Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The most elementary infrastructure necessary for the maintenance of society and the existence of humanity is our natural environment. The Taoiseach’s highly disingenuous response to Deputy Bríd Smith earlier about her climate emergency Bill, which is trying to stop the extraction of further fossil fuels was not very heartening in respect of his attitude to this. I do not know whether he heard George Lee on RTÉ today chatting to Pádraic Fogarty of the Irish Wildlife Trust. The headline on the item was that Irish nature is collapsing. He went on to describe how 100 of our plants and animals are already extinct and another third of our species are under very serious threat. He spoke about the deterioration of water quality, the extremely precarious situation of forestry, wildlife and so on and the fact that the Irish Greyhound Board gets as much money annually as the National Parks and Wildlife Service. They even talked about a beautiful forest in Enniskerry - the Taoiseach should go and walk there - Knocksink Wood, where the environmental education centre is sitting there, empty and derelict, because of Government cuts. This is typical of the Government's attitude to environmental issues.

Rather than slagging off the left, which is actually trying to do something about it, as the Taoiseach did earlier today, why does he not actually do something to address these issues, like deal with afforestation, fund the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and indeed, support our Bill to cease fossil fuel extraction?

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