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

This week, we had yet more terrifying evidence of how we in this country, in Europe and across the world are careering towards a climate, biodiversity and ecological disaster. It is a fact that 1 million of the world's 8 million species are now threatened with extinction. Here in Ireland, it is worse, and the Irish Wildlife Trust states that one third of species are facing extinction. A report today shows that Europe is more than two and a half times over-consuming the natural resources necessary to sustain existence on this planet. The school students who were on strike over the climate emergency are coming out on the day of the European and local elections calling for further protests. In Leinster House today we had Extinction Rebellion saying how the Government's policies around planning to ramp up the use of gas for energy is an environmental disaster.

My questions are very simple. Will the Government follow what has been done in Britain and declare a climate and biological emergency? Where is the promised all-of-Government plan to deal with climate change? When is it going to happen? Are we going to see the radical emergency action that is necessary to deal with an ecological and climate disaster coming at us?

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