Ms Meaghan Carmody:

I thank the Chair. If he allows me a few minutes, I have a few points in response to that because he raised a number of really important threads that I want to make sure are not lost. First, the badge was designed by a documentarian called Adam Curtis and a lot of thought went into it. It is not a coincidence that it also represents the doughnut, if the Chair has ever heard of doughnut economics. My second point is the outer of the concentric circles represents the planetary boundaries. There are nine of them and we have already surpassed or transgressed six.

In 2015 that framework was devised by Will Steffen and a number of others at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. It is really important that we keep those in mind because we need to meet everybody's needs and put a social floor under everybody's feet, regardless of where they come from, while not transgressing those planetary boundaries. That social floor is the inner circle. That is a great hub for conversations. The Cathaoirleach mentioned fear and optimism. I have recently learned the distinction between optimism and hope. Optimism can be being positive and disregarding the evidence, and the evidence is bleak. We need to be cognisant and explicit about that. We are not on the right track. Even before Covid-19, the EU was not on the right track in terms of achieving the SDGs. As Mr. Donoghue pointed out, it is unlikely that any country was ever going to achieve 100% by 2030. They are a direction but the evidence shows that we are actually backtracking on a lot of them, which is very worrying. Alternatively, the hope is sticking to the desired outcome despite the odds. Even if there is a narrowing window, we remain hopeful. That is common to all of us here.

The Cathaoirleach made a point about climate migration. Sian Cowman, a fantastic researcher at NUI Maynooth, is doing a lot of research on the narratives around climate migration and, in particular, advocating for us not to use that term anymore because it is being co-opted and it is plastering over deeper issues that are causing people to move. People have always moved as mobility is natural to humans. To take the example of UAE, however, people are not moving from UAE because there is infrastructure there and they do not have to move. People are moving from countries that historically have lacked investment and the infrastructure to meet everybody's needs. This is deeply related to climate finance. They are not two separate tracks of thought. We need to be paying our historical debt. Ireland is doing relatively well in many areas but we have to keep the spillovers that were mentioned earlier at the front of our minds. We are importing emissions and embodied slavery and we are offshoring many of the issues, as is the EU as a whole. We need to talk about climate finance and get to the €500 million target that has been floated by Oxfam, Dóchas and others.

I take the point about lazy language in terms of the drift to the right. It is really important not to label people. People vote for different reasons. There are agitators, albeit few of them, but there are people who want less rights for most people for whatever reason. Many people have suffered the brunt of the financial crisis. They have been squeezed and are seeing a lack of investment in their communities, particularly working class communities. They are frustrated and fed up. Rather than labelling people, we need to ensure that communities are well served and there is investment in our communities. That investment still has not returned to pre-2008 levels as of today in Ireland.

The Cathaoirleach spoke about education, which is important, but well-being and providing that social floor for everybody is foundational. We cannot have increasing inequality and this consistent focus on economic growth, and then think that education will be the plaster to solve this. It is part of it but it is not the panacea.

On futures, this is an area where there is real optimism. Ireland has the opportunity to be the second country in the world with a future generations commissioner or a future generations ombudsman. There is a Bill going through the Houses at the moment. We could show how we punch above our weight in this area. We are a small country, like Wales, and could have a national conversation on what sort of a future we want to have for Ireland. There are models out there on how to do that. I will push back a little bit on the statement that in Ireland we have a whole-of-government approach. We hear this again and again. We do have a framework for SDG delivery but it is not integrated or embedded sufficiently across all Departments. We have an inter-departmental working group but it is relatively weak. To take the food poverty working group and hot school meals for children, for example, a lot of the food used is not local and is not necessarily sustainable in terms of packaging. There is incoherence there on something that is very easy to be coherent with. We also need leadership from the Department of the Taoiseach. That signal has to come from the higher levels as, otherwise, the Department of the environment will not have accountability over other Departments, which speaks to Senator Keogan's point. That is a key issue. We need to integrate this with our well-being framework, which already exists, and account for spillover effects. When we do that and it informs the budget, we will supercharge SDG delivery in Ireland.

My final point is to focus on having a well-being economy. People are sick of hearing that Ireland is doing really well economically. We have a budget every year but if we look at the housing crisis or what is happening today on Mount St., it begs the question as to where that money is going. We need more transparency, as well as more involvement of citizens in our national budgets and our future.