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MINISTER FOR CLIMATE and Transport Eamon Ryan today warned that the world is verging closer to climate tipping points and irreversible damage to the earth’s ecosystem, he stressed however that a different pathway is still possible.
“What’s happening to our climate is truly terrifying. If you listen to the best scientists, temperatures have leapt in the last year, jumped beyond anything that the scientists previously expected or modelled,” Ryan said today.
He added, however, that climate action works and said while Ireland has previously been a laggard when it comes to emission reduction, that is starting to change.
Ryan was speaking at the Mansion House in Dublin for the launch of the city’s Climate Action Week which runs from today until Sunday 15 September.
The launch was hosted by Dublin’s Lord Mayor James Geoghegan and included presentations from a number of representatives from different community groups who have received government grants for sustainability projects.
Among them were community volunteers working to improve awareness and knowledge of natural garden design, a GAA club which has saved over 1m litres of water by switching to dry urinals and a repair cafe looking to expand their services right across Dublin by empowering people to mend broken items on their own.
Speaking today, Donal O’Laoire from the Kingfisher Project, appealed for volunteers to take part in a project to make the gardens (and balconies and windowsills) of Ireland more eco-friendly.
The Kingfisher Project began in 2022 as an effort to transform what was a waste ground on the river Poddle at Kimmage but has now expanded to become a community education facility to reconnect people with the natural environment.
O’Laoire made the point that the 2m domestic gardens in Irish cities and towns make up 28% of the urban land. This equates to 205 Phoenix Parks.
Through the group’s pilot ‘Pixel Gardens’ initiative, they are on a mission to transform gardens and outdoor spaces into areas of climate action, biodiversity and food security.
“We’re trying to demonstrate a replicable and scalable urban transformation process,” O’Laoire said.
The group is currently seeking 100 volunteers to take part in the project which aims to transform outdoor space into living spaces for nature.
“The most important thing for us is to maintain and reconnect with the common knowledge of how to grow stuff, how to relate to the environment, know the limitations of the environment, and through that moderate our attitudes and our behaviour.
“We’re talking about window boxes. We’re talking about containers. We’re talking about front gardens, back gardens, laneways, we’re talking about communal areas, a whole sort of plethora of different types of areas that we want to capitalise on,” O’Laoire said.
Also speaking at the event was Neil Barrett from Naomh Olaf GAA club in Sandyford, who outlined how the club has been using government funding to go green.
The club has installed solar panels, planted ‘mini forests’ around its grounds with almost 2,000 trees, introduced composting, placed beehives on its roof, and even switched all its urinals to dry urinals to save water, with plans to introduce similar changes in its ladies rooms too.
Barrett appealed to other GAA clubs to engage with each other and use the knowledge of their members to introduce similar changes.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Roe from Tog Hackerspace, a shared workshop in the centre of Dublin that runs a repair cafe, spoke about how his organisation has used government funding to develop ‘repair cafes in a box’.
Repair cafes offer a space, run by volunteers, where people can bring broken household items to be mended and fixed.
The ‘repair cafe in a box’ model allows community groups to set up their own repair cafes by equipping them with the necessary tools free of charge.
All of these projects were funded by the Community Climate Action Programme (CCAP) and supported by local authorities. €26m in funding was been made available for the first phase of the CCAP, with Dublin local authorities receiving nearly €5m.
The core aim of the CCAP is to reduce the use of fossil fuels while also building climate resilience.
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So democracy in Ireland is now having the same party in power and opposition at the same time.
@james rowan: Independent TDs aren’t the same as Independent Ireland (the party)….. It’s literally in the title. So the same party are not in govt and in the opposition
Opposition should automatically be part of government. No elections needed!
@james rowan: I think you’ll find that the independents are not a party…
@smatrix mantra: I truly hope that the real opposition go to the courts to overturn this undemocratic scenario that has been thrust upon the electorate who have been fooled yet again by Fianna Fail.
I’d love it if the Gardai properly investigated Michael Lowry, because there is evidence out there proving he took a bung from Dobrien. It disgusts me that a crook has so much power over his peers in FF & FG.
