Seanad debates

Wednesday, 29 May 2013

Address to Seanad Éireann by Ms Margareta Wahlström

 

12:30 pm

Photo of Susan O'KeeffeSusan O'Keeffe (Labour) | Oireachtas source

We are known as the country of the thousand welcomes, so I would like to add mine to all of the others and welcome Ms Wahlström to this House. We are honoured to have her here today.

An issue that is dear to Ms Wahlström's heart and which she mentioned earlier is that the idea of disaster is not real for many countries. It is not real in the way the internet was not real 20 years ago, yet now we cannot live without it. We have not yet worked out how to make this real. Does Ms Wahlström have a view on how schools might be involved with this? Starting with the little ones is key. They already criticise their parents for smoking and so forth. How can we engage with them?

More particularly, Ms Wahlström mentioned the enormous investment by private companies. In that context, what is the balance between the effort she makes with regard to private companies as against politicians? How can politicians influence the private companies that make those investments? Very often, private companies will write into their bottom line the penalties they know they will pay for breaching rules on the abuse of water, air, land and so on. We have seen the evidence of that across the world. They know already that they will have to pay and they write off €5 million, €50 million or whatever is appropriate. How do we stop that? How do we change that culture? Without such a change, as Ms Wahlström pointed out, we will not make progress, because 80% of the world's investors are private companies and they are the biggest abusers of the countryside and the land.

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