Maire Devine (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister, Deputy Bruton. I welcome the opportunity to address him directly on the climate action plan quarterly progress report. It is with dismay that all those who have worked so hard to influence the Government to take climate change seriously in the past year note what is happening. I am a bit downhearted to have to open my statement with an unapologetic condemnation of the Taoiseach's outrageous comments on the benefits of climate change. How can the Minister defend a plan that seeks to mitigate global warming when his leader implicitly posits it as beneficial? How can he stay here and expect us and the public to take seriously the commitments to tackle climate change? There is no possible justification for a trained scientist such as the Taoiseach in putting forward such damaging, ignorant commentary. Let us be clear: warmer winters bring heavier rain and flooding, not ambient indoor temperatures. Warmer winters mean people being evacuated from their homes because flood defences have been breached. Warmer winters do not mean sitting at home and turning down the heat dial. Warmer winters mean more landslides and deaths in road traffic accidents and by drowning. They mean more premature deaths and demands on public health services, not people sitting at home in their bikinis and counting their energy savings. Our winters have been getting warmer for decades, yet neither home energy costs nor carbon dioxide emissions have reduced. Is this not the reason the Government increased the carbon tax? Last year the Society of St. Vincent de Paul spent €3 million in heating the homes of those who have not yet felt the Taoiseach's so-called benefits of global warming. No doubt, the society will spend the same amount, if not more, this year. Perhaps the Minister might tell those concerned how they are doing global warming all wrong.

I could go on in that vein, but I want to address other issues that bring the climate action plan into grave question. An internal audit of the Minister's Department found that the State systems for monitoring whether Ireland was meeting key climate change targets were unsatisfactory. The audit found a significant number of failings in how progress in meeting climate targets was recorded and reported to the Government and senior departmental officials. While Ireland is set to fall short of EU climate targets next year and is also on course to miss significant targets for 2030, the internal audit found that the Minister was not informed on a systematic basis of performance gaps in Department policies to hit climate targets and that, as a result, he was unable to advise the Government on the need for corrective action. The audit found there were no procedural arrangements for reporting progress to senior civil servants and that their subsequent decisions might not have been informed by the most recent information. In addition, the audit found that there was a lack of formal reporting on overall climate change targets to the Government and the Houses of the Oireachtas. The Minister has no way of finding out what is going on, no evidence with which to advise the Government and has no way of reporting to this House. In essence, this renders the progress report null and void because the means by which evidence is harnessed is wholly compromised, yet it is the taxpayer who will be raided to pay exorbitant target failure fines and bear the burden of the Government's failures.

There are many other issues I could raise, including electric vehicles, retrofitting and the warmer homes scheme, but I want to concentrate on the pressing issue of the Shannon liquefied natural gas project and the Government's persistence in defending its retention on the list of projects of common interest, despite Ireland's unequivocal opposition to using fracked gas in its energy mix. The Climate Change Advisory Council has not given consideration to non-territorial emissions, although the issue is within its remit. At a committee meeting Professor John FitzGerald, whom the Minister quoted, described gas emissions as a distraction. On TV3 Deputy Naughton described discussions on fracked gas as a sideshow. There are grave concerns that the Government is seeking to row back on Ireland's anti-fracking commitments. As the Minister is proposing to commission a report on the security and sustainability of Ireland's energy supplies, it is imperative that he understand the report will be meaningless if it does not include an assessment of non-territorial emissions. As Professor Barry McMullin put it in his evidence to the climate action committee on 9 October:

We currently delegate responsibility for those emissions to the US. However, if it withdraws from the Paris Agreement [bearing in mind its continuous threats to do so and its frequent tantrums], all bets are off and we will have to look at our own responsibility much more closely.

We have co-responsibility in our climate change obligations to do no harm to others and no further harm to our planet in pursuit of our own mitigation targets. There is no circumstance whatsoever in which fracked gas can be a component of Ireland's future energy mix. I ask the Minister to prevail on the Taoiseach to stop trolling the citizens of the country and start taking the climate change obligations seriously. The Taoiseach has done a great disservice to the science and declaring evidence of climate chaos, while giving comfort to those who are unable to see the wood from the trees.