Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will limit myself to one ask which is that we expand Science Week to become Science and Design Week and that we take that approach in the future. I have always believed that design has been a driver of change that we have neglected in Ireland.

When I was listening to the Minister in my office I noted he said that we must seek to ensure that science understands the problems of politics and I agree with him. I fear that in the debate about climate, a gulf has emerged between science and politics. It is correct and oft repeated that you cannot negotiate with the science. However, many climate scientists feel that it is enough to issue the dire warnings about the direction in which we are travelling and then to stand back and say that it is over to the politicians, who are in the arena trying to come up with policies that would change things. That is why I believe that faced with such a transformative challenge as we are, the role of design should be dramatically enhanced.

I have done a lot of work on the issue of how we can remove the environmental damage from the supply chain of our lives and it is clear that design thinking is the core. I will give a few examples as follows. The business world says that 80% of environmental damage is baked in at design stage in the selection of materials, the processes that are used and the way in which the market is designed and conceived. That is where the problems start and if we do not have design thinking at the heart of our approach, we will fail. For example, construction, which uses half of the materials we absorb in this country, has the worst record on recovery and reuse but it also lacks design thinking. We do not incorporate timber into our construction methods; rather we use concrete. Timber is a way of sequestering carbon and preserving it, as opposed to concrete, which is a way of generating emissions. Poor urban design has been at the heart of the design in Ireland generally of an urban environment that has appalling carbon ratings and which has encouraged a lot of the commuting and dispersed and distraught lives many people have to live while trying to balance the needs in their communities. If you take fast fashion and textiles, which is the fourth-highest emissions generator and the worst of all in terms of water impact, it is dominated by perverse design that we have allowed to slip into the way we think about fashion in particular, and less so about textiles. We do not recover or reuse materials. The market is determined to see travel as a product to be sold and to sit idle in our driveways 95% of the time, used primarily for a single occupant. If we rethought travel as a service that we tried to deliver in as efficient a way as we could, then we would come up with completely different solutions and we would look at solving the problems of individual families in different ways. I ask for that to be considered; it would tap into a deep vein of fresh thinking and break out of a slightly depressed approach that a lot of people take to the challenge of climate.

On seeing Deputy Naughten in the Chamber, I note that I brought down a magnum opuswe did together in a report of the Joint Committee of Education and Science on science and technology in October 2000. It would be worth, 22 years on, redoing the tables and seeing how much progress we have made. We have made great progress in primary education and science has become embedded there. I would not be quite as sure that we have made the same level of progress in second level education. The reform of the examinations system is slow and areas such as professional development opportunities for science teachers, which we have pointed to, an audit of the science equipment in our labs and the take-up of science by women are not areas where we have made great progress. Schools should be forming clusters where they could develop the depth of the science offer being made, particularly to girls, who tend to have a poorer start in their schools. I am sure Deputy Naughten has done the work to redo all of these tables because he is much more diligent than I am but it would be worth revisiting how well we are equipping the schools to deliver the ambitions we all have for the coming generation.

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