Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

On 30 August, the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Naughten, admitted that the Government's climate mitigation plan was not working. Earlier in the summer, the head of the Climate Change Advisory Council, Professor John FitzGerald, said that we are off course and heading rapidly in the wrong direction. At last week's Joint Committee on Climate Action meeting, we asked for the Secretary General of the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment to appear in advance of this afternoon's committee meeting and if we could see a first draft of the plan that the Government has to present to the European Union by Christmas, only to be told yesterday by the secretariat that no such plan exists yet. Ms Marie Donnelly, a former Irish civil servant in the European Commission set out a vision of how we could turn this into an opportunity for our country at last week's meeting. By being ambitious and going for a zero-carbon Ireland, we could create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We have to have the draft by Christmas but in truth this is a question for Deputy Micheál Martin as much as for Deputies McDonald, Howlin and every other Deputy in this Dáil because the final sign off on this new climate action plan, which is the one we have to do, will not be agreed by this Government but by the next Government towards the end of next year.

My question is whether we are able to make the leap that Ms Donnelly set out. We have done it previously. In the late 1950s, we went from a closed economy to an open economy and Fine Gael played its part. The Taoiseach's party appointed Dr. T.K. Whitaker before Fianna Fáil and supported Seán Lemass when the Dáil at that time collectively set our country on a new course. That is the scale of the historic moment that we are in now and we must organise ourselves in the next 16 to 18 months. Then we must repeat it for the subsequent six Governments because the reason that Whitaker and Lemass were successful was that there was a stable political agreement in this House to invest in education, join the European Union, set up the Shannon tax free zone and so on.

That level of co-operation, ambition and joint effort is needed and the people are ready for it. They are good at tackling climate change; they just need some leadership, help and support, which this Dáil must provide. In going green, which we can do as an island, it will be 40 shades of green. We must change everything, including our transport system, energy system, food system and business system. Work must be done in Killybegs, Galway, Shannon, Waterford, Cork, Drogheda, Dundalk, Belfast and Derry to turn them into ports that will bring us energy from our seas. It will happen on every street where we change them from the current car-dominated streets to greenways such as the one in the Taoiseach's area of Blanchardstown which I am sure he knows. It is a beautiful cycle path and we need those in every area so that our children can cycle to school and do not have get asthma growing up. Similarly, instead of looking at the future of farming where the average age of a farmer is 67, let us be bold and ambitious and pay them properly for storing carbon and reduce the average age of farmers in ten years to 37. This is the front-line of this global challenge, which is the biggest that humankind has ever faced. We should engage Bord na Móna to retrofit our homes, double the size of the company and start immediately storing the peat in the ground. We need to make that level of a leap.

I ask the Taoiseach in the spirit of collaboration to follow the example of those who appointed Whitaker. We need a Whitaker today within the public service and we need a Lemass in every party to get agreement on this climate leap we need to make. Is the Taoiseach willing to make that leap to think about everything and think big about how we write this new plan together by Christmas?

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