Ms Sarah Clancy:

Mixing up the people who make most noise with the majority is not always a great idea. People have severe issues with traffic in Galway. What will solve these is really good public transport, which we do not have. We have no DART or Luas, as I know from living there, and there is extremely poor planning. All the factories were built on the far side of the city from all the housing. It is a city with three river crossings. I am referring to really working to provide the solutions. For example, there has been a campaign for years for a “Gluas”, a Luas for Galway. People have been laughing at this as if we wanted a spaceship. If the positive things were coming at the same time as the negative things, it would be desirable, but they are not.

On carbon taxes, I would be totally in favour of a carbon tax on flying, but I am not in favour of a carbon tax on rural areas because huge numbers of people there have no viable alternatives. Active travel is not an alternative unless a person can deliver his or her three children to three schools 20 km away by this means. People do not like being told that things that are not practically possible for them are the solution. It would be really positive to get the positive things going as fast as possible.

One thing we keep coming up against is that when we say to people that they have to cut their emissions, they point to the fine, big data centres being built. A renewal of an exploration licence for fossil fuels was granted last week. We cannot have that happening. We have to have one message, namely that the granting of such licences is a thing of the past and that we are moving towards the future. We must also try to get people to buy into the belief that it will be a good future. I hate harking back to things, but how did they build Ardnacrusha? How did the co-operatives emerge? We know how to do this in Ireland but we are just not-----