Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Tomorrow, April 22, is Earth Day. The first Earth Day took place in 1970. Now, the Earth Day website states that more than 1 billion people have mobilised for “the future of the planet” and that there are more than 75,000 partners working “to drive positive action”. In 1970, 20 million individuals are said to have mobilised on the first Earth Day. That is 51 years ago. One would expect there to have been major change in the interim given the level of awareness back in 1970 on the need to protect our planet. Yet, here we still are burning, destroying and decimating our natural resources and our life source. All of this is done in the name of capitalism, greed and the patriarchy.

In the summer of 2018, the world sat up and took notice of a young Swedish activist who began the hugely popular School Strike for Climate. From the strike came the Fridays For Future movement, which, pre-Covid, was a mass movement of over 100,000 schoolchildren going on strikes in more than 100 countries around the world. Greta Thunberg and her peers around the world put climate action firmly back on the political agenda. I say "back" on the political agenda because climate action has been on international agendas for some time. There have been countless global conferences and historic agreements, endless reports, climate change denial and realisation that developing countries are suffering the impacts most, while having contributed the least to climate change.

Part of the disconnect from the urgency of climate change is how the problems are portrayed. We are not speaking in layperson's terms. We speak about tonnes of CO₂or CO₂equivalent, emissions trading schemes, ETS and greenhouse gases, GHGs, including CO₂, methane and N₂O. Scientists, academics and researchers are, thankfully, educating us about the percentages of carbon emission reductions, sinks, biomethane emissions from livestock, gases and targets. One of the great things about the previous Dáil, as Sinead Mercier reminded us in her interview in the Business Postat the weekend, was that every political party was assigned a climate researcher so that every political party and Member in the Dáil could understand what was being talked about with these issues.

We all remember the 1980s and 1990s when we were worried about the hole in the ozone layer. Scientists had discovered that chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, were causing this hole. People were told that aerosols contained CFCs and there was a concerted effort across industry, manufacturers and consumers to eliminate and drastically reduce, or both, the use of CFCs in aerosols and other products that up to then had been emitting them at large rates.

In recent years, climate action has seemed like an upper- and middle-class issue. Those who could afford to buy electric cars bought them. They also retrofitted their homes and shopped organic and from ethically sourced suppliers. There is no fast fashion for those who can afford otherwise. There has been a kind of snobbery around the individual responsibility for addressing climate action. The reality is that some aspects of climate action are not accessible for cohorts in our society and people are doing their best within the systems that have been created around them. We need to look at that and that is why a just transition is so important. Why talk so consistently about personal responsibility but then allow Google to move $75 billion in profits through the supposedly defunct double Irish loophole? That does not make any sense and people see that.

The Bill before us is a vast improvement on what was initially introduced. I commend the members of the Joint Committee on Climate Action on the thorough pre-legislative scrutiny they undertook. It is welcome to see that many of the committee’s 78 recommendations were accepted. There are some remaining issues with the Bill, which I hope will be addressed on Committee Stage because it is imperative that we have tangible and clear targets in place. The Government must be held to account for missed targets. We cannot continue to pay lip service to the most pressing issues of our time. I would also like to commend the activists and grassroots organisers who have been working tirelessly to scrutinise the Bill and offer solutions to all Members.

In 2018, we made history in this House by passing the Fossil Fuel Divestment Act 2018. The Act amended the National Treasury Management Agency (Amendment) Act 2014 and instructed the agency to divest the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund of its assets in fossil fuel companies. This divestment is to take place within five years of the commencement of the Act to precipitate a timely decarbonisation process in line with Ireland's climate change commitments under Article 2 of the Paris Agreement. It was a great day and we were lauded internationally for our work. We know that Ireland is so small that we do not make a huge difference globally but we can and should be a leader in the fight against climate change.

That Act made a difference globally and it sent out a message across the world that it is possible to divest and that everybody can do it. If a state sets out to do it, it can be done.

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