Irish Cycling Campaign was well represented at the Climate and Environment hustings held earlier today (Wed 20 November) at the Royal Irish Academy on Dawson Street in Dublin. Dr. Mike McKillen, Colm Ryder and Dr. Damien Ó Tuama attended wearing ICC hats.
The event was hosted by DCU’s Centre for Climate and Society, Friends of the Earth Ireland and Stop Climate Chaos (of which Irish Cycling Campaign is a member). The debate was moderated by Pat Leahy, Political Editor of The Irish Times.
Seven parties were represented:
- The Labour Party, by their Leader Deputy Ivana Bacik
- Sinn Féin, by Deputy Darren O’Rourke
- Green Party, by Senator Pippa Hackett
- Fine Gael, by Deputy Hildegarde Naughton
- People Before Profit-Solidarity, by Deputy Paul Murphy
- Fianna Fáíl, by Deputy Thomas Byrne
- Social Democrats, by Jennifer Whitmore
There was some reference to transport in the contributions, but not a huge amount. Both Ivana Bacik and Darren O’Rourke referred respectively to The Labour Party’s and Sinn Féin’s commitments to public transport, while Pippa Hackett referred to the current Programme for Government’s commitment of the spend ratio of 2:1 for public transport projects versus new roads. Deputy Naughton mentioned her own role in initiating the current Safe Routes to Schools projects. Much of the debate centred on retrofitting, carbon taxes, the Nature Restoration Law, data centres and LNG (Liquefied natural gas).
A YouTube recording of the event can be viewed here:
Irish Cycling Campaign is currently examining all the parties’ manifestos with a view to producing an analysis over the coming days. We will be reporting on this on the Irish Cycling Campaign website here. Watch this space.
In short though, we know that Ireland is still not on track to stay within our national carbon budgets or our EU commitments for 2030. All of the political parties will need to radically up their games if we are to rapidly reduce emission from transport.
