Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I commend Deputy Catherine Murphy on bringing forward this Bill and on the obvious hard work and research she put into it. This is a comprehensive Bill, dealing with an incredibly important subject not alone for Ireland, but for the whole world and future generations. This Bill is a wake up call for the Government and society in terms of the urgency to address the issue of climate change.

Thankfully, we have moved on from the situation when concern was first raised about the issue of climate change by environmentalists and those in the establishment, politics and, in particular, business sought to deny the reality of climate change. We have come a long way from that, with few people remaining who do not acknowledge the serious problem of climate change and the threat it represents to our civilisation and planet, which if not addressed means society will soon be in deep trouble.

I would like to put the issue in historical context so that people understand the gravity of what we are dealing with. I do not know if people ever question why the great civilisations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Rome collapsed. Given the very advanced nature of those societies thousands of years ago, why did they collapse? It was because they neglected the environment and operated to the short term advantage of the elites which ran them. Early great civilisations were based on a system of irrigation of canals out of great rivers such as the Euphrates and the Nile. Through a system of irrigation of the canals, they created fertile zones around the rivers, which became the basis for the development of those societies. These systems of irrigation, which were a technological leap forward, laid the basis for the tremendous civilisations and major advances in science, technology and so on that occurred as a result. These civilisations collapsed because the elites who ran them became more concerned over time with protecting their privilege and interests and celebrating their own importance and failed to invest in the infrastructure of their economies. In other words, they spent more time building pyramids to celebrate the importance of the pharaohs and kings and failed to invest in the canal infrastructure. This led ultimately to the collapse of those societies. An environmental catastrophe led to the fall of those civilisations.

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