@Steve McGarrett: That’s right they are FFG Proxies
@james rowan: Independents isn’t a political party. It’s literally in the name. They are independent TDs and not affiliated!….. So if the INDEPENDENT TDs aren’t part of a political party how are the same parties in govt and the opposition!?!?!?
@Frank Cauldhame: It is in the rules. They are rat cute and they won’t have made an error like that.
Fine Gael only came 3rd in the General Election
@Kevin O Brien: Cool. Thanks.
@Kevin O Brien: So what? SF came 2nd. The majority of voted ABSF so no government places for SF.
@Kevin O Brien: your point?
@Vincent Alexander: Complete claptrap.. by that logic the majority voted ABFF and ABFG .. or every other political party in the country. Mind your back ya auld codger.. you’ll do damage with all that contorting you’re doing.
@Kevin O Brien: And?
Get in extra vaseline and lube folks, cos the next 5 years are gonna be as painful for many as the last was, only this time with a severe chance of a recession hanging over the country head, only this time we cant tell people to leave cos they are a burden etc due to ya know the whole immigration for profit scam thats been happening. Gonna be fun to watch FFG and the independents trying to get along when things go wrong or off script
@Patrick Newell: never try and predict anything, especially the future. Know all.
@Patrick Newell: country doing fantastic. I was on a plane to Lanzarote, one of five yesterday, packed with old age pensioners and families off for a holiday, out last night, only accents you hear are Irish
@Dave f Doe: he also ran for president. Ha ha. How did that work out.
What drives me crazy is the people who say “ahhhhh why don’t you get out and vote if you want change”
What a load of bollox.
i did vote
Nothing has changed.
@reg morrisey: don’t vote again. It’s simple.
Every one of them including Fianna Fail & the Independents, are money grabbing parasites, only interested in what they can get from the public purse. Public Service in this country is no longer about serving the people and is more about feathering their own nests.
@The Firestarter: increasing their super inflated wages , appointing their friends and family members to the made up positions and posts to waste hard earned tax payers money without a single though of making peoples lifes easier.
Parasites is indeed a term you should describe them.
@The Firestarter: leave so if you actually believe your own BS
FFG with their combined pluracy telling the country that that they own the place and they always have. The reality is that they’ve built a Titanic and all they’ve done is left Cobh.
@Louis Jacob: *plurality even… lol.
Puke party
@N D K: sinn fein?
@Philip Kennedy: sinn fein never squandered our money or caused our youth to immigrate by the thousands because of the cost of them trying to begin there lives here, sinn fein never agreed to give an own door house to the world upon arrival here, plus a million more reasons I could give you, but you know yourself already
Knife found in kitchen drawer
Another week and more of this “Programme For Government” nonsense, our politicians and media love this “Programme For Government” thingy after every election as if it means something or for that matter implemented, another favourite word of theirs and the media is “Context” neither can compete a sentence without including it a least once or twice.
Dirty deeds and they’re done dirt cheap.
Oh great! But did the other side of their arse not already agree to that? More of the same…… chancers!
Good to see there will be stable Government for the next five years.
@Johnny Wilson: won’t last 6 months
@Johnny Wilson: FFG and the independents sticking it out for 5 years?? Ya ill take ur stable bet and say if this lasts 18 months before something big happens and the independents turn on FFG or vice versa id be shocked.
@Alan Moloney: another soothsayer.
So many here were doing cartwheels celebrating when the Greens lost, now they’re complaining bitterly that their favourite facist party aren’t in charge. Clear indication that the right think the only votes that count are theirs
@FoxyBoiiYT: Muh fascism… YAWN!
@Chop Chop: Yep. Fascists are truly tiresome.
Of course they did. Hardly going to turn down all the pay rises.
Well of course they were going to. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are identical parties with identical policies and they might as well merge at this point. It’s so annoying that no good options ever pop up for the Irish people in the general elections that are held and the cosmopolitan progressive establishment takes change once again for the next five years. I’m so disappointed in our country that we keep enabling the same failed tax and spend policies that continually fail and drive up our national debt every year.
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