Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin. I will be supporting the motion. I, along with colleagues here, have fought consistently to raise matters relating to housing, health and climate change on the floor of the Dáil but we were laughed at. I am no climate denier and I am not here to demonise the Green Party. We have to make fundamental changes in the context of climate change but the absence of leadership and the divisive manner in which that is being tackled fills me with despair. I absolutely despair that it has become a divisive conversation. I never agreed with carbon tax. It is a divisive tax that punishes the poor while letting the big polluters off the hook. What the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, has done here, aside from creating a communications fiasco, is even worse in the sense that he has divided people from each other under the guise of a climate change action when what we really need is leadership, unity, solidarity and to get a message across that we are in it together. We should have learned from Covid that we cannot split and divide. We have to get a message across that we need transformational change. That is not done by making an announcement that people will not be allowed to use turf from September.

Of those in my constituency, 23% or 25% use turf. What provision has been made in respect of those people? The debacle of various backbenchers and other Deputies going on radio programmes to speak on this is appalling and unacceptable. It is setting climate change way back. The Government is doing this at a time when energy prices are going through the roof. We have heard the figures. I looked them up. The price of home heating oil rose by 58.5% between February and March and by a further 126.6% in the 12 months to March 2022. I do not have enough time in my few minutes to quote all the other statistics. The Minister knows them well. On top of that, average rents in the county from which I come, outside the city, have increased by 19%. I ask the Minister to listen to these figures. Houses and rent used to be cheaper outside the city. Rents in the county increased by 19% from 2020 to 2021. In Galway city, they cannot rise any more, but they still rose by 8.8% in a short quarter.

On top of that, the Government's amendment to the motion cynically refers to the number of deaths per year as a result of air pollution. I welcome that the Government is beginning to look at things like that but it has included that statistic in a very cynical way in this context. None of its amendments have ever referred to the number of people who die each year from poverty, bad housing or being left on hospital trolleys. Dr. Hickey in Sligo has said at least 300 deaths every year are directly related to the person having spent two or three days on a trolley. In my city, people are being left for seven or eight days on a trolley and, furthermore, they are without visitors, but that is an issue for another day.

What should we do here when we are faced with the existential threat to the planet of climate change? Should we go down a divisive road of telling the turf users who make up 23% of the people in my county that they cannot use it in September; they can sit and freeze? Should we tell them that turf burning will have to stop at some stage, outline the way that will be done and show them what we are going to do for them because they will help us with our climate strategy? Should we keep on with these idiotic debates where we vote for or against something and the Opposition divides up in different ways, with the Labour Party telling us one thing or Deputy Tóibín, for whom I have the greatest of respect, proudly stating he did not vote for the climate action Bill? We are facing an existential crisis and we need leadership and transformational action but that is sorely lacking.

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