Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will take this opportunity to thank all the Members for their support and comments. I also thank the Ceann Comhairle for handling the debate and ensuring that we finished in time, as without his stewardship we could have talked ourselves out of it and ended up without passing the Bill.

It is welcome when there is cross-party support for an initiative such as this. It is a moment to be celebrated by civil society and the members of the public who have got behind this Bill and pushed hard and consistently over the last two years on this issue. For the global divestment movement that has been shining an essential light on the contradictions of investing in the prolonged expansion of an industry whose business plans are in direct contradiction of the hard-won goals set out in the Paris Agreement, our last chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, it is also a moment to be celebrated.

If passed through the Seanad, this Bill will make Ireland the first country to commit to divest from the global fossil fuel industry. However, I feel strongly that this is not a moment for celebration in the Dáil. Rather, it is a moment to stop and seriously consider the role we are playing in the global effort on climate change. With this Bill, we are leading the way on state-level divestment from fossil fuels but we are lagging seriously behind our most basic national, EU and global level commitments.

While the cross-party support for this Bill shows that significant change is possible where there is political will, thus far we have not the political will to take the big and small decisions that are needed to unlock the change. That must change.

In closing, I want to step back and recall how this Bill came to be. About two years ago, Trócaire approached me and shared their deep concerns about the direction climate change was taking globally and particularly in Ireland. The impacts of climate change today are already at crisis levels, a human tragedy unfolding against a background of continued political inertia. We must be very clear; people are dying today as a direct result of climate change through the increasingly frequent and intense disasters, through increased hunger, increased water scarcity and significantly more will die or be forced into displacement if there is not a radical change in direction.

Let this be a moment where we commit to getting serious. Let us show the Irish public and the international community that we are ready to think and act beyond narrow short-term and vested interests and will take the opportunities that lie ahead of us to bring in real change.

Finally I wish to thank a number of people who made all this possible. From Trócaire, Cliona Sharkey, Selina Donnelly, Niamh Garvey and their entire team have worked incredibly hard and gave much of their time and expertise to see this project to completion. I thank them and any others I may have left out. I thank Stop Climate Chaos for organising the divestment campaign and for the coalition's activism - all the emails and advocacy - which have kept the issue on the agenda. I thank all the university students across Ireland, and especially in NUI Galway and Trinity College Dublin, who helped campaign for divestment and activated ordinary citizens on the ground to rally behind this. I thank Gerry Liston of Global Legal Action Network, GLAN, whose expertise in legislative drafting made this project possible. John Moreland from the UK assisted us with some of the more financial and technical aspects of the Bill, for which I thank him. I thank the Minister and all the staff for their support and work on this Bill.

I thank all the Deputies from Independents4Change and other political parties who have supported me. Lastly, and most importantly, I thank Jodie Neary, my parliamentary assistant, who has done most of the work on this. I just stand here and make the speeches, which is the nice handy part of it, but Jodie has done all the hard work so I thank her for that and everyone for their support.

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