Mr. Oisín Coghlan:

I have been trying to communicate climate change for a while. There has been a sea change in the past four or five years, which has helped us with the communication. This meeting demonstrates that while there are still some divisions and different emphases, there is more common ground about the challenge and the communications than there has been at times before. Some of the things that have changed matters include the process unleashed by the Citizens’ Assembly, including the work of this committee and its previous iterations. The Citizens’ Assembly has shown us, as it did on other issues, that the public was further ahead than the politicians thought.

That freed the politicians to be more communicative and engaged than they had been before.

The science around climate change, the 1.5°C report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, and the most recent report again are so stark that it has been harder than ever to ignore. The climate school strikes, to be honest, changed the conversation and caught us by surprise in the environmental movement and they shook up societal perceptions. Finally, the climate itself and the changes over the past ten years in how we are experiencing climate and weather have brought this home to people in a way that means it cannot be ignored. That has freed people, to put it that way, to communicate more about this. I agree with some of the other speakers that we will not always be on the same hymn sheet, but we need the substance to communicate, and then we need to be honest with our constituencies about the scale of the transition that is required and the challenges of that, as well as the opportunities and the benefits.