Dr. Tadhg O'Mahony:

I thank the committee for the invitation to contribute to its pre-Committee Stage scrutiny of the Commission for Future Generations Bill 2023.

The future is an undiscovered country, a journey replete with hope and promise as with hazard and peril. Two decades ago when I began my journey in the field of foresight, a popular quote was circulating from the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke: “The future is not what it used to be”. Clarke recognised that, while generations had known that many of the patterns of life would repeat, a new unpredictable epoch was emerging. This fundamental change has become known in public policy as VUCA as the world becomes more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We have many examples in recent years of major systemic challenges to public policy across housing, transport, health, migration, climate change and biodiversity, and in the surprises of the financial crisis and the Covid pandemic. In response, public policy must become both better prepared for change, but also more adept at building vision for change and creating the change that we desire. Public policy needs the opportunity to move from firefighting the day-to-day to exploring new vision, to building coalition and consensus and to strategically devising the means to achieve our preferred future. Responding effectively requires four things from public policy, those being, moving from short-term reactions to long-term planning, from narrow approaches to holistic ones, from siloed Departments to co-ordinated missions, and from top-down policy to participative governance.

Our institutional structures were formed in a very different era of the State's history in response to 20th century challenges. We can say with unflinching confidence that we now stand at an inflection point in history. We live in an era of climate and ecological breakdowns, threatening economy and society and the natural world on which they rely. We also live in an age of threats to democracy, underlying economic vulnerabilities, growing inequality, geopolitical instability and the acceleration of technological change. We live in an era where the impacts of decisions that we make today will resonate for decades, marching down a voiceless line of unborn generations.

Globally, the scientific literature is robustly clear. Addressing our current challenges demands transformations of what we do and how we do it. However, it also highlights significant cause for optimism, because within these transformations are voluminous opportunities for win-win outcomes that improve our well-being, restore the natural world on which we depend and bring us to a flourishing and sustainable well-being. In my work on transformational governance and policy for the Irish climate change assessment, which has been signed off on by institutional stakeholders, critical gaps in Ireland’s national foresight capacity were identified across three major functions in our ability to foresee change, proactively respond to change and articulate desirable visions and the means to achieve them. In the same report, I had the opportunity to identify significant livelihood and economic opportunities that transformations could offer Ireland for both urban dwellers and rural Ireland while cautioning that these would be forgone without a new approach to policy. We know that the old certainties of 20th century policymaking are breaking down and that we need new knowledge to understand and envision change and new capacity in public institutions and structures to create it. The commission for future generations offers a response appropriate to policymaking in the Ireland of the 21st century.