Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)

I wish the Minister of State the best. I welcome his passion today and his invitation to all of us to go out into the country. There is a lot more than that to be done, however. He knows that more than anyone. If we go back, we declared biodiversity a climate emergency back in May 2019. The Minister at the time, Josepha Madigan, said that, “We are losing biodiversity around the globe at a rate unprecedented in human history”. She said that on 29 May 2019. The former Minister of State from the Green Party and current Senator, Malcolm Noonan, said, “The biodiversity emergency is among our greatest challenges, if not the greatest”. I pay tribute to the former Minister of State because he took a hands-on approach with the National Parks and Wildlife Service and we now have extra parks as a result.

We are in an emergency. The elephant in the room is the continued wars in which we are complicit. I do not know how we can talk about climate change with any honesty or sincerity while we allow wars to continue every day.

It is obviously the elephant in the room for biodiversity. Then we look at the EPA. It is never mentioned that ongoing wars are totally incompatible with changes in climate. The EPA's state of the environment report is the eighth such report since 1996. It states:

... the scale of improvements that are being made ... is insufficient ... [...] In all cases, the outlook is not positive with substantial challenges to deliver [not just] on climate, air ... [but on the economy as well].

Elsewhere, it states:

This report shows that serious deficits remain in Ireland’s implementation of environmental legislation such as the Urban Waste Water Directive, Water Framework Directive ... [and so on] [...] There are currently nine Court of Justice of the European Union cases and 16 infringements open against Ireland for failures in implementing EU environmental legislation.

That is just a tiny taste in two minutes and 30 seconds, so maybe in his closing speech the Minister of State will direct himself to what the Government is doing about this crisis.

See this speech in context