Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to make a contribution to this debate. I support the setting up of a just transition commission. How we deal with a just transition will be the measure of whether we are serious about climate change. I am fully with the Minister with regard to climate change. I have said this on the record repeatedly. However, our record in this area is, at the most benign, one of extreme tardiness. On 9 May 2019, we declared a climate and biodiversity emergency. That was not a proactive move on the part of the Government. In July of the following year, the Supreme Court quashed the 2017 mitigation plan because it fell short of the level of specificity required to provide that transparency and to comply with the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015. In his speech on the budget, the Minister for Finance told us that the world is burning. There has been report after report. The sixth report of the IPCC is absolutely damning. I will not go into the statistics within it.

Let us look at what we are talking about here. Some rural Deputies feel that their areas are being left out. I have the privilege of representing a city and a rural area and I know this division is absolutely detrimental to our solidarity and our approach to climate change. This was not helped by the recent announcement that the sale of turf is to be stopped when 23% of the homes in County Galway use turf-fired central heating. That type of idiocy, which leads to more and more division, is simply unacceptable.

We are penalising the people on the ground who have actually led us on sustainability. I have mentioned this about Galway so often that it now bores people. The people of Galway led on recycling 20 years ago but the power was taken away from them. Instead of building on such initiatives, we have listed decarbonisation zones throughout the country, which is brilliant. These are sitting in the Department or in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. There has been no movement at all on this or on a feasibility study for light rail in Galway. There has also been no movement with regard to park-and-ride facilities in Galway. This has been in the plan since 2005. I could go on and on. There have been absolutely no practical measures on the ground. There is an opportunity to make Galway a green and lean city as its population increases by 50% with a light rail system or at least a feasibility study in that regard.

There has been no attempt at all to look at what we are doing with the big corporations and the data centres. Perhaps the Minister could read his correspondence afterwards because I have only a few seconds of his attention. The biggest problem for me is the marketisation of everything. I will mention a recent article in The Irish Timesabout Scotland. A big player in the fashion industry has bought up 210,000 acres on 12 estates in Scotland with a view to trading his emissions from the fashion industry. If that is this Government's way forward, I will have no part of it.

See this speech in context