Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I wonder what it is that the Seanad will oversee because I have had great difficulty in overseeing these matters from an Opposition perspective, even though one of my roles in this House is to hold the Government to account. We have been told that our national ambition is stated in the sectoral plans in areas like agriculture, transport and construction. Will the Seanad get sight of those sectoral plans earlier? I cannot see any ambition here. In fact, what I see is the very opposite of ambition. This Bill deals with climate inaction. It seems that there was a deliberate design on the part of the Government over the last few years to get us to a point where we would plead a special case for ourselves, as a very rich nation vis-à-visvery poor nations, in terms of what should be done.

Regardless of whether it is the Seanad or the Dáil which oversees this, the EPA has already told us that we will not reach the 2020 targets. Indeed, the Taoiseach has said that we will not reach the 2030 targets. Recent decisions made on transport, for example, are the very opposite of what we should do if we want to reduce the number of car journeys taken. The take up rate for the retrofit grants to improve the energy efficiency of homes has plummeted. These are just two areas in which we could be doing far more. The Government is taking a very dishonest approach to the agriculture sector by telling it that it will not be required to do anything in terms of mitigation because the Government will plead its case. We could do more in terms of developing carbon sinks in bogland and planting more trees but there is no avoiding the fact that under the 2020 Food Harvest plan, the national herd will grow by approximately 300,000 which is not sustainable. The Government's arguments are not sustainable in this area. The sectoral plans must be produced speedily so that the Seanad and Dáil can examine them to determine whether they will be effective.

I was disgusted by what the Taoiseach said in Paris this week. I was ashamed that Ireland was at that conference, pleading a special case. Earlier this year I met some French politicians at a meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on the Environment, Culture and the Gaeltacht who were totally shocked when they realised there were no targets set down in this legislation. As I said during the Second Stage debate, if one sets out on a journey, one ought to know where one is going but we have no real guidance in this Bill. Everything is just pushed off into the future.

It is ironic that we are dealing with the closing stages of this Bill in the same week that the global conference on climate change is taking place in Paris. We have been very badly exposed in terms of our approach to this issue, which is fundamentally dishonest. By not doing something about climate change we are avoiding our moral obligations and not taking the leadership role that we should take in the context of climate justice. The Government is not being honest with people in this country because it is not pointing out what will happen when we miss our targets. Hard cash will have to be paid over when we miss our targets and taxpayers will have to come up with that hard cash. If people saw the full picture, the debate on this would be much more honest, including the debate with those sectors which must play a part in the context of mitigation. It is not acceptable for one sector to be told that it does not have to play a role in this regard. There are many in that sector who know full well that things will have to change for them and they are looking for leadership, which they are certainly not getting from this Government. What the Government is doing at the Paris conference is a complete embarrassment and no amount of additional oversight from Seanad Éireann will make a whit of a difference because this is one of the weakest pieces of climate legislation which we are, disgracefully, enacting at a time when the world is supposed to be taking the Paris conference seriously. This Government is not taking it seriously and has not done so during the current Dáil. This has been a very dishonest enterprise.

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