The Government’s budget preparations should have taken place on Achill Island in place of the Mayo International Kite Festival held there every summer. The tag line for the festival is “The Sky’s the Limit” – also a fitting summary of the exhaustive number of notions and promises flown by the masters of our economic wellbeing.
Peering beyond the kites, however, brings clarity about one thing: there is not nearly enough political seriousness about climate change in this country.
Tánaiste Simon Harris rightly takes to task those who demand the scrapping of the carbon tax, but in the same breath he says in relation to that levy, “there is flexibility for the Government to do something there if they wish to … we need to consider that in the round”.
This has become a mantra in the annual sky’s-the-limit budget festival. But what “in the round” translates to in relation to climate change mitigation is speaking out of two sides of the mouth.
This is a well-established art. In 2018, Leo Varadkar, then taoiseach, admitted he was “not proud” of Ireland’s record in tackling climate change; later the same year he wondered, after his government shirked the issue of a carbon tax in the budget, if it was “the appropriate time” to focus on this tax given Brexit, worries about general price increases, the fear that such a tax would have “totally wiped out” the tax cuts in the budget and because we were “heading into winter”.
We’ll be heading into winter every year, and they will be stormier. An ambitious and radical climate-change agenda is considered by constituency-focused politicians as something that will “decimate rural Ireland”, to use a phrase frequently uttered in the last few years, including by those mooting fuel price protests.
There is no denying the hardship generated by the energy price hikes, but it is continued reliance on fossil fuels and stalling of climate action that will do the most damage to rural Ireland.
Many working the land are well aware of this; we witness much coverage of the high-octane rhetoric from the self-appointed guardians of tradition, but not as much coverage of those in rural Ireland who have long recognised the ominous signs that stalk their land and do their best to adapt their own practices and change their methods. Those who shout loudest and abuse our Tricolour flag are not always the most representative.
It will cost billions of euro to sustain the determination to continue the doomed attempt to suppress petrol and diesel prices.
Minister for Transport and Energy Darragh O’Brien was keen to insist in April that “the €750 million total package that we brought in is one of the most significant in all of Europe”, a boast repeated by Taoiseach Micheál Martin.
Intervention has since been extended to spend public money on fossil fuels at a time when Ireland is lagging way behind the European Union goal to cut emissions by 55 per cent by 2030.
The money could be spent instead on introducing free public transport, making retrofitting more affordable and aggressively tackling woefully inadequate electric vehicle infrastructure, but such is the short-termism of our political culture that we get hugely expensive and misplaced sticking plasters.
“We’re not going to hit our 2030 target, but that does not reduce our ambition in that regard,” said O’Brien, who this week left the door open to continuance of fuel subsidies via excise cuts.
This prevarication and blinkered vision will come to haunt the Government very soon because of the inevitability of extreme weather events; what Peter Thorne, the climatologist and chair of the adaptation committee of the Climate Change Advisory Council (CCAC), has described as “weather whiplash, where we go from one extreme to another – flood to drought, storm to heatwave”.
The latest annual review by the CCAC is unfailingly polite but firm: “Ireland’s climate adaptation planning does not match the scale and urgency of increasing climate risks … The continued absence of the proposed Extreme Weather Event Assistance Scheme – a commitment in the 2025 Programme for Government – is a critical gap in immediate recovery and ‘build back better’ support for citizens and businesses”.
Furthermore, it highlights that 30 of the 54 major flood relief schemes identified in 2018 by a national flood risk assessment remain at the stage of preliminary design, which is only the “first stage of a five-stage delivery process. This is particularly significant given that completing flood relief schemes takes an average of 11 years”.
And if that is not enough, the report also reminds us that in the last six years, 288 flood prone sites have been proposed for rezoning by councillors, an indication, Thorne says, of “utter madness”.
Climatologists, at least, are not in the business of speaking out of both sides of their mouths.