Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to see the Minister back again. I congratulate him on his new post. I hope the United Nations report on biodiversity did not keep him tossing and turning in the leaba last night. Between that report and the screening of "Unquiet Graves" on RTÉ 1 yesterday, I certainly did not get my seven hours' sleep, but I digress.

Few politicians get to debate not just the kind of future we will have but whether there will be a future at all. We are living through and causing an extinction event but, judging by the bypasses from Government, we seem content to diminish or ignore it. It sounds grandiose but it is dead simple. The dead part can be seen in the loss of biodiversity, habitats, species and coastline and the vanishing ice in the Arctic and on the Alps. The simple part can be seen in the difference between back then and now. Back then, every winter, when our mams washed our jeans and perhaps left them out on the line all night, when we went out to bring them in in the morning, they were stiff as boards, the grass in the back garden crunching beneath our feet. Now, though, the washing being like boards in the winter is virtually unknown to our own children.

In using this example I am not mistaking weather for climate; I am saying our more clement temperatures do not mean a more clement climate. In fact, the so-called "modest" 1° increase which some time ago people thought would boost food production in the world is already wreaking havoc on our planet. Rainfall normally associated with the Himalayas and the Philippines is now a regular feature of life along the Mediterranean. In poorer countries susceptible to flooding, parents teach their children to swim, not to win the medal in the swimming gala but to survive the inevitable flooding. Here at home we do not have to hear the billions of tonnes of Greenland ice thundering into the North Atlantic or see the record heatwaves or droughts or Australia or California burning to know that our climate is changing and not for the better. We look out the window and see the tropical storms and hurricanes creeping up into the North Atlantic. A warmer ocean means moister winds, giving us the A to Z of storms we saw on the weather forecast with Joanna Donnelly every evening this week, the trampolines on tour A to Z, as gales and torrential rains pound us with greater intensity and regularity.

Mother Earth did not do this on her own, though. She had a dig-out from politicians, corporations and the millionaires turned billionaires treating Earth as something to exploit for their profit as opposed to something to cherish for our children and our grandchildren. The truth is that capitalism is not a good bedfellow of sustainability and the environment. That is the real inconvenient truth for the Green Party, this Government and governments all across the world. The great and the good of Ireland mourn the loss of an EU Trade Commissioner who paved the way for a Mercosur deal which contributes to the annihilation of the Amazon rain forest.

In my constituency, in north Kildare, locals tell me they were promised the spent bogs of Bord na Móna would be rewetted and that they would get a lake, which would have been a great amenity for north Kildare. Instead they got a dump. On Kildare County Council Sinn Féin councillors consistently put forward motions on reforestation of rural council greenfield and brownfield sites with native trees. We sought the option of microgeneration for community groups and individuals. In fact, my cumann brought forward a motion on that at our Ard-Fheis.

We also wanted to incorporate geothermal heating systems in new council estates, whereby the green area would be used for that purpose. Of course, we were all ignored and plámásed because the truth is that this State has not got a notion about really tackling climate change that involves the State doing the heavy lifting. Instead it prefers to pretend it should all be left to the individual or to carbon-taxing the life out of poor communities with no affordable alternative. I want to call that out. I want to put forward citizen-centred solutions, so I am very grateful to Deputy Mary Lou McDonald for appointing me to the climate committee. I want to play a role and play my part to deliver the change that people see we really need - real change, radical change, urgent change - from consumer politics to economics where, in the end, all we are consuming is our Earth and one another. We are running out of time to save our planet from all this.

I remember my nana used to have a lovely "I told you so" phrase if we complained that we did not get something done when we should have foreseen it in time: Ní hé lá na gaoithe Iá na scolb. It is not on the windy day that the thatching should be done. It is very apt. It is not like we have not been warned. We know the predictions are stark. Capitalist economic growth costs and the price is our children's future. Like millions all over the world, I am not prepared to pay it. Today I ask an tAire, as leader of the Green Party and as a member of this Government, is he.

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