Mr. Shane Conneely:

I thank the committee for inviting us here today. I will be outlining how we in Chambers Ireland use the sustainable development goals to guide our policy recommendations. I am joined by my colleague, Mr. James Kiernan, who is director of relationships with Chambers Ireland. James has been our in-house champion of the SDGs, and has been the one who engages with business on the ground. He leads our sustainable business council, and has been the powerhouse behind our SDG toolkit for business, which is being translated by our sister chambers internationally. He is here to answer any questions the committee has on the business engagement side.

As a network, Chambers Ireland strongly welcomes the increased interest which is being shown in the sustainable development goals by the Oireachtas, Departments and Government agencies. Chambers Ireland have been supporting the sustainable development goals since their inception. We are members of the International Chambers of Commerce, which has permanent observer status in the UN as a result of our collective support for the sustainable development goals. In 2019, our member chambers came together to sign a pledge to support the attainment of the sustainable development goals, and since then we have put the sustainable development goals at the core of all our activities. We use the goals as tools for creating coherence across our policy proposals and when it comes to developing greater awareness of sustainability issues within the business community.

Our first action regarding the goals was to identify those goals that were most relevant to our network. While acknowledging that there would be opportunities to promote the other goals, we selected five that would be our highest priorities. Our members throughout the network went through their own processes to determine which would be most relevant to them, and broadly we all landed on the same. In no particular order, they are: climate action; industry innovation and infrastructure; gender equality; decent work and economic growth; and sustainable cities and communities.

While we have these foci, we have found that the great strength of the goals, as a policy tool, comes in lending a holistic perspective on the issues our members face. Our members outline to us the problems that businesses are experiencing in their areas, and then we use the goals to help identify what solutions we should be pushing. We find that their greatest utility emerges from highlighting novel angles, insights and opportunities when seeking out solutions to problems.

One of the things that we do when making a submission, or lobbying about an issue, is to ask ourselves what other goals are relevant here. How does policy action pertaining to this issue impact, directly and indirectly, other goals that we want to achieve? How can our advocacy for other goals reinforce what we are trying to do in this instance? Can it help us identify new allies?

A case in point is our advocacy for better public transport. This is a key concern for our network because it is a quality of life issue, and quality of life issues are making it harder for businesses to attract and retain staff in the country. We are looking for better infrastructure, which immediately has us thinking about the industry innovation and infrastructure SDG. If you know our chambers network, you will know that for many of them, infrastructure will be seen as an end in itself. However, climate action also comes in here, because we can see that transport is an enormous component of our greenhouse gas emissions. This has led us to more advocacy for sustainable transport, and public transport, so that people have an alternative to using cars. This has led us to consider the impact that cars have had on our town centres, and how they have been undermining the economic potential of our towns and cities.

The long commutes that have been normalised impact quality of life further, damaging households and communities. This has led us to advocate for the activation of vacant and underutilised properties, because if people are living in town centres we can, on the one hand, offer them better public services more efficiently, and on the other, we are bringing customers to our members’ doorsteps.

Looking at transport issues from a gender equality perspective highlights things most of us in this room are going to be oblivious to, including how the lighting at public transport stops and the frequency with which trams and buses arrive stop women using public transport and keep them in their cars. This makes gender equality a climate action issue too. There is a naive way to look at this whereby we say this is a chicken-and-egg scenario and it is all so complicated that we do not know where to start. However, we have already started, we know what our shared goals are and we just need to remind our colleagues these are their goals too. What if we can get our colleagues in the Department of Health to emphasise the savings active travel brings to the health service when they are in their budget discussions with with the Department of Finance? If the Department of Justice comes to see vacancies as the huge public order problem they have become, we can then start acting on the widespread calls for joined-up Government. When used well, the goals are a tool for de-siloing public policy.

In addition to the solutions, the goals also help us identify where the problems are. Our chambers are deeply concerned that as things stand Ireland will not be able to meet our climate action targets, national development plan or climate action plan. It currently seems likely we will not be reaching our targets for offshore wind energy, despite the increased ambition for this. We fear our country is unlikely to be able to upgrade our energy networks to admit the quantity of renewable energy available to us. Without alternative means of transport and the decarbonisation of our energy infrastructure, it does not seem possible we will be able to meet our 2030 targets, nor our climate action goal. The issue here is our planning system. It has become the single greatest hurdle to achieving the sustainable development goals. We are more than half way towards 2030 and are supposed to be achieving our goals, but on climate action is seems the attainment of that goal is further away than ever.

I thank the committee.