Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for coming here today. I apologise for my tardiness. I had other things happening but I am here now. It is great to have the witnesses here today. This is one of the things I am very passionate about. I am the Green Party spokesperson for enterprise, trade and employment and for rural development. I have worked with many small companies and social entrepreneurs over the years. I come from a family of social entrepreneurs and I have lots of friends around me who are doing great things.

I have a couple of questions. I do not know who will answer them but I will throw them out there anyway. Scope 3 has really brought it into light for bigger companies. I am becoming less cynical about many big companies in Ireland. I think they are doing some really good work in leading the way on solutions to reduce their carbon emissions. Smaller businesses struggle to get the information they need under scope 3. I do not believe we are doing enough to support small businesses with this challenge and to be able to supply the larger companies. I see that most of these companies are very busy, so they do not have a lot of time. There is a green for micro scheme through the local enterprise offices but the figures for it are appalling. There is very little uptake or push on it despite lots of good funding to support it, so there is something missing in that.

Many small companies often want to do the right thing but they have to bear all the packaging and other costs because they cannot do bulk buying because of storage issues and so on. I was thinking that it would be great if there was some way where organisations supported them to do a bulk purchase between them so they could get the cost benefits big companies can. This is something that is missing at present.

I would like to know the figures on the B Corp standard. It is the only one I feel is really safe and that I can really trust. I have seen many different standards, labels, awards, green awards and so on. When I looked into B Corp, it was by far the standard that gave me real faith. How is that going? Is it spreading figures-wise? Are we getting there? I do not know if many companies know about it. There are many different labels and awards available these days but we want to bring to the surface the ones that are true green awards and recognise them.

I see a lot of great social entrepreneurs doing lots of good things but also focusing on single issues such as trees, climate or biodiversity. What I see missing is the holistic piece. I attended a tree planting event where some 40 people had driven from all over the country to the event. The lovely, amazing NGO was getting funding from philanthropists and Government. As a social entrepreneur, it was ticking all the boxes. There are lots of clever ways of getting funding from every angle, which is brilliant and a good thing. However, it was doing nothing on transport, for example.

We have to reduce our transport by 50%. It had not even occurred to the organisation to tell those attending about the bus that comes eight times a day to that town, for example. Do we need some kind of toolkit to ensure, if organisations are getting funding for doing something green, they are trying to cover all the different things? It is not big work.

I did a thing with the Burren Ecotourism Network. That is an amazing example of what can be done. There are more than 60 businesses there. I developed the sustainable transport module they signed up for. It is simple things like having the bus timetable on the website, whether there is bike hire or having a car-pooling app so if eight people are coming from Dublin, they come in two cars instead of seven. It is to get people thinking like that again. There are simple things we can do. We cannot all cycle and walk everywhere but we all did car-sharing. We piled into cars and it is a good social connection as well. We are missing a piece by going down a tunnel on one specific thing and being busy on that. Maybe Social Entrepreneurs Ireland could look at something to support businesses and communities better. The Burren Ecotourism Network, again, is a good example. It tries to cover every aspect. Any business that signs up has to come up with how it is dealing with every aspect of being more climate- and biodiversity-aware. That would be a good model to look at because it seems to be working and thriving in Clare. I am completely biased but it is one of the best.

It is interesting to look at how far we have come. Things are vastly improving. There will probably be war over this latte levy when it comes in. I do not think people realise how bad we are in Ireland and the amount of rubbish and waste we produce. People were giving out about the deposit return scheme but three million extra bottles were recycled in the first week. People do not want inconvenience but it could save them money and be good for the planet. Most people know and are concerned about climate but we need to bring home how it affects them locally. Flooding affects us locally, as does the cost of petrol or diesel. How do we bring it back to the local? Nobody cares about the Maldives anymore. They want to know how it affects them. That is a missing piece when we talk about climate and biodiversity. Giving global information is not where most people are at in their daily lives.