Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We have rehearsed this argument and will return to it again on Report Stage. Environmentalists have been at pains to tell me that very often the definition of "environmental sustainability" that is used in political parlance, in the Dáil and elsewhere, is so narrow as to reduce its meaning to nothing. When sustainability is defined by the EU in various environmental directives and at the conclusion of environmental summits, like the Rio summit in 2012, it is a very broad definition that takes into account the impact, at every level, on society and on communities because that is the environment. The environment is not just the fish in the sea or the level of pollution in the air. The environment is, literally, everything and that is how it is defined. It is not just me or Irish environmentalists who are saying this.

That is how it was defined at the Earth Summit in Rio and is defined in EU directives. The point being made by environmentalists is that the companies the Minister is exempting have enormous impact on our society and the environment in the broadest sense and therefore to insulate them on the grounds that they are engaged in commercial activity would be a massive blow to the campaign for environmental sustainability in the official and proper meaning of that term.