Mrs. Mary Robinson:

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach. Tá an-áthas orm a bheith ar ais. It is an honour to address the Seanad again. I am going to speak personally, passionately and from the heart. I hope, as iarUachtarán na hÉireann, nothing I say will be politically divisive. I do not wish to cause any trouble as that would not be right. While I will not cause any trouble, I am going to speak from the heart and I hope what I say will resonate with all of you.

I wish to speak to two places in which I have been recently and what I have learned there. At the end of May, I was in São Paolo in Brazil, for two reasons. The first reason was a meeting of the Planetary Guardians. It was followed immediately by a meeting of The Elders, which is held twice per year. At the moment, as Members know, I am chair of The Elders. However, it is the meeting of the Planetary Guardians on which I particularly wish to focus. I am one of the 19 global planetary guardians of the nine planetary boundaries, reflecting the work of the climate scientist, Professor Johan Rockström from the Potsdam Institute in Germany. I will not go into detail on those nine boundaries as I am not even sure if I am able to describe them utterly correctly. They give a much broader sense of the threats to the ecosystems which sustain us rather than just talking about climate and nature. Those boundaries are the whole of that which gives us the liveable system we have had as human beings for thousands of years. We are endangering it with our emissions which are changing the climate in a very serious way.

The good news is we have actually been able to retrieve one of those planetary boundaries which was in the danger, namely, the ozone layer. Approximately around 1985, scientists said the ozone layer was opening to such a degree that it was going to fry us because of the chemicals we were putting up. The world got very frightened. Every country signed up to the Montreal Protocol and we closed the ozone layer. We have actually been very successful since then in keeping the ozone layer from being a danger to us. However, in six of the other nine planetary boundaries, which include, of course, climate, nature and oceans, we are in serious danger. We are in some danger. At that meeting, we had the benefit of absolutely up-to-date expertise on the climate issue from Professor Johan Rockström, who I have mentioned already, and from a Brazilian scientist, Dr. Carlos Nobre, who is also one of the guardians. They made presentations which were actually quite scary. They showed us how the world is heating to a degree that it has never done before and how the oceans are warming very dangerously and becoming acidic. We are at very big risk. They made it clear we have no more than six years to radically change course. If we do not do so, nature may turn against us and we may be into, what is called, tipping-point territory. No scientist wants to go there. In fact, when I talked to Professor Rockström and Dr. Nobre, they almost had tears in their eyes because they were so stressed by the situation as it is today. That is true of every climate scientist I know - and I know quite a few of them. They are at the edge of their own personal stress levels because they know how serious it is. They are trying to convey this to us and trying to make sense of it. Basically, they say we have just tipped above 1.5°C a few times this year. Scientists do not call it "breaching 1.5°C" because that must be done for approximately a decade, at least, before it is "breached", as such. However, tipping 1.5°C is very serious and they explained that the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C is really very serious. Probably, in that time, the coral reefs will disappear. It is very likely the Arctic ice will entirely melt and change the whole system of the gulf stream and everything else that affects us because the Arctic and the Antarctic are very connected, The permafrost will melt and throw up both carbon and methane. Methane is more dangerous and there is a lot of it beneath the permafrost. They made it clear we need to move urgently.Dr. Carlos Nobre was particularly interesting on the Amazon. He said that at the moment, as we know, the Amazon is largely a very big sink that helps us and cools the world. However, there are parts of the Amazon already that are showing they are actually contributing to carbon. If the whole of the Amazon were to contribute to carbon, that itself would also be extremely serious. I came away from that meeting in Brazil with a real sense that everybody, not just governments, opposition and parliaments but human beings all over the place and local communities, should be in crisis mode. If we reach tipping point territory, we will make it far more likely that future generations will have an unliveable world. It will start with the poorest countries and their people will move in their millions. It is predicted that more than 1 billion people may move by 2050. That is a very serious way in which we have to look at the world.

