Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I was at the national ploughing championships last week and I was challenged by a man. It was a very interesting discussion and proof that real humans are much nicer than Twitter humans, if we needed such proof. He challenged me on the restriction on the burning of turf and smoky coal and questioned whether it was a green issue or a health issue. I very strongly made the case that it is both and that one does not need to be exclusive of the other. We know the implications of burning fossil fuels in general, be it to power our cars or to heat our homes, and the impact it has on air quality.

It was timely when I saw the EPA report land on Monday morning. It tells us that in 2022, air monitoring results from EPA stations across Ireland showed that fine particulate matter, mainly from the burning of solid fuel in homes, and NO₂, mainly from road traffic, remain the main threats to good air quality here. High levels of harmful particulate matter are being recorded right across the country. This is due to two main sources, as I said, namely, the burning of solid fuels in our homes for cooking or heating, and high levels of nitrogen dioxide associated with road traffic. Dr. Micheál Lehane, director of the EPA's office of radiation protection and environmental monitoring, said in response to the report that the EPA's air quality monitoring has shown that Ireland met all of its EU legal requirements in 2022 but, crucially, did not meet the World Health Organization's air quality guidelines for health. Our clean air strategy commits to going above and beyond those EU legal guidelines, and to taking into full consideration the new WHO guideline limits.

Particulate matter, in particular PM2.5, which is the finest of particulate matters, has a real and significant impact on health outcomes and mortality rates across the EU. That is what both the EPA report and a Guardianreport showed. The Guardian report took a European-wide context. Across Europe, fine particulate matter is accounting for some 400,000 excess deaths per year. In Ireland, the EPA estimates that at about 1,400. We stopped the world for Covid, which was entirely right and correct, to prevent that kind of excess mortality. To think that 400,000 people across Europe are dying due to poor air quality really should spur us into more action than we are currently seeing.

It is not just about the mortalities, either. It is also about the impact on health and well-being. We know that this type of particulate matter air pollution is particularly associated with the likes of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, and asthma. We have some very stark figures in Ireland where asthma rates are among the highest in Europe. There are 8,000 asthma admissions to hospital each year, and 2.4 million asthma GP consultations each year. Every four minutes someone in Ireland visits an emergency department with asthma. Every six days one person in Ireland dies of asthma. It is not just that. The particulate matter is so small that it passes through the body very easily. It passes through the barrier of the lungs and enters into the bloodstream. We find it turning up in people's heart, lung and brain tissue. Polluted air increases the risk for people with cancer, diabetes, cognitive impairment and dementia. Even low birth rate can be associated with it. The evidence for this is robust and getting stronger.

We have brought in a clean air strategy with 26 key measures across six strands. What progress has been made on our clean air strategy so that we can reduce drastically those numbers of people impacted by the quality of the air on this island?

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