The new Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael administration will be like a tanker that has to get into a tricky port but has just managed to scupper its tugboat. It is one of history’s little jokes that the incoming government will be defined above all else by the part of its identity it has sunk. It has, in Michael O’Leary’s gleeful phrase, “weeded out” the Green Party – and yet it has little choice but to go deep emerald.
A week after the election, with exquisitely bad timing, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC) coughed up a startling figure. Previously discussions of climate policy have focused on the looming threat that, to reach our binding targets for the reduction of carbon emissions, Ireland will have to purchase climate credits from other countries. According to the Climate Change Advisory Council, just before the election, “the cost of failing to meet EU targets could exceed €8 billion for the period up to 2030”.
Except this seems way too cheery. IFAC has now upped the cost to a possible €20 billion. Here’s what it says: “If Ireland fails to reduce its emissions, as it currently looks set to by a wide margin, it may have to transfer large amounts of money to neighbouring countries.” It then says that those previous estimates of what we will have to pay for these credits, bad as they are, “assume Ireland follows through on measures that it looks increasingly unlikely to implement. If these measures were not implemented then the State would be further from its climate objectives and would face much higher compliance costs, potentially as high as €20 billion.”
The State is legally obliged by 2030 to have reduced Ireland’s carbon emissions by 51 per cent compared to 2018 levels. If it serves its full term this is what the incoming government has to achieve over its lifetime. On Friday, the Climate Change Advisory Council noted bluntly that “it is increasingly unlikely that the necessary levels of reductions are being achieved to put Ireland on a pathway to climate neutrality”.
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Two things leap out at us. One is that even a government with a strong Green component was not doing nearly enough. The idea that this fringe party was making us all go too far too fast is the exact opposite of the truth. And the other is that the next government doesn’t just have to carry on with decarbonising the economy – it has to cut much deeper and move much faster.
And if not? If Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and whatever bunch of Independents support them don’t rapidly intensify the drive to end carbon and methane emissions they will be creating the second biggest fiscal disaster in the history of the State. They will, in essence, be handing over an entire year of our capital budget – the money for all that promised housing and infrastructure we so desperately need – to foreign countries that have managed to get their climate change houses in order.
Our biggest fiscal disaster was, of course, the bailout of the already dead Anglo-Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide after the crash of 2008. It cost us €37 billion. So we’re looking at the incoming government throwing away more than half that. But the difference is that this time what IFAC calls “a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money” will be predicted and knowing. It will result not from private greed and folly but from sheer political inertia.
And it will be a national humiliation. What could be more shameful than the idea that, more than a century after independence, Ireland is incapable of playing its part in tackling the greatest crisis facing humanity, and is forced, in effect, to pay other countries to keep our commitments for us?
Bear in mind, too, that this €20 billion cost may well come on top of severe reductions on corporation tax receipts if and when Donald Trump starts a trade war.
The political narrative around the climate crisis is that citizens have lost their appetite for the green menu. But the evidence suggests otherwise. The exit poll conducted on election day asked voters how they felt about the outgoing government and climate change. In response more than half said the Government has not gone far enough on climate change, while only one in five said it has gone too far.
So how come those same voters collectively ditched the Greens? Because, I would speculate, the Greens actually succeeded too well (from a party point of view) in persuading voters that the climate crisis is everybody’s problem. It is not their unique selling point any more. There’s an expectation that any government will now adopt what were once seen as partisan policies.
The related narrative – often spun by regional Independents – is that climate change is an urban issue that does not concern rural people. The Environmental Protection Agency has an online map that shows public attitudes to the climate crisis county by county. In Dublin, 85 per cent say they are worried about climate change – typical of those woke hipsters. In Mattie McGrath’s woke hipstery Tipperary it’s 82 per cent. In the Healy-Raes’ Kerry it’s 83 per cent. In Michael Fitzmaurice’s Roscommon it’s 80 per cent. There isn’t a single county in Ireland where fewer than 90 per cent of people do not believe that “climate change will harm future generations” or where fewer than 70 per cent don’t think “extreme weather will harm my community”.
And yet – who’s going to have the courage in the new government to speed up Ireland’s decarbonisation? The reason we needed the Greens in government was that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil had an abysmal record of climate inaction – at the time of the previous election in 2020, Ireland’s performance in meeting its decarbonisation commitments was ranked 39th of 57 developed countries.
And even over the last four years the big parties were happy to nod and wink that any pain involved in trying to catch up was the fault of the Greens. They can’t Greenwash the inevitable now.