My second visit was more recent. It was last week, on 5 and 6 June, just before the local elections. I attended the second Mary Robinson climate and nature conference in my home town of Ballina. As with the previous year, it was a remarkable gathering of people who are passionate about tackling the climate and nature crisis with actions. It included academics from Ireland and Europe who are experts on climate and nature. There was a huge buzz for the two days and people were interacting well with each other. There was a surreal sense of the power of doing good. There were all kinds of wonderful organisations. I am having an elder moment trying to remember the names of some of them. There was Hometree, for example, an organisation that is planting trees. All kinds of organisations came. Local authority representatives came from different parts of the country.

It reminded me very vividly of early 1990 when I was nominated by the Labour Party and ran as an independent candidate to seek the votes of people around Ireland. I got to know a bit about the country in a very interesting way because in 1990 the Common Agricultural Policy provided some money to rural Ireland. That money was going into towns and villages but they did not have the facilities the cities had. What people were doing was volunteering. As some of you who are old enough - though you all look very young to me - may recall, there was a very big movement of local self-development, the spirit of "meitheal". I heard it all over the place. Meitheal clubs and getting together to help get facilities for children, sports facilities and facilities for people with disabilities and the elderly in these towns and villages. It was an extraordinary time and as I talked that up, it helped me to gain support. We know how these things work.

During my stay in Ballina I was of course given a copy of the Mayo County Council climate action plan 2024 to 2029. The Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 requires all local authorities to provide action plans, so I assume other local authorities also have them. From reading it, it is a very positive action plan except there is no funding for it. It would be an action plan if we got the funding for it. That is the problem. If we got the funding, we could do this and that would give rise to various possibilities.

We know that as a country we are in trouble as regards our climate responsibility. Senators will recall very recently that the latest Environmental Protection Agency carbon emissions projections out to 2030 show Ireland is likely to achieve just 29% of a reduction compared with the commitment and legal requirement of 51% set out under legally binding carbon budgets up to the end of the decade. Ireland is on course for a 29% carbon emissions reduction, not 51%. I do not want to get political but I did not hear that figure at all during the local elections. I was waiting for somebody to mention it but I did not see it mentioned anywhere. We just had our elections but nobody wanted to know. Nobody wanted to think about it or say it. It is not easy because people want to get re-elected and that is why we have to change everything. That is where I really feel we need to think about how, as humans, we make progress. How do we make change? We need a much more positive narrative. What we face at the moment, because we are not meeting our requirements, are multibillion euro compliance costs and fines from the EU under our EU obligations. Imagine paying multibillion euro fines to the EU because Ireland is not on course. It is rubbish. It is ridiculous. Why do we not realise we need to spend money to incentivise the doing now? We need to have a very positive narrative of moving faster.

I am involved with a lot of women leaders now who are involved in the climate space. They are leading climate activists, climate organisations and in their governments, etc. We have Project Dandelion and Senators will see I am wearing a big dandelion. It is a symbol which is very useful because the dandelion, which we know in this country as a weed, is also a beautiful flower. It grows on all continents and is very resilient. You cannot get rid of the damn things if you want to and most of us have tried. It is also very good for the soil because of its deep roots. It regenerates the soil. Every part of the dandelion can be eaten or drunk. Even the roots remove toxins from the human body. Dandelions are spread by blowing, and children blow the seeds. The dandelion is a symbol. I learned the power of symbols when I had the honour to be Uachtarán na hÉireann. I put a light in the window of the kitchen of Áras an Uachtaráin which could be seen from the road that goes through the Phoenix Park. That light took a light of its own and in the early nineties helped to shape an Irish diaspora and to link those who had to emigrate from Ireland with us in Ireland and us with them as being a wider family. I gave a speech to both Houses about the Irish diaspora. I was criticised for using this new word that nobody was using but we got used to it and we now know how important that link is. That was a light.

