Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Deputy Pringle's Private Members' Bill. The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, ISIF, has investments in some truly destructive companies, from tobacco companies to mercenary armies and to the worst of the polluters. Although the amounts of money involved are not astronomical, Ireland could show leadership on this issue and follow through on some of the Government's talk about tackling climate change. Many of the companies on the list of the portfolio of investments have shocking track records. Exxon Mobil, for example, withheld decades of research that detailed the effects and advance of climate change and instead funded and promoted an entirely different story that contradicted its own findings. One of the vehicles for the climate change denial is the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, a right wing policy group that shapes and promotes legislation at state level across the United States. ALEC brings corporate donors together with conservative state lawmakers to push anti-regulatory legislation on a range of issues. It uses its money and influence to push legislation they draft to benefit the corporate sector at the expense of the public good.

Fortunemagazine reported that during the 2009 legislative session, ALEC developed 826 state Bills and 115 of them became law. During the 2011 to 2012 legislative session, 132 Bills based on ALEC models were introduced in various states. It has pushed racist and regressive immigration and customs legislation in order that private prison corporations would profit from the rise in detention and deportation of immigrants. It works hand in hand with companies seeking to roll back health care reform, environmental protections, workers' rights, corporate accountability, and taxes on the wealthy.

ALEC works with right wing lawmakers to battle the advance of the gay rights movement, providing them with research that argues that most homosexuals are paedophiles, that all gays are corrupt, and that they are not to be treated fairly but they need therapy and the Christian faith. As part of this attack on homosexuals, ALEC wants to stop AIDS research and to push to restrict the rights of homosexuals in the workplace.

In the 1980s ALEC worked tirelessly to stop the divestment movement against apartheid in South Africa and played a key role in delaying meaningful US action to pressure the apartheid regime. That was done in the interest of its corporate members that had business in the country, such as Exxon, the Dow Chemical Company, and Pfizer, in all of which ISIF has equities, and IBM which the Taoiseach is meeting today in Davos.

In 2012, in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, campaigns were launched by human rights groups exposing ALEC's role in the adoption of the so-called stand your ground gun laws in Florida and other states that have resulted in a drastic rise in gun homicides throughout the US. In 2013, ALEC pushed legislation that made it mandatory to teach climate change denial in public schools. The Bill was introduced in 11 states, and passed in four. It has consistently argued for the rejection by the United States of the Paris climate change agreement, and now with its man, Mr. Trump, in charge, and a host of its prominent members such as Rex Tillerson and Rick Perry being appointed to important positions, it sees that as a genuine possibility.

In 2015, public shaming pushed energy industry giants, Royal Dutch Shell and BP to quit ALEC. How bad does an organisation have to be before Shell, one of the most environmentally destructive corporations ever to exist, thinks it is toxic? Despite this, Diageo, the maker of Guinness, Smithwick's, Smirnoff, Gordon's gin, and Captain Morgan, among countless other products, has been on the corporate executive council of ALEC all that time. ISIF has an €18 million commitment with the Ulster Bank Diageo venture fund.

As part of the fossil fuel divestment movement the State should also distance itself from those who champion the campaign against climate action, not to mention those involved in sustained campaigns attacking human rights, especially those who are central in spreading climate change denial.

ISIF has equities in Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Reynolds American Tobacco, Pfizer, AT&T, the largest telecommunications company in the world by revenue and which the Taoiseach is meeting in Davos today, UPS, Altria, formerly known as Philip Morris, and Exxon Mobil, all of which are members of the corporate executive council of ALEC. Shell, in which ISIF also has significant holdings, defended the group and its membership of it by arguing that ALEC promotes job creation and the free market. Eventually it pulled out after a sustained campaign by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

It is not surprising that the Government does not seem concerned to keep ties with such companies and that the Taoiseach is meeting ALEC members in Davos. If we just look at the area of climate change, we have some strikingly similar policies to those of ALEC in terms of the climate change deniers and the ultra conservatives who are populating the Trump cabinet. For example, Ireland is currently practising what ALEC calls free market environmentalism, which is, to quote the ALEC literature, "to promote the mutually beneficial link between a robust economy and a healthy environment, to unleash the creative powers of the free market for environmental stewardship, and to enhance the quality and use of our natural and agricultural resources for the benefit of human health and well-being". In reality, that means that we pursue the jobs versus environment argument at every turn. While Ireland is being criticised for its increasing agricultural sector carbon emissions, State diplomats are arguing a special case for Ireland against the long-term interests of the environment and the public for the short-term objectives of industry and finance. In public, the Taoiseach and his associates talk about leading the way in the fight against climate change while in practice they pursue policies like Food Harvest 2020 that are incompatible with reducing greenhouse gases and issue licensing options for gas and oil drilling and exploration off the coast.

The Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Naughten, speaking at the Energy Ireland conference last year, stated that the Government needed "to strike a balance between sustainability, security of supply and competitiveness". He did not define any of those terms but it is clear that he means that the future of the environment will take a back seat to the dictates of the neoliberal agenda and the requirements of the market.

ALEC and its members promote climate change denial with the precise aim of ensuring that the short-term economic interests of its members are not affected. The Government behaves in a similar way. We do not focus on the crisis. We say that climate change is a great challenge but we do very little about it. The Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, introduced budget 2017 by saying that climate change was one of the greatest challenges we face and then went on to outline how we are not going to step up to the challenge in any meaningful way.

This Government is finding it hard to shake its belief that all consideration of important measures is made first and foremost from the point of view of finance even if the future of the planet is at stake. This is precisely ALEC's position. In much the same way as our neoliberals in Government love to see Ireland as the best little country in which to do business, ALEC has its own version of the much-loved Doing Business report which similarly grades states on their ability to take away rights from workers and destroy the environment through lack of regulation and in which "costs" imply laws to protect workers, "difficulties" are understood to mean regulations and human rights and "environmental protections" are simply a roadblock to unfettered profit. The more tattered, threadbare, corrupt and competitive our legal framework is, the more attractive it looks in the shop window to the corporations that want to make profits with minimum social responsibility attached. The corporations that extract fossil fuels from the earth and burn or sell them for profit have a vested interest in making this planet an even more dangerous place to live than it already is. The corporations that fund and support groups such as ALEC have a vested interest in legislators ignoring the rights and interests of the citizens they claim to represent and want them to instead pursue policies and legislation that fill their pockets while the world burns. Does the Government care more about the interests of fossil fuel companies or those of the people of the earth? This important Private Members' Bill, which has been put forward by Deputy Pringle, is a litmus test. I look forward to the response.

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