Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I agree with my colleague about the military-industrial complex, which is the elephant in the room in these discussions. I will take the Minister to task for the absence of a written speech. It is a serious situation and we are beyond emergency so I would have expected him to have come here tonight after the UN summit to tell us what progress has been made since his plan was published. When we are in an emergency, we need monthly updates. The Department of the Taoiseach was to establish a climate action delivery board. Has that been established? The Government was to establish an independent climate action council. Was that established? As an Independent Deputy, my time is limited but I have to go through the documents when they should all be in a written speech from the Minister telling me what has been achieved since the plan was published.

The Minister said he wanted a more systematic engagement with young people and citizens. The time for engagement is over and young people and citizens want action. We had a Citizens' Assembly with 13 recommendations but as far as I can see, the Minister has either ignored them or watered them down, which has certainly been the case in terms of timeframe. The summit was very unusual, given the emergency we are in. It was a special climate action summit, where the UN Secretary General went out on a limb to call on world leaders to attend and bring concrete realistic plans to enhance their nationally determined contributions by 2020. We are on target to miss our targets for 2020 and to miss our targets for 2030. We are looking at 2050 and talking about electric cars as the solution, along with small pieces of action as opposed to a transformative overall plan. If we do not have a transformative plan we are going no place.

We were put on notice of this in Paris in 2013 and at the convention in Rio of 1992. This has not happened overnight. In 2015, Trócaire told us that significant and persistent increases in national-level ambition in all countries were necessary if the temperature limits adopted were not to be breached. The UN is telling us we need to up our targets because the ones we have set are not sufficient. Some of the targets are good and the framework is good but it is like pieces of a jigsaw without the overall picture, which is that we are facing extinction. We need to take transformative action in everything we do and we need to lead.

We need to know what has happened since the Minister published his plan. What have the local authorities done today? I am going home tomorrow because Storm Lorenzo is coming and the people of Galway are bracing themselves. At the consultation process relating to the water framework directive, we were told that these were one-in-100-years events but they are now much more frequent than that and are the pattern for the foreseeable future. The Taoiseach spoke about our wonderful green country. He said the advisory council said gas needed to be there as a transition. I understand that the secretariat to the advisory council gave much more nuanced advice, to the effect that the use of new gas reserves should be contingent on us meeting our targets and climate justice. If we persist in taking gas out, we must evaluate how that will affect our targets and climate justice.

My biggest difficulty with this Government is a lack of faith, because its policies are inconsistent. Social Justice Ireland has pointed this out and I pointed it out last night on the subject of forestry. It is wonderful to think about planting so many million trees but we need a policy that is consistent with climate mitigation measures and climate justice and I do not see that. I am from Galway and we want public transport and to deal with the terrible problems on our roads but what is the Government proposing in the national planning framework? It is proposing more and more roads, more and more cars. The words in many of these documents are fantastic, such as "sustainable development", but the roll-out has nothing to do with sustainability. The message is "business as usual" but wrapped up in nice green words.

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