Professor Barry McMullin:

Again, I am opening a wider discussion - and members should correct me if I am going too far afield - but what we can see in the discussions regarding Dublin Airport, data centres and the agricultural sector is that there are tensions, if not outright conflicts, between economic goals and climate goals. For too long we have pretended that there are no conflicts and cannot be any conflicts, and that it must be possible to simultaneously pursue our economic and climate goals without any interference between the two. That may have been true 20 or 30 years ago. In my view, it is no longer true. We can no longer delay acknowledging that and having an honest discussion about how to prioritise appropriate economic goals while at the same time, absolutely and in a precautionary way, achieving our climate goals. If we do not achieve our climate goals, then I am sorry. It is a cliché, but there is no economy on a dead planet. There is also no economy on a planet where industrialised civilisation is no longer functional. That is the future we are now looking at with the rate at which the climate is destabilising.