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

The Government says it wants more ambition on the limit of 1.5⁰C at COP27 but that loss and damage was a major achievement. The real story of COP27 is the failure of measures to limit global temperatures. It is like saying to the people of east Africa, "We can starve 40,000 of you and give you a few bob" or to the people of Pakistan, "We can cause catastrophic flooding for 30 million of your people and give you a few bob to compensate". We come home at the weekend to find a gloating tweet from the Minister of State, Deputy Patrick O'Donovan. He wants to show his support for building a liquefied natural gas, LNG, facility in this State. The Minister for Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Éamon Ryan, before going to COP27 sanctioned a licence extension for Europa Oil and Gas, which said it hopes to extract about 1.5 trillion ft³of gas. He gave the company the licence to do so. In the same week he also informed me that he will not allow the climate emergency measures to proceed on Committee Stage for fear it would cause existing offshore licence holders to take legal action against the State such as Providence and Europa Oil and Gas. Does the Taoiseach accept the science that argues we must leave the vast bulk of fossil fuels in the ground to deal with this catastrophic scenario facing us, and that the real failure of COP was to reduce the limit of 1.5⁰C?

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