Pippa Hackett (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. I have four children and want the world they and their children live in as adults to be one that renews, refreshes and reinvigorates itself, not one that continues to degrade, decay and destruct. That, quite simply, is what this Bill is about. Life as we know it must change; otherwise, we will condemn our children and grandchildren to a bleak future with greater inequality, increased injustice and a natural world devoid of meaningful life and incapable of growing the food we need to survive.

Food, of course, is something we in Ireland produce in abundance. Unfortunately, however, we have pushed things too far in the wrong direction and need to address that. Like all of society, agriculture must change to. How we use our land and farm it are central to this. When agriculture and climate change are spoken about in the same conversation, polar opposite views are often expressed. Common ground disappears and common sense evaporates but we should be careful with the rhetoric. While noisy exchanges make for good radio or television, they do little to move the debate on, and this serves no one. We need to keep this simple. What this means is accepting that farming must work within the ecological limits it is bound by. We have pushed against those boundaries for too long and we see the effects in our water, air and natural world. Interestingly, the climate action plan and the Common Agricultural Policy share the same acronym but the similarity should not end there. I cringed when I heard a recent comment that the objective of the first CAP, in 1962, was to produce cheap food. No doubt, anyone defending such a view would have said it was what the people wanted, but we should just look at what we have created as a result: a race to the bottom, with ever-increasing input costs, decreasing returns and the natural environment pushed to the brink. When, in the design of the upcoming CAP, the citizens of the EU were consulted on what they wanted their money to be spent on, cheap food did not get a mention. The three most pressing issues were delivering a fair standard of living for farmers, removing pressures on the environment and dealing with climate change.

"The consumer won't pay" is a frequent chant, yet when consumers have access to higher-quality food with a lower carbon footprint that is biodiversity and habitat friendly, they will pay. Those are the consumers we in Ireland should target.We are not obliged to feed 40 million or 50 million people, but we are obliged to clean our water and our air, protect habitats and meet our climate targets. That is what we must do.

The world does not need Ireland to feed it. The world needs Ireland to work for justice. Climate justice is a big part of that. As we know, most world hunger and poverty result from war, political unrest, breakdowns in supply chains and greed. The effects of conflict and war are exacerbated by a changing climate, with even more people displaced from their homes, making life-threatening trips from their home countries not just to escape oppression but also increasingly unlivable land and climate.

We talk a lot about climate justice and just transition. I understand them as a commitment to deliver justice to those who are left helpless in the face of climate change and to provide a just transition to those who find themselves exposed to the impact of the adaptations that we need to make as a society to mitigate climate change.

In my area of the midlands, there are many people whose livelihoods have been linked to peat extraction. For generations, it was the central activity in the area, but we now understand the huge damage such extraction has done to our atmosphere. There are also many whose livelihoods are impacted by flooding. Once upon a time, such flooding occurred once every 100 years. Now it occurs several times a decade. We cannot turn our back on these lives, people and situations. That is why I wholeheartedly welcome this Bill. I believe that it commits us, in law, not to just meeting targets, but to a human-centred approach, safeguarding the rights of the most vulnerable and sharing the impacts of climate change in an equitable way.

The time for avoidance and kicking that famous can a little further down the road is gone. Those who want to believe that we can shirk our responsibilities for a few more years, because Germany still has coal mines or because we are minuscule compared to China, need to face reality. The fact is that we are one of the highest per capitaemitters in the world. We need to do something about that not just for targets or for the EU, but for ourselves.

I was honoured once to share a stage with Mary Robinson at the Tipperary International Peace Award ceremony in 2019, when she was the righteous recipient of the award. We both spoke that day about peace and climate justice. I ended up musing that at the end of the day, Mother Nature will come out on top. Like it or not, she is the one who is really charge here. Therefore, we need to start asking her for her help, learning from her, working with her and not believing that we can dictate to her. If we lose the battle with climate change and biodiversity loss, we will ultimately cause our own destruction and possible extinction. Let us not create a situation in which Mother Nature breathes a big sigh of relief that we are finally gone. Let us instead work with her and help her get back to what she does best: healing and repairing and nurturing and propagating in her own wonderfully balanced way. Let us work with her to sustain life on this planet in a way we have not yet managed to do.