John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. One of the first things I want to do is to acknowledge that Ireland and the world owes the green movement a huge debt of thanks. I must acknowledge the Green Party was ahead of the posse here, notwithstanding the efforts of the odd individual, conservationist or ecologist who might have international status and be very well known to people publicly. The Green Party led the way, was persistent and experienced the slings and arrows of success and failure electorally and never gave up. It is fair to say that over recent years the whole green climate action agenda has become a climate action agenda that is embraced by all mainstream parties and, indeed, my own party.

In Government, way back in 1990 or so, we banned the use of smoky coal in Dublin. There is still a residual issue around the use of smoky coal. However, the ban on the use of smoky coal was very far-seeing at the time. My Fianna Fáil colleague, former Deputy Noel Dempsey, introduced the plastic bag levy when he was Minister for the Environment and Local Government. Indeed, perhaps the Minister, Deputy Ryan, might revisit that issue. There is a bit of abuse of that system going on. I have noticed that if you go into a shop and buy a bag, if can cost 70 cent to 1 euro. I think they are creeping back in, even if they are compostable. It might be something that the Minister could look into.

The climate action agenda has gone mainstream and is very much embraced by parties like Fianna Fáil. The most significant thing to say is that climate action and climate action legislation has been an objective, an ideal and an aspiration for the past decade. This Government has actually put it on the agenda and is dealing with it for the first time. It may not be perfect and there may be amendments and tweaks that need to be made, but it must be acknowledged that it is coming to our Statue Book, is aggressive in the manner in which it attempts to set climate action targets for us, does not baulk at and is difficult in facing up to the unique challenges that face Ireland, and calls on everybody to make their contribution.

One of the things on which I want to focus before making a few comments on the Bill is the fact the Green Party does the helicopter view of climate action really well. However, for the ordinary Joe and Joan Soap to make a really meaningful contribution to it, we must bring in more initiatives and ideas they can buy into, enabling them in a meaningful way to know they are contributing in a significant way to reducing not just their own carbon footprint but that of their community. The Minister will remember the green box into which we used to put our recyclables. It was the size of a shopping basket 20 years ago. Then we discovered that almost all of its contents ended up in landfill, even though everybody had been doing their best to recycle their recyclable products at home. We have improved a lot on that. People are recycling to a huge degree, they embrace it, want to do more of it and want to make their contribution in a meaningful way.

One of the areas in which I have been interested is waste management. It is an area that is managed on a retail basis here by Rehab. We have seen some really innovative gestures by large multiples. Perhaps they are not the mainstream ones we associate with our supermarkets and supermarket shopping but others. Aldi and Lidl have led the way in this. When you are finished your shopping, you can discard the recyclable parts of the packaging or packaging you simply do not want. These stores are doing this on a voluntary basis. I am have a Bill in preparation that would oblige large retailers of a particular size, and even the local retailers like Spar, SuperValu and Centra, to provide their shoppers with the opportunity to discard the waste packaging they do not want. It would send a major and significant message back through the supply chain to the point of source, manufacture or production to tell those involved the consumer does not need all this packaging, that product A results in a significant amount of returns compared with product B.

I know the print newspaper industry is going through a transformation and this Government has had positive ideas in that respect. Every Sunday when I buy the newspapers, there are a number of supplements I do not want, but they end up in my green bin. I would like to be in a position to be able to hand them back to the retailer and say I only want the main section or the sport, lifestyle or culture section, whatever it may be. I would like to be able to set out which sections of the newspaper I want to buy and the associated bits that I do not. A retailer will get the message very quickly and pass it back to the point of production that it is sent certain products every week, which are then stacked on the shelves and supplied to the consumer, who does not like the amount of packaging. It will pass on the message, which will be sent loud and clear. That should be legislated for.

