Dr. Peter Doran:

I begin by inviting members to let their minds wander to their favourite piece of wilderness, the place where their soul is most at home on our island - a field, a lakeside, a beach or a coastal walk, a wood or a piece of farmland, perhaps tended by generations of their family. Today, citizens across the island and across the world are watching the committee's deliberations following up on the recommendations from the citizens’ assembly. I am thinking of rights of nature campaigners across the island who have brought motions to local authorities seeking recognition of the rights of nature or their local ecosystems. I am thinking of Maeve O'Neill or Rose Kelly in the borderlands of Derry and Donegal. I am thinking of the secretariat of the United Nations Harmony with Nature unit, who gathered with us at the UN General Assembly earlier this year to consider the progress we have made across the island on the incorporation of the rights of nature into policy and law.

These campaigners from across the island and across the world form a transformative movement that makes a simple claim: our island is alive, nature is our relative, and nature's integrity and intrinsic rights to flourish are inseparable from our own human right to freedom and dignity. An amendment to the Constitution incorporating the human right to a healthy environment, together with the rights of nature, can bring a new dignity to the Constitution and a new visibility to the fact that we are constituted as a nation by citizens and the “more than human”, that is, the ecosystems, landscapes, rivers, trees and mountains whose daily labour make our lives possible and make our human rights meaningful.

At the first meeting of the Citizens Assembly on 14 May last year, Professor Bob Watson, a man who has helped steer the world’s scientific work on climate change as the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a former chair of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity, asked a profound question, namely, do we humans have the right to destroy nature? It was a deliberately provocative question that goes to the heart of our deliberations about nature and rights. On my reading, Professor Watson’s question poses this dilemma: the destruction of our life support systems has accelerated even as our national and international legal systems have proliferated laws and conventions designed supposedly to limit the damage we have wrought.

Seventy-five years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 50 years after the Stockholm conference in 1972, where the idea of a human right to a healthy environment was first mooted, and more than 30 years after the first Earth Summit, there are few signs that we will contain the climate emergency and the wider ecological or socio-ecological crises continue to point to an ongoing extinction event unprecedented in its scale during humanity's time on earth.

The authoritative planetary boundaries framework update recently found that six of the nine boundaries are already transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.

There is increasing concern that we humans have designed our political, economic, legal and environmental solutions using the very toolbox that has brought us to the brink. That old toolbox puts humans first. In Ireland, as in many parts for the world, the right to enclose, use, exploit, transform and dispose of nature seems to trump all other considerations or can do so. Nature herself enjoys no intrinsic rights to exist. Our laws and constitutions remain deeply anthropocentric. In the European habit of thought, we humans have regularly reduced nature’s standing to that of an object and dead matter only deserving of our fundamental ethical regard insofar as it can derive value from our dominant economic systems. As the saying goes, we know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

It took a vast European-led imaginative and political enterprise that was colonial, intellectual, philosophical, and cultural in its scope to render the Earth "as a vast machine made of inert particles in ceaseless motion" and to construct nature as a machine, as a resource, and to destroy and denigrate the thousands of indigenous communities who lived from a different spirit, a deeply ecological sense of their own origins and being. In Brian Friel’s immortal words, in his play Translations, colonialism led to "a kind of exile" that not only resulted from the imposition of an alien language but from the partition that severed communities from their ancient ties to their landscapes and their local knowledge. The recommendations from the citizens' assembly present us with an opportunity to listen carefully to our own story of imposed narratives that would have us reduce our Irish mytho-poetic traditions to mere superstition, devoid of meaning.

Our insatiable appetite for the writings and broadcasts of the celebrated Manchán Magan suggest that we are emerging as a people from a spell of disenchantment that accompanied our experience of colonialism and the closure of our collective imaginations. Our own writers, poets, singers, storytellers and many academics, stretching back to "The Song of Amergin" and up to figures such as John Moriarty or, more recently, Michael Cronin, have protected and cherished ways of knowing and belonging to our landscapes in ways that restore an intimacy, love and meaning.

Let me close with the words of the UN Special Rapporteur on Environment and Human Rights, who said:

The fundamental values and laws that have governed society for hundreds of years are in the early stages of the most radical transformation in history. To some extent, this is a revitalization of long-suppressed Indigenous cosmologies that offer a different, and many would say far healthier, vision of humanity’s relationship with the rest of the natural world.

The rights of nature point to much more than a legal transformation. They point to an opportunity to amend our Constitution so that we might at last constitute, that is, re-imagine, invoke and call into being our Republic as a Republic for all; a Republic for humans and the more than human, who work, love and labour for us every moment of every day to secure the conditions for our human life. The rights of nature point to new forms of knowing and being that are part of our own ancient stories. The rights of nature speak to an intimate knowledge, an intimate pre-colonial memory, that our freedom as a Republic will only be complete when our rivers also run free. That is why our children and young people’s assembly anticipated the citizens' assembly's recommendations with a call on all of us to treat nature as a relative. That is why the rights of nature speak to a deep intuitive insight that everyone carries deep in their hearts, for we are all in love with the wild places we call home, the wild places where we come to know freedom as a kind of wild stirring of our most beautiful thoughts and deepest connections and belongings.