the highest per capita emitter in the EU. In total, Ireland's emissions are on track to exceed the combined ten-year carbon budget by between 23% and 26%. It is an absolutely brazen, clear and complete failure in every single aspect. The reason is the Government always puts the interests of big business first. To stop climate change and absolute catastrophe we need system change, a break with the ecocidal capitalist system and ecosocialist change that puts people's interests and our planet first.

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