We are using the symbol of a dandelion to gather in all of us who are on the plus side, if you like, working on this issue. I am talking more globally now but what if we did this in Ireland? What if we went back to the spirit that was there in 1990 of local self-development to change from what we are doing now to what it will take to get to that 51% by 2030, just thinking about it and working at it at every level? What Mayo County Council produced as a plan for 2024 to 2029 looks great except it is not funded and I am sure every local authority has the same issue.

Then there are all the voluntary bodies and groups that are already coming together. One of the experts in Ballina said, and I think this is true, that we are a very social people. We can actually mingle very well with each other and collaborate very well. Sometimes we do not but, by and large, we have the capacity to do so. I literally saw that when I was running for election in 1990. I saw the way groups were changing things to get facilities for young people, sports, the elderly and people with disabilities. Now we need to change to a positive narrative.

Let us have a look at what that narrative is because it is true. We are on the cusp of a clean-energy, healthier, safer, cleaner and fairer world. We are on the cusp of that. Millions of us around the world in different ways are moving towards it but we are not moving fast enough. One of the big impediments to moving fast enough is what we call the "fossil fuel lobby". The fossil fuel lobby is an impediment in two big ways. First, it gets subsidies to continue to provide a fuel that is harming the world, whether it is coal, oil or gas. In this country it was turf - or peat - and we are getting out of that.According to The B Team of business leaders, we spend $1.8 trillion per year on what is harming us. It is crazy. It is mainly spent on fossil fuel subsidies, bad land management, etc. We could switch even half of that to incentivising a faster move to clean energy, subsidies to farmers, incentives to people to retrofit their homes - these exist, but they are still small and not quite enough - incentives to get into electric cars or to do whatever it takes to move faster to meet the exigencies of the science. Women leaders in the climate space - that is a kind of bubble in a way - are now utterly on board with Project Dandelion. We have reached out to a lot of men, especially the B Team of business leaders and the We Mean Business Coalition, who are now beginning to wear the dandelion badge. We need to understand the wisdom of indigenous peoples worldwide who are preserving the forests and of the children and young people who are urging us to take the steps they cannot take. They know the science. They are well taught now in schools and they know how urgent what I am saying is.

There are millions of business leaders, scientists, farmers and entrepreneurs who are not connected. Meanwhile, on the other side, the other part of the fossil fuel problem is that, according to Al Gore, and I have to take his word for it as he has probably done the calculation, the fossil fuel lobby spends $4 billion per year on miscommunication, on very clever stuff. It is no longer crude. It is inclined to say that every person should be doing more. It individualises rather than looks at the baddies, the big emitters, the big companies, the big sovereign oil, gas and coal funding bodies and governments that are not moving fast enough. Let us not pay too much attention to that. Yes, we all need to do our individual bit and we are doing more. We are recycling better. That is improving, but it is not the key.

The key is to make sure we can enforce against the big emitters. Some of it can be done through court cases. There was a wonderful case in the European Court of Human Rights recently, known as the "grannies' case". I was pleased it was a grannies' case in a way. It was a clever judgment. I read it with great pride because I follow Síofra O'Leary whom I know and admire as the first woman to be president of the court. I sent her a WhatsApp message when the judgment came out. It is an interesting judgment by a court that was determined to find a solution to the three cases before it. The court lacked jurisdiction in two of them. The four grannies did not have standing before the court but the organisation of more than 8,000 elderly Swiss grannies did because between them, they had to be impacted in a negative way because Switzerland was not fulfilling its commitments. That means that probably every country in Europe now faces more litigation, including this country. If we are only at 29% of our target and we should be at 51%, I can tell you as a lawyer manquéor lawyer of the past, there are cases or litigation in that.

That is one way of changing things, but I prefer the broader sense. Can we get back the mood in communities around the country? Senators are in touch with their communities. Can we fire people up? This is everyone's problem. It is a crisis and we should be in crisis mode. We can and we must.

I will end with Nelson Mandela's words since he was the founder of The Elders, that I currently chair. He put it succinctly when he said "It always seems impossible until it is done".

Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.