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

Does the Taoiseach not think he should apologise for trivialising the issue of the climate emergency by making those comments? It really gives succour to climate deniers like Donald Trump to make glib trivialising comments of that sort. It would be helpful if the Taoiseach said they were comments he regretted.

I question the Taoiseach's more general bona fides on this given the continued commitment to go ahead with the liquefied natural gas terminal in Shannon, which is going to import toxic fracked gas from the United States. It is okay to ban fracking here, and rightly so, because of the damage it does to the environment, but we have no problem with visiting it on the people of the United States.

I also want to ask about public transport and the Government's commitments in that regard. We have been holding a series of meetings on BusConnects over the last while and when one looks into the facts of public transport in this country, one really has to wonder about the Government's commitment to getting people out of their cars. How does improving public transport square with the fact that bus fares in the last ten years have increased by 80%, the PSO subsidy to Dublin Bus has dropped dramatically from €87 million to €50 million and there are now fewer buses in the Dublin Bus fleet than in 2008? How do these stark facts about the poor state of our public transport system, which is one of the most costly in Europe in terms of fares, square with a commitment to improving public transport in order to get people out of private cars and thus reduce CO² emissions? I put it to the Taoiseach that they do not; they square more with a privatisation of public transport agenda which will do nothing to reduce CO² emissions.

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