Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to have the opportunity to have five minutes on this but I put it to the Ceann Comhairle that it is not enough. I would ask the Business Committee to look at this. Last week we were in the Chamber for two and a half hours on the smoking ban, a measure that is 20 years old and very successful. Today there is 75 minutes on this motion.

I thank the Chair of the committee and the committee members for producing this report. I would ask them to seek more time to discuss this more fully, as it deserves. This is despite the best efforts of the Minister of State. I am aware he has driven change in his Department but he was starting from a very low base. It is almost five years since we declared a climate catastrophe, a climate emergency and a biodiversity emergency. While I welcome the provision, the Minister of State is telling us we are almost there with the most basic thing of a biodiversity officer in each local authority. I spent 17 years of my life with other colleagues asking "Please do something", and nothing happened. Here we are now five years later and looking at that.

I welcome the report and I welcome the speed with which the report was produced and what followed on from the citizens' assembly. This report has 86 recommendations ,which I will not get through here. I see no problem with any of them but I do see a complete lack of integrated government response. I do not believe the penny has dropped at all.

Let us look at what Mary Robinson is telling us by way of action. At the DCU annual climate conference on Tuesday she told us “Ireland, to its credit, has good climate policies, but Ireland’s not implementing  [them]". She said “We have a beautiful island. It could be the most sustainable island in the world and everybody would benefit.” I absolutely agree with her. I do not see climate change in terms of problems. I see it in terms of potential and possibilities if we do it, but we are not dealing with that. It has, therefore, become an existential threat and we are still persisting with the same policies nationally and worldwide in our investment. We still cannot get a clear commitment from the Government, for example, yesterday, when we were talking about pensions funds and not investing in the arms industry, fossil fuels and so on. Over and over that is what we are facing – a complete misalignment between policy and action. On a more basic level, the Burren project everyone has praised in Clare is misaligned with the ACRES project, and so on. So, we look at what Mary Robinson says. Then we look at coverage from the business community at the same conference. Glenn Gillard from Deloitte Ireland was reported as saying that the business community had a key role in engaging and negotiating a genuine just transition. He said that a few years ago sustainability was main priority for CEOs but, he said “what I see today is business getting preoccupied with geopolitical tension, a challenging economic environment, but also other transformational changes like artificial intelligence", but not dealing with climate change. I would say the large corporations are an integral part of the problem of climate change.

When I look at this and all the recommendations and the work of the citizens’ assembly, it is a battle cry. I do not like the term "battle cry" but it is gáir chatha in a peaceful sense. It is a call to arms to do something while all the time we are ignoring what wars and the arms industry are doing to nature. We are here trying to do a little bit while ignoring the elephant in the room.

Even while we are trying to do our little bit, we are not using a fully integrated approach. Dr. Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin, chair of the citizens' assembly, spoke about the need for urgent action to address the stark issue of biodiversity loss in Ireland. I will not go into the details because time is running out on me. Dr. Áine Ryall said that the State has comprehensively failed to adequately fund, implement and enforce existing national legislation, national policies, EU biodiversity-related laws and so on and so it goes on.

In those 86 recommendations, different ones jump out at me and they are all under different headings but I will be parochial and look at Galway city. There is a fantastic laneway but everything in it - all the biodiversity you can imagine - is not protected. As former Deputy Joe Higgins said a long time ago, and I am using it in a different context, you might as well throw a sliothar at a-----

See this speech in context