Dr. Alison Hough:

There is a lot to be said for the establishment of a new mechanism such as a commissioner for future generations or something like that to coalesce the conversation around the issues of children's rights in a concrete way and focus public debate in important ways on the fact that children are one of groups that are really affected by climate change. We can see from the recent European Court of Human Rights decisions that children and the elderly, the two extremes on the age spectrum, are the most impacted by the harms of climate change. There is some interesting UN data on the global impact on children in countries where temperatures are exceeding norms. Children's schooling is being impacted because schools have to close because of the excessive heat. Children's health is impacted more because they are smaller and cannot cope with excessive heat and all those things.

There is also the issue of intergenerational equity, aside from the immediate practicalities of the impact of climate change. There is also a danger of reinventing the wheel for the sake of it. It can become a sort of buzzword to declare we are going to do something about the children who are affected by climate change and set up a new commission when, in fact, a lot of work is being done under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which hears children's voices and takes into account their input. One of the big developments has been the children's ombudsman. We can use those existing mechanisms and broadening the remit may be another option when we consider ways in which we can take on those perspectives.

A lot of good work is being done in the national climate dialogues on hearing the voice of the youth. A youth climate assembly set up for teenagers, those from 12 to 18, was tasked with solving various climate problems and participants gave their perspectives. It was encouraging to see the Minister's direct engagement with the youth in those forums. The problem, of course, was that there was no joining up of the circuit when it came to the outputs from that assembly because they did not inform the national energy and climate plan, NECP, in the slightest. The assembly did not discuss the NECP even though that process would have been running in parallel. That is quite strange and concerning. In that sense, much relates to the boring work of joining the dots on existing processes that are there and using existing mechanisms.

When it comes to public participation in general, it is not some new and radical thing to try to figure out how we communicate complex messages and issues and get feedback from Joe Public on them. The just transition commissioner went into communities and talked with peat workers in Bord na Móna and businesses affected by the peat transition. He talked to affected community groups and there is a public participation network of community groups there, and there is The Wheel. There are many ways in which all these organisations are already patched in and it is possible to patch into those networks that already exist.

There are lots of effective public participation professionals who would be more than willing to help. There is a lot of already established research on how to do good public participation. There are lots of good examples, even though public participation has been the weak point of all NECPs across Europe. There are many good examples if we look through other countries' NECPs. We are working on pulling together some best practice examples from those. There is a lot out there and it is about drawing together the existing data and talking to groups such as ours and other socially interested groups. That is why all the groups involved in the Stop Climate Chaos coalition and the groups with which Environmental Justice Network Ireland, EJNI, works with are working on social justice and intersectional issues across the spectrum. The climate affects everybody and it is important that there is genuine public participation because there has not been, and that just fuels the conspiracy that the Government is making important decisions about our future without our consent.

Unfortunately, that is true in the case of the NECP, and that automatically leads to an implementation problem when you do not have public support or public buy-in. We have seen with the peat situation and the ban on turf cutting what happens when you do not have those communities that are affected behind the measures being imposed and when you do not have that sense of consent and consensus. It has a really damaging effect on the ability to actually implement those measures. These plans will therefore just be paper if they are not consulted on in a thorough, top-to-bottom, social way.