Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Everything about the Government's response to this issue is utterly cynical and it must be called out on it. Its approach to the question of procedure makes a joke of the supposed democracy of this Parliament, while its approach to the substance of the issue makes a joke of any commitment to tackle plastic pollution. It is a good motion, but I do not mean any offence to its movers when I say its most substantial elements simply call on the Government to recognise the support the Dáil has given to a Bill which was passed on Second Stage last yea, and approve the issuing of a money message to stop using a technical measure to prevent a Bill passed by Parliament from proceeding, being debated on Committee Stage and eventually passed into law, as is the democratic will of Parliament.

That Green Party Deputies are forced to use Private Members' time to bring forward a motion to state a Bill that has been passed on Second Stage should stop being blocked by the Government is utterly outrageous. The Government is cynical not just on this issue but also on others such as the sexual education Bill, where it allows Bills to pass on Second Stage, or is forced to recognise a Bill that has been passed on Second Stage and then simply stops it because it is no longer in the limelight. It is an utter disgrace. The Government's response to this debate adds insult to injury. After this debate, the Government will abstain; we will pass the motion without a vote and there will be two votes in the Parliament in favour of the Bill being brought into law, yet it still will not be brought into law because the Government will not pass the money message. It will still go to the European State and state it is in favour of taking action, etc., while it watches the clock wind down in this parliamentary term, knowing that all of the Bills will then die with nothing having been done about them. It is a disgrace. It is good that the Green Party has brought forward the motion to call out the Government on it, of which we need to do more because it gets away with it.

On the substance of the Bill, the unwillingness to implement the legislation underlines the unwillingness to do anything about the fundamental issue, apart from the rhetoric on climate change, as we saw in the Budget Statement a couple of weeks ago. The point has been made about how urgent the problem is and every minute the equivalent of a bin truck full of plastic is dumped into the oceans, with the consequence that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish. It interacts with nature in the oceans and causes starvation in marine animals and birds as it cannot be broken down. It fills their stomachs, preventing them from ingesting food. It becomes entangled in coral reefs, blocking light and oxygen and releasing harmful toxins, which allows disease to set in and kill the coral. Of course, it ends up in humans. A study conducted in Ghent University last year found that each European was possibly ingesting up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic every year.

The approach of the Government, or at least Fine Gael, was summed up in its green week a couple of months ago, which was like something from 20 years ago in its idea that tackling the issue was all about individual responsibilty. The use of plastic proves the point that it is not only about good individual choices. People do not make choices in a vacuum; rather, they make them in a capitalist society where many of the choices such as on the use of plastic packaging and so on have already been made for them, driven by the need to make a profit, logistics, marketing and so forth. We need regulations to ban the use of single-use plastics, non-recyclable plastics and, most fundamentally, oil-based plastics. I would go further, however, and say we need to tackle those behind the manufacture of plastics, that is, the same companies which are behind the causes of climate change, namely, the big oil companies. Fundamentally, we cannot control what we do not own; therefore, the oil companies need to be taken into public ownership. We need to use that control to end the use of oil-based plastics and completely phase out the use of fossil fuels.

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