Paul Murphy slams guillotine on Climate Action Bill debate

Yeah, I just want to make two points. One is I think that it is scandalous that the government is putting a guillotine on this, the most important, or what should be, the most important piece of legislation that we will pass in this Dáil, and that we're not getting sufficient time to debate the issues, because the government doesn't want, and the Green Party in particular, doesn't want to deal with the fact of the inadequacies of the Climate Action Bill. I heard someone, I was listening to the debate earlier, and someone made the point that, you know, we all want to see the targets implemented and so on, but, you know, a very, very fundamental point, which is that the government's own targets set out in the bill do not match with the science. They're less than even the EU targets, which also don't match with the science. So, you know, we're not doing what the science demands here, and we're going to be in a worse position as a consequence of it. But the main point I want to make is in relation to this point about just transition, which is obviously effectively missing in terms of an absence of a decent definition and so on, effectively missing from the bill. And I think that there is, there's a very good parallel with the treatment of workers in the airline industry due to COVID measures, and the needs in terms of a just transition and moving away from a fossil fuel based economy. Because it is remarkable that the government likes to say that any time there's criticism about the way that airline workers are being treated, the government turns around to the opposition, and they say, no, no, you're responsible for this. Sure, it's the people over here that were calling for mandatory hotel quarantine. You're the ones that have shuttered the airline industry. Of course you're responsible. And there doesn't seem to be any acceptance or even kind of logical acknowledgement that one can be both for necessary public health measures, including mandatory hotel quarantine, to deal with the issues in terms of COVID, COVID, and simultaneously say, workers should not pay the price for that. To say that workers should not pay the price for doing what we need to do in terms of COVID, in terms of public health, etc. Those two positions are absolutely compatible. Then you get to a question of who should pay for that. And of course, we're clear in terms of the big polluting companies that should pay. And the government's response in terms of the airline crisis gives us real cause for concern in terms of what approach they're going to take in terms of climate. Because similarly, certain industries, certain industries are going to disappear completely. Other industries are going to be wound down. So, you know, being blunt, in a future zero-carbon society in Ireland, we will not have any or have extremely few internal flights. That's the truth. And we should instead, and we need to invest in building a proper rail network at high speed that people can get around the country. But that is not a call for any airline workers to lose their jobs, to lose their wages, to lose their pension benefits, to lose their working conditions. Not at all. That's the point in terms of a just transition. A just transition says that those workers whose jobs become less, or whose jobs no longer exist as a result of the zero-carbon economy that we absolutely need to be, because there's no jobs on a dead planet, that those workers will not pay the price for that. And that can be done. That can be done 100%. We're talking about the construction, the creation of huge numbers of green jobs. Hundreds of thousands of green jobs have to be created in our economy. You can have retraining for people, and you can have an absolute guarantee for people that no jobs will be lost, no income will be lost, etc. But the way the government approaches the issue of aviation in relation to COVID gives you every indication that they're not going to do that. Instead, when it comes to the Bord and the Mona workers or other groups of workers that are affected by doing what is necessary to do in terms of climate change, the government is instead going to turn around to the opposition and say, well, these are the people who are calling for climate action. And that's why, unfortunately, people are losing jobs. We don't accept that. We don't accept that at all. And that is just giving a gift to the reactionaries in this Dáil and around the country, some of whom exist, who deny climate change, and will attempt to say, you know, climate action is going to destroy people's lives, therefore you have to be opposed to climate action. And, you know, the exact alternative approach is needed, encapsulated in the notion of an eco-socialist Green New Deal, which transforms people's lives for the better at the same time as rapidly moving to a just, to a zero-carbon economy. And that not just can be done, but if we are to successfully and rapidly move at the scale and the speed that we need to move, it absolutely has to be done, because without mobilising people behind the demand to build zero-carbon housing on a massive scale, behind the demand of providing free, quality public transport for all, behind the demand for a four-day week without loss of pay, behind the demand for sustainable agriculture, if we don't mobilise people behind those demands that will transform their lives for the better, well, then we cannot possibly overcome the opposition, which is a very substantial and very vested interest in terms of fossil fuel companies, car companies, and all the rest, the aviation industry, big agricultural companies, all of those which will simply refuse to do what is necessary. So that's why, you know, this isn't some kind of highfalutin debate about how do you define just transition, etc. It gets to the centre of whether we're going to actually be able to do what the science demands that we do, which requires the kind of programme that transforms people's lives for the better. Thanks.