Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I commend Deputy Bríd Smith on introducing this Bill. When we license for drilling instead of expanding our renewable energy infrastructure, choose biomass over wind, water and solar power, increase the national herd instead of helping farmers and the public to diversify from climate destructive forms of food production and consumption, when the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport gives priority to roads and fossil fuel guzzling buses over electrified rail and we fall way behind almost every European country in terms of the transfer to renewable energy, these are all political choices that have the effect of stealing the right to quality lives from the people of the planet.

A nonsensical argument is being spread by the Government, and the polluting industries that gain from the status quo, that Ireland signed up to more than it could handle and that it is facing a bigger burden in terms of the targets than most other countries. The truth is that there was no political will to face these problems and there still is none. In 1990, the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, report was published. In 2009 we signed up to the targets that the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment now says are unachievable. Ireland will be one of only two EU countries that will miss their targets, which is some achievement. We signed up to the targets in 2009 and published the legislation in December 2015. The legislation was empty, containing no mitigation measures or references to targets. Now, in 2018, we still do not have concrete, detailed sectoral mitigation action plans.

In 2009 the Scottish Parliament voted to cut its nation's CO₂emissions by 42% by 2020, a target it reached six years early. In 2014 its emissions were 44.8% lower than in 1990. Given that we grant licences for drilling for fossil fuels off the coast of our country to some of the biggest polluters, knowing the science of the situation and how it is threatening the possibility of human life on the planet, it appears the Government does not care enough to take the necessary action. It does not appear to care enough about what future generations will have to deal with or about the lives of those on the front line of climate disasters today. We have the comfort of not having to deal with many of the worst climate disasters. We see them on television and they are a nice, handy distance away. It is a little like the bombing in the Middle East and supporting the Americans using Shannon Airport to allow them to bomb the living daylights out of those countries.

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