Speaking at Order of Business today in the Seanad Green Party Senator Pauline O’Reilly raised an issue that has been coming up on the doorsteps in Dublin Bay South and which was highlighted also by Dublin Cycling Campaign.
O’Reilly said “Dublin Cycling Campaign, over the last day, have highlighted the fact that in the constituency, where we’ve all have been pounding the pavements, in Dublin Bay South, significant portions of that constituency are set to be below the annual flood level by 2030. I’m talking the Aviva Stadium, I’m talking Trinity College. I’m talking the whole of Sandymount. And yet it’s simply not coming up in the media”.
She continued “this is the most important issue of our time. It means that we need radical action. We need to ensure that we put into place, that funding, of one million a day on cycling and walking that is committed in the Programme for Government, and we are starting to do that. It is really important that we don’t bury our heads in the sand. We hear about that small town in Canada, Lytton, where temperatures have actually reached 50 degrees Celsius. There are 250 people in that town, and each person matters, but we are actually talking about hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people across this globe that are set to be impacted over the next few decades and we have to play our part.
“The Climate Action Bill passed Committee stage yesterday, but that Bill has gone through almost a year of pre-legislative scrutiny at Committee and by government, not to mind decades of action by environmentalists and children, who last weekend were standing outside Leinster House again. It is time to move on with these things”.
O’Reilly concluded “we absolutely have to take on board amendments and in fact the Green Senators had our own amendment accepted, which was to promote not just climate justice, which is an international standard, but also a just transition for the people of Ireland. But we also need to think about the intergenerational impact of us doing nothing. We need to protect workers. We also need to get on with doing the action that will protect our children and our children’s children”.