Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The glaring visual tonight is the absence of the Minister, Deputy Ryan. That is a big mistake on his part. Most of the measures listed in the motion are to do with the Department of the Minister, Deputy McGrath. However, the question the whole country is discussing is that of ending turf cutting. We will be talking about carbon tax again tomorrow. It is a massive issue that my party spent a lot of time studying. I have to say Deputy Bacik of the Labour Party is completely wrong on it. There is not a heap of evidence to show that carbon tax is the right thing to do or that it alleviates the climate disaster - quite the opposite.

I hope Sinn Féin will accept the People Before Profit amendment to the motion in the spirit in which we are trying to address this issue. It is entirely possible for two different things to be true at the same time. That might come as a surprise to some Deputies. It might surprise climate deniers and it might even surprise the Minister. We have a global climate catastrophe on our hands yet some people need to continue to use fossil fuels to survive in their homes and to move around. Both things are true at the same time. It is absolutely true the climate crisis is worsening. This week we are likely to see record temperatures in the Indian continent that will kill thousands of people. Records elsewhere will be broken and in some cities and regions temperatures will exceed the ability of human habitability. It is true that this year again will be among the warmest on record and floods, droughts and storms will destroy lives, crops and biodiversity. It is also true that any policy we take to deal with this can either address the systemic nature of the causes of climate change or not. It can hinder rather than aid the fight against climate change.

The Minister must bear with me because this is important to say. We need to stop burning turf. It is more carbon dioxide intensive than coal or oil. It is a potential pollutant in the air. However, if we examined the areas in which deaths happen from poor air quality, they are more likely to happen in bigger cities where traffic is severely congested and air quality is extremely compromised. I represent Dublin South-Central, which is consistently reported in Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, findings as having the worst air quality in the country. I represent many older and vulnerable people in that constituency who have chronic respiratory conditions and cannot even access SEAI grants or other State helps. By and large they do not burn turf but they are subject to the burning of some illegal fuels and mostly to traffic congestion. Nevertheless we will add turf to the list of things we have to move away from burning and extracting wholesale.

We also need to stop driving petrol and diesel cars. We need to stop burning gas to heat homes. We need to stop building data centres that consume vast quantities of water and energy. What is the point of banning turf cutting and then facilitating the building of liquified natural gas terminals throughout the country? We need to do all of this urgently and immediately. How we do it is not just a question of tactics. How we do it will determine if we can succeed in stopping a climate catastrophe and reducing emissions. We will debate the carbon tax tomorrow. I see the Government's turf policy is very much in the same category: an emphasis on personal, individual behaviour while ignoring the systemic causes that drive emissions up.

I reject utterly the idea that turf burning is a cultural or uniquely Irish thing which must not be upset or challenged. That is nonsense. If we were to call out what is behind that idea, it is straightforward climate denial. It is no accident that the Deputies who have consistently denied the facts of climate change resort to this mystical cultural argument to defend the continued burning of turf. We could argue that coal is as much a cultural aspect of the lives of people in Poland, Germany or Spain. It is a building block of much of Britain. It is the foundation of the trade union movement not just in Britain but for working-class organisations across the globe. Does that mean those regions get a free pass to continue burning it? No, it does not.

How we stop using or burning turf is critical. If by September the State cannot show the households relying on turf a scheme that will fully compensate them financially and another scheme that will ensure their homes do not freeze and are fully retrofitted to the highest degree in readiness for that change, we have no business proposing such a ban or pretending even that we understand what we mean by just transition. We have seen with Bord na Móna that Government Ministers refer to just transition this and just transition that although they are utterly ignorant of what it means or should mean.

I will finish with a warning to the Green Party and others. When they support policies and actions that allow, as this has, political and vested commercial interests to rail against the impact of the policy on vulnerable households or communities, they do absolutely no good to the fight against climate change. They give succour to and shore up the arguments of deniers and sceptics and drive away ordinary people from the fight against the biggest single crisis facing humanity. This is the case with carbon taxes on ordinary people and it is the same with banning the burning of turf. We must translate climate action into policies which win people to the urgency of the fight. In this case, that starts with saying we need to make this change and this is how we will make it while we help those who are most affected by it.

That is why I ask the Government to take our amendment seriously and prioritise for retrofitting those households affected by any restriction on turf burning.

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