There is an interesting story, which I might tell on another occasion, about an entrepreneur in my own constituency who was thwarted in the end by a well-known coffee retailer. Many people go to buy coffee in the morning and I have seen increasing numbers of people bring their own cup for this purpose. Let us consider the amount of waste generated in those small retail spaces. When we buy coffee, the coffee grounds go to landfill, yet coffee grounds are incredibly nutrient-rich and make really good fertiliser. There are outlets, like a major burger chain, that offer bags of coffee grounds to customers free of charge. The customers do not tend to take up this offer. Perhaps it is because they do not know that coffee grounds make really good compost for their plants. We should legislate that every retailer or outlet that sells coffee is obliged to recycle it, so that it does not end up in a black plastic sack in landfill. What about the little wooden stick that we use to stir a sachet of sugar into our coffee? It is made of wood, is only used once, goes into the black refuse sack and ends up in landfill. It could easily be recycled.

We need to be much more aggressive and vigorous on retailers and points of production. I spoke to someone who works with a major burger outlet that is one of the best known chains. They told me that when they replaced the plastic straws with paper straws, customers gave out because they did not like the paper straws, but they have got used to them. We need to be really vigorous. One of the reasons I raise this issue is that it gives the consumer, at a very basic level, a real sense of empowerment that he or she is doing something useful, is not adding to waste and is playing a small role in the supply chain.

The Minister and I share a passion for micromobility. If we keep going in the positive way we are going in relation to the vaccine roll-out and the Covid figures, we may not be back to peak traffic but we will be moving towards heavy traffic again. We can see it. The city is still particularly quiet but the suburbs are buzzing.

The time has come for electric scooters. We should have gone about introducing them, as it was done in the UK, under the cover of Covid to give people time to get used to them. I have a Bill providing for a scheme like the Dublin city bike scheme that would get people used to scooters and show they can be rolled out safely and are capable of playing a significant part in smart transport in the city. However, the Covid window has passed. As people begin to return over time from remote working, the city will start to get busier. The Minister knows my enthusiasm for these types of initiatives. He is a cyclist, as am I. It would help legislators to make laws in this area if they had experience of things like e-scooters and e-bikes. I wonder how many members of the Cabinet have ridden either. It is not until you do, as the Minister has, that you see their exciting potential as a component of micromobility and smart travel.

The next point I want to make is one I have raised with colleagues before. I am saying it to the Minister in the context of the next budget. Electric bikes have become hugely popular but they are an expensive piece of kit. A good one costs approximately €3,000. People can get some of that money back through the bike to work scheme but they have to spend the €3,000 before they get it back. I do not care whether it is a Fianna Fáil Minister or a Green Party Minister who brings forward initiatives in this regard. Dublin hosted the Velo-City cycling conference two years ago, which the Minister attended, and it was a fantastic and fascinating experience. Belgium is the leader in encouraging the use of electric bikes. It has a scheme under which any employer who invests in any electric bike initiative, whether by way of purchasing bikes for employees, constructing e-bike parking facilities and lockers or installing shower facilities in the workplace, can write off 125% of that investment against tax. In this country, all we have done is extend the bike to work scheme to an e-bike to work scheme. If the Minister were to give employers in Dublin city an incentive whereby every cent they spend on e-bike infrastructure for their employees could be written off against tax, that would make a substantial difference to mobility and commuting in Dublin and would not cost the Exchequer a huge amount.

I believe in trying to empower people to understand they can make a real difference on climate action in their own lives. I am a supporter of climate budgeting, which the Minister knows all about. I would like to see attention being given to the notion of county-by-county climate budgeting. I will explain what that would involve for anyone who might be watching and does not know. Just as a local authority produces an account of how much it spends, what it spends it on and how much it raises every year, climate budgeting would involve an audit of where the carbon footprint comes from in a particular area. In the case of my local authority, South Dublin County Council, agriculture does not account for a huge amount of the footprint, even though two thirds of the area is rural. Most of it is probably coming from data centres and transport. On still days in May, June and July, you can see a huge plume of brown smoke hanging over the M50 as it weaves its way through the area. If you are up in the Dublin Mountains, you can see that brown plume of smoke below. In the case of South Dublin County Council, a climate budget might involve setting the carbon footprint at 100 every year. The audit would include keeping track of the number of e-cars or hybrid cars and auditing their carbon footprint. Each time someone living in the local authority area changed a diesel or petrol car for a hybrid, he or she would be able to see that the carbon front of the area was reduced as a direct impact of that change.

