Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the ex-President Mary Robinson for coming here today. She has been a hero of mine since I was about 11. I remember the story of the contraception train coming down from the North. That was the first time I heard about her and I was completely blown away that she, Nell McCafferty and some other great women were brave enough at that time. Even now, it is still a challenge for a woman to stand up in a patriarchy to fight for things. We do not like to have to deal with menopause, breastfeeding or periods. We are still treating sanitary products as a luxury item. We have huge issues. It really blew me away to see those women 53 years ago going to the North and bringing down contraception to try to give women some ownership of their bodies again instead of constantly getting pregnant because there was no contraception available here.

It also showed me that women could smash glass ceilings. I did not really have any experience of that in my life and on the media. I just did not see it until they smashed that glass ceiling into smithereens. I really thank her for that. It gave me the impetus to run for election in a very rural area in north Clare where we had never elected a woman, not to mention a Green Party woman. When I was elected in 2019, I was proud but also embarrassed that it took that long to get a woman elected in north Clare, but we did it.

I thank Mrs. Robinson. She has played a huge part in my personal life. I want to ask her for advice. I now see that the climate and nature thing is being used as a political football. There is much disingenuous narrative; it does not make any difference whom it is from. If people were genuinely concerned about climate, the destruction of nature and the very future of our existence in this country, we would not use it as a political football. We would all have it in our manifestoes. We would all be discussing it in the Seanad every day. We would all be putting it in for budgets. Instead of what has been achieved in the last four years with 100 houses a day putting up solar panels and 1,000 houses a week getting retrofitted, we see lots of criticism that it is not enough and should have been more. If the people who are saying that had been fighting with us to get funding to do those things many years ago, we would not be in the situation we are in now.

That rhetoric deeply saddens me. We are at a crisis point and people are using it as a political football. The narrative across the country is that even though I am from a farm, I hate rural Ireland, I hate farmers, I am evil and I want to make everybody poor and suffer for the rest of their lives in cold houses. We saw that narrative in the local elections from candidates from rural areas. It is deeply saddening that it was used as a political football. As a result, we have fewer people who care about nature and climate in our local authorities. Unfortunately, many of our local authorities are still stuck in the 1980s. We are doing our people a disservice.

Many rural Independents go on about putting out the Child of Prague. We are still having that as a joke in 2024 when we saw what happened in Midleton. They all agree that it was as a direct result of climate change. It could happen in Ennis, Enniscorthy or Dublin, but it does not seem to be hitting home because instead of the green agenda being seen as a solution, it is seen as a problem. That is my big concern and that is why I wanted Mrs. Robinson in here today. How do we get people who are decision makers, whether it is local authorities, people in this House or people in the Dáil, to realise that this is no longer a game? It is too important to use as a political football to try to destroy the green voices of those who have been genuine about this for 30 years. It is affecting our children, our homes, our food and our land. All my neighbours are losing land every year to flooding. It is affecting our crops.

People will say, "It's all the fault of China and India. Sure, how can we make a difference?". That is irrelevant now. The reality of climate change is that it is affecting us on a daily basis. My big concern is that we are not taking it seriously. We see it as a thing to give the Green Party grief. I am in the Green Party so I will stand up for it. What we have done in the last four years is phenomenal but we have got such slagging. I think everybody would agree that we are the most vilified party. We are getting it from the extreme left and the extreme right, as well as from our coalition partners. They say there should be more offshore wind, more retrofitting and more solar. However, none of these parties was asking for any of this before the last general election; it was not in their manifestoes.

We got €1 million a day for active walking and cycling. There is war over that because people want to build more motorways. It is very tricky. It is not because I am in the Green Party; it is because I deeply care about nature and climate. That is the only reason I am in politics. Politics stinks. I am only here because we need to get stuff done because we are in a climate and nature emergency. We will have nothing left. One woman asked me recently how she could find a hedgehog to show her daughter. I grew up seeing hedgehogs everywhere. Now people just want to see badgers dead. We have completely lost connection with the fact that we are part of nature, we live in nature.

We need to stop blaming the Chinese and the Indians because the chickens have come home to roost. It is affecting us every day and it affects farmers. This thing about the farmers drives me mad. The small farmer is not causing any of the problems; it is the big farmer. We are not augmenting methane because it means I hate farmers. However, 90% of the methane is coming from about 5% of farmers who are rich and loaded. Yet, we hear the poor farmers are really poor and it is not fair that the Greens hate them.We have to have an intelligent debate about this. It is too late to be using this as a political football or having low-brow, unintelligent debate attacking the only party that has ever cared. I really want to hit home how climate is affecting Ireland. It is irrelevant whose fault it is at this stage. The question is what we can do and how we have to take it seriously.