Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister, Deputy Ryan, to the Chamber and wish him well in his new job. I had the pleasure of working with many close colleagues of the Minister on Dublin City Council and they are among the most talented of politicians. We shared a great deal in common with respect to how things worked at local authority level.

The Labour Party welcomes the provisions of the Bill and the establishment of the climate action fund. However, we will support Senator Higgins's amendment.

As a word of warning, my party does not believe the challenges of climate change will be tackled by solely relying on a levy on fossil fuels. I echo the call of my colleague in the Dáil, Deputy Duncan Smith, for a further debate on how we will fund the climate action plan. Deputy Smith also asked if there is a timeline for putting the climate action fund on a statutory basis beyond this Bill.

My colleague, Senator Hoey, will address the question of a just transition, particularly for workers employed in what are now considered to be dirty industries. We in the Labour Party will not tolerate a transition that does not put workers and the right to be employed in secure, well-paid jobs at its heart. There can be no green transformation without fairness and justice for workers at its heart.

The first call for applications includes some very good projects, particularly systems such as district heating in Dublin city and south Dublin. However, the second call needs to provide for more investment in retrofitting local authority housing stock, to which Senator Fitzpatrick referred, and for grants to local authorities to make their housing stock and systems more energy efficient, particularly in areas such as green roofs. When I and a couple of the Minister's Green Party colleagues pushed for green roofs to made part of the plans for the development of Chamber Street flats, we were told there was no funding available and there were also issues with sustainability. I would like more funding to go into research on how we can come up with innovative ways of making existing stock and new housing stock more passive, while also mitigating against the flood risks in Dublin, including in the city.

I am a little concerned about the previous Government's approach of pushing electric vehicles. I would like greater investment in sustainable forms of transport and public transport, rather than in moving the car stock from fossil fuels to electric vehicles. The societal cost of congestion has to be incorporated in that. I do not want a significant amount of funding from the climate action fund allocated to funding electric vehicles because they lead to an unsustainable use of land and road space. We need greater investment in sustainable forms of transport, in making our public transport system electric and also, potentially, making it free of charge. I certainly welcome some of the moves by local authorities over the course of Covid to make our roads more cycle-friendly.

One of my concerns about the second round of applications is that the projects that have been funded to date have been large, require large organisations to get involved and feature a great deal of research and development. I would like to see this move towards smaller community initiatives, not to become like lotto funding and the sports capital grants but to ensure that local communities are able to come up with bottom-up ideas that might work in their local areas. A community fund should be established to which communities could apply for small amounts of funding. It should be administered through the local authorities or local communities.

I will now address the issues of density in cities, city fight-back against climate action and the need to invest more in green spaces. As I stated previously, this is not only important for the health and well-being of people in cities. It is an important part of our flood defences.What were one in 100 years flooding events within cities will now become more frequent. We need to have a way to make smaller concrete spaces greener, for example by putting in pocket parks, to assist in our flood defences. Small things such as giving people grants for gardens and for green roofing would represent an investment in our flood defences.