When I proposed something along those lines before, when I was on the Fianna Fáil Front Bench, colleagues said it would punish particular counties that have a heavy reliance on agriculture. My argument is that my part of south County Dublin has a heavy reliance on data centres and transport, with the M50 running right through it. It is incumbent on all of us to set specific targets to reduce the carbon footprint in our own areas. That does not necessarily mean having to cut the cattle herd in some counties, although that may be part of it, but it involves looking at a range of suitable methods. The big headline figure in this country is emissions from cattle. The question is how to counterbalance that with other initiatives. In south County Dublin, for example, we could look to offset the carbon footprint of data centres by encouraging more people to cycle. That would require rolling out more cycle lanes and greenways and promoting the use of e-bikes, e-scooters and hybrid cars. It could involve telling the people of south County Dublin that they can make a real difference by reducing the amount of waste they produce. Initiatives like that could set up quite a competitive environment that is conducive to effective change.

Although data centres get a lot of flak, it is important to note there are other factors to consider. People forget that companies like Amazon, AWS, Microsoft and Facebook have set themselves incredibly ambitious targets in regard to the carbon footprint they create. The bosses in Ireland have demanding objectives to reach, overseen by the executives in headquarters. In my constituency, the AWS facility in Tallaght produces a lot of heat. However, AWS is doing significant work in terms of providing district heating from what comes out of that plant. We should look at more of those types of initiatives because the spin-off in terms of jobs is significant. In the old days, we may have thought we were getting the poor relation of technology in securing data centres rather than the creative enterprises. We now know that data are king. It is an incredibly valuable thing to have the data centres of many global companies housed in Ireland.

We waste one third of our food in this country, which is truly appalling. One of my family members has inspired me to take action in this regard. There used to be a bit of social cachet among the middle classes in having a full fridge. A really well-stocked fridge looks great. During Covid, my family member decided to try to exhaust the contents of the fridge before going shopping again. I have tried to do the same. Having empty shelves in the fridge and using up all the contents before going out to shop has become the goal. Shopping more often for fewer items may be helpful in this regard rather than doing one big shop, but this could be impractical for large families. It is something we should encourage people to consider. As I said, we waste 30% of the food we produce and buy. That is an appalling statistic.

My local authority, South Dublin County Council, is doing an enormous amount of work, backed up by the Minister's Department and other Departments, on the provision of greenways and cycle tracks. Constituents are looking for maps of where those tracks are because they want to use them. They want to know whether they can get from Knocklyon to Tallaght by bike and, if there is more than one route, which one is the best. There is also a lot of work being done on areas of ecological sensitivity. The old days of having every open space in an estate looking like a more well-manicured version of Augusta are gone. People realise that wild flowers, open spaces and rivers are types of sanctuaries.

The planet took a big deep breath over the past year, as we have discussed before in the House. We heard birdsong and experienced new smells. I encountered natural smells I had not smelled since I was a boy. The M50, which I live beside, was like a country road at the height of the Covid restrictions. You could hear individual cars pass by. The planet got to breathe but, at the same time, we witnessed things like what my colleague, Deputy O'Callaghan, referred to in terms of President Bolsonaro's actions regarding the rainforest in Brazil. That was a crime against nature. Before the Second World War, the concept of a crime against humanity did not exist. The concept of a crime against nature is something a body like the United Nations should look at with a view to setting particular standards in that regard and imposing punitive sanctions on countries that break those standards.

I cannot make these comments without reflecting on the fact that we, in the western world, who exploited most of the riches that much of the rest of the world had over the centuries, are setting the global targets for those countries that are trying to develop and do their best. Ireland was not part of that exploitation and that is something of which we can be proud. Some of those countries that are trying to do their best to develop their economies and the potential of their people, countries, economies, natural resources, spaces and areas were exploited by colonists and imperialists over centuries. People in India and parts of Africa must think it is a bit rich to hear targets set by the West and countries that pillaged all their riches over centuries. We should not forget that.

I wish the Minister well in his work. He has my absolute support for the Bill and any assistance I can offer. I would ask him to focus on some micro-initiatives, whether budgets or other things, which people on the street can buy into and know that in taking action and following such initiatives, they are making their own little contributions to the big but achievable targets the Minister has set at a macro and a global level.

See this speech in context