Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I also welcome the representatives from Stop Climate Chaos and Trócaire in the Public Gallery and thank them for their briefing materials, which have been very helpful.

I am very glad of the opportunity to have this debate. Of course, it is a requirement under the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015. Former Senator Sean Barrett was responsible for ensuring that we would have the opportunity to debate these annual statements, not just in the Dáil but also in the Seanad. I very much welcome the opportunity to do this today. However, it must be said that Ireland is performing very badly currently, and that this is not a happy second annual statement to be making to us. I have the utmost respect for the Minister, and I would ask that he bring the message back to his Cabinet colleagues that the key problem, as I see it, is a lack of joined-up thinking and a lack of an overall Government vision for tackling climate change and for ensuring that Ireland will in fact meet its targets.

Other colleagues have referred to the very disappointing figures released by the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, showing serious increases in Ireland's carbon emissions. There were marked increases in 2016 of 3.5%. That was broken down by the EPA to show that agriculture emissions increased by 2.7%, transport emissions by 3.7% and energy industry emissions by 6.1%. It was pointed out that there were significant increases observed across all of the main sectors and an overall trend of increasing emissions. National emissions have now increased by 7% in just two years, indicating, according to the EPA, that we have not managed to decouple emissions from economic growth. The Minister referred to economic growth as a driver here, but clearly we need to ensure that economic growth does not come at the expense of failing to meet targets. I know that the Minister is committed to that. It seems that we are getting a series of disjointed actions by individual Ministers, whereas the whole intention or purpose behind these statements was to ensure that there was a coherent overall strategy at Government level to manage how we meet our targets on climate change.

We have been criticised by our own national body, the EPA, but also at international level by the European Environment Agency, which points out that Ireland is the third highest producer of emissions per person in the EU and one of just seven member states which are set to miss the EU 2020 emission reduction targets. Other bodies at international level, such as the Climate Change Performance Index, have ranked Ireland as the worst performing country in Europe for action on climate change. As others have pointed out, we also face significant fines if we fail to meet targets.

What can we do about this? There is some room for optimism. Clearly, we have significant opportunities to bring about transformational change. I believe that the political and public will is there for that, as was evidenced in the really excellent Citizens' Assembly report, which the Minister himself referred to. Looking at the recommendations from that report, there are some really positive and welcome recommendations. Some 98% of the members of the Citizens' Assembly recommended that climate change should be at the centre of policymaking in Ireland. This brings us back to the idea of having a joined-up national approach to tackling climate change. A total of 100% of members recommended that the State should take a leadership role in addressing climate change. Indeed, 80%, a sizeable majority, said that they would be willing to pay higher taxes on carbon-intensive activities, which is a sign that there is public will to put our money where our mouths are.

The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, will be coming into the House after the Minister present, Deputy Naughten, but as the Minister has mentioned it already, I will say that there were very strong recommendations on improving cycling infrastructure. As a very committed daily cyclist I would urge action on that. There was also a strong recommendation to support the transition to electric vehicles. Senator Reilly, among others, has spoken about that. I have met the Electricity Association of Ireland, the ESB and other stakeholders on this, and there is a real concern that we are not doing enough to encourage consumers to make the transition to electric vehicles. Senator Reilly referred to some of the challenges involved in that in terms of charging and range.

The Labour Party set out in its policy document, Growing the Green Economy, and in its submission to the Citizens' Assembly a series of actions that could be taken. It proposed the setting up of a green infrastructure fund, worth €1 billion, to retrofit 225,000 homes over the next five years. I thought that Senator Reilly made some very strong points on retrofitting and on the importance of encouraging householders to take action on this. We need to ensure that there are strong incentives in place for the fitting of solar panels and so on. That seems to be an eminently sensible approach, and the Labour Party has recommended it also. It also called for a new forum for community energy engagement and to promote and diversify Ireland's renewable energy portfolio.

While in Government, the Labour Party was a strong driver behind the State's first climate change legislation, the 2015 Act, which is the reason we are all here. When I was first elected to the Seanad in 2007, I brought forward a Private Member's Bill, with Friends of the Earth, which was the first climate change Bill which sought to set binding targets. The Labour Party, when in Government, produced a new national strategy to combat energy poverty and began a €20 million pilot programme to improve domestic energy efficiency.

The Government needs to take a strong leadership role on climate action. We have advantages because many State-owned companies, such as the ESB, Bord na Móna and Coillte, are operating in the energy sector and can be dynamic agents of change. We have pointed out that this is an area where State intervention and activism are crucial. The market alone, unaided, cannot deliver the transformation to the low-carbon, and ultimately zero-carbon, economy we need to achieve. There is immense public support for that. Any survey we see shows immense public support for recycling initiatives and for ideas such as retrofitting.

I want to refer to the issue of climate justice, which Senator Grace O'Sullivan referred to. That is also an important part of any debate on this. This is not just a national issue. Trócaire has produced very useful briefings on this issue. It is the poorest and least developed countries, those which have done the least to cause the enormous amount of climate change we have seen, which are being hit the hardest. Mary Robinson, speaking recently at the COP23 UN climate change conference in Bonn, spoke about the need to engage stakeholders to ensure the right to participation and decision-making by those from the least developed countries is respected and fulfilled as we make the transition to zero carbon.

I will end on an optimistic note. Mary Robinson did strike a very optimistic note in reflecting on that recent conference. She spoke about how she has become more optimistic about the global response to climate change. She urged the implementation of a Marshall Plan-type intervention, which I thought was a very attractive idea, to ensure that everyone has access to renewable energy. This is also a critical way of tackling global poverty. To return to the point made by the EPA, we should never consider that economic progress inevitably means increased emissions. Unfortunately, that has been our recent experience and it is why we are performing particularly badly currently. We need to decouple emissions from economic growth, see the enormous economic benefit in growing sustainable energy and move increasingly towards a zero-carbon economy.