Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to raise the issue of how we talk about climate. No doubt we will have a discussion in these Houses very soon again about climate. I was very sorry I was unable to be present at the education committee this morning. I know the Acting Leader was there. It is very important we had the hearings we did. The committee heard from young people and various bodies, including the Union of Students in Ireland and the Irish Second-Level Students' Union, about how climate and the challenges around climate are to be talked about in our school system and the response that needs to be made.

There is absolutely no doubt that massive climate change is happening and there is absolutely no doubt there has been a massive increase in emissions of CO₂ and other gasses from man-made activity. Where there is not absolute consensus and where there is a respectable minority view is around to what extent climate change can be explained by anthropogenic activity. It would be wrong to engage in a kind of groupthink that pretends there are not Nobel Prize-winning physicists, for example, who have a minority view around this. I say this because I am concerned about the impact of climate alarmism on the rising generation. There was a phrase from the Irish Second-Level Students' Union statement that:

We must acknowledge climate discussions can have a profound impact on students in our education system. The planet is in crisis and that can be hard for many. We must be prepared for the impact of eco-grief which already grips many today.

We must not be prepared for the impact of that. We must arrest that development in schools and we must help young people be resilient. We must encourage sustainable practices. We must help them be climate aware but we must help them live in the world as we have it and prepare this world better for the future.I am worried about an excessive politicisation of our curriculum, where a certain kind of Chicken Licken, the-sky-is-falling analysis pervades all talk around climate. I worry that might contribute to what might be called a fragilisation, if such a word exists, of younger people.

We need to be serious about climate, but we need to be careful about talking about it as an emergency. There are many emergencies in our world, from human trafficking to what is going on in Gaza and a whole lot of other places. However, we may be losing our way in how we bring forward the next generation and educate them about climate and climate responsibility. If we are talking about eco-grief and preparing students for it, then somebody somewhere high up in the education chain has lost it.