Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am very pleased to speak on this very progressive Bill. I acknowledge the lead role played by our colleague, Deputy Duncan Smith, in its genesis, in addition to the work Deputy Bacik has done on it to date.

As we know, climate change is the single most important challenge of our time. It is existential and beyond urgent, though one wonders if that reality has dawned on many of those who attended COP26 in Glasgow. The scale of the task facing us can often feel completely overwhelming. It is understandable that we as individual citizens might say, "This is too big for me; nothing I can do can change anything", but this is simply untrue. We cannot be fatalistic and fall into that trap.

Yes, we all despair at the foot-dragging and the incrementalism of the big polluters and leaders of large nations who would keep permitting them to do what they do and to hell with the consequences, but all of us still have a role to play. We all have a responsibility. We can take some control of our own lives and of our planet’s destiny. We all have agency and we all have power and that is what this Bill is fundamentally about.

When we are shopping, most of us these days try, insofar as we can, to be health conscious. We try to make decisions about what we put into our bodies based on the standardised nutritional values on the packaging we see in our supermarkets. I also make decisions, as do many of us, based on labour standards applied by the companies which produce the products we are interested in buying. Do they treat their workers well? Where do they source their ingredients? Were the ingredients sourced sustainably? That is often a very difficult decision to make and a question to answer as there are simply no commonly understood legal standards to define that term. Too much of it involves guesswork and it is a case of finding out what you can for yourself.

The question of labelling is a powerful and often emotive one. There is much about their products companies themselves and indeed entire states do not want you to know. One need only look at the resistance to a modest proposal emanating from these Houses, supported by the Labour Party, to label goods produced in the illegally-occupied territories of Palestine. Labelling matters and so does the presentation of labelling, or rather the misrepresentation of labelling. The phenomenon of greenwashing, mentioned by my colleague, Deputy Bacik, is something we are seeing more and more. We see some of the most egregious carbon- and methane-emitting firms and industries in the world mislead and deliberately misrepresent their environmental credentials because they can get away with it. More often than not they get away with it with impunity because their cant goes unchallenged and there are no robust legal standards that apply to this area. Greenwashing reminds me of the behaviour of some of the biggest firms which think that by wrapping themselves in the rainbow flag they are good employers and they are embracing equality, diversity and basic human respect and decency. Some of these companies are among those that are most openly aggressive and hostile towards trade unions, for example. A company does not get to call itself decent if that is its policy. It cannot define what decency involves. In the very same way, a firm responsible for polluting our air, land and water should not be able to make up their own tailored, customised, bespoke rules on sustainability. That simply cannot be allowed to happen and that is what this Bill is about. At the same time, the Bill does not overpromise. It is a modest proposal designed to make industry and producers honest and to treat consumers as informed citizens, providing all of us with the knowledge we need to do the right thing.

I am pleased Government will not be opposing this Bill. That is very progressive. We are prepared to work with Government on improving this Bill if that is required and we are aware that there is work going on at EU level on the standardisation and harmonisation of this process. I doubt we would have been made aware this week, or indeed earlier, of the Government’s plans or the EU plans formally in this House if it were not for the Labour Bill that prompted that action and that information to come forward. On that basis alone this Bill is very welcome and this should prompt the action that is required, needed and is frankly beyond urgent.

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