Paul Murphy condemns 'appalling' government failure on biodiversity

The science here is not in doubt. We have countless reports to tell us how important biodiversity is, how threatened it is, what the consequence of a continuation of the destruction of biodiversity will be for humanity on this planet, and even what to do to protect it. The issue is not that we don't know what to do. The problem is the political will and the economic interest to do it. And the appalling lack of political will from successive Irish governments in relation to biodiversity is shown in the damning verdict of the Citizens' Assembly. In its second recommendation, it states, as a matter of fact, that the State has comprehensively failed to adequately fund, implement and enforce existing national legislation, national policies, EU biodiversity-related laws and directives related to biodiversity. That is why a third of Irish species are threatened with extinction. That is why 85% of our supposedly protected habitats have bad or inadequate status. Unfortunately, that lack of political will shows very little signs of changing under this or under potential future governments. Only this week in the European Parliament, NEPs from both Fine Gael and Sinn Féin voted against the crucial nature restoration law. They could have fought for a massive long-term nature restoration fund that would guarantee a comfortable standard of living for small farmers to become custodians and restorers of biodiversity and farm in ecologically sustainable ways. Instead, they caved, like they always do, to big business, big farmer lobbying from the IFA and the agri-food industry and voted to sacrifice biodiversity completely on the altar of profit. And the Green Party in government has been ineffectual in countering this. Thank you. Under Eamon Ryan's neoliberal managerialism, we get shed loads of plans, of targets and strategies, but zero actual action whenever it comes into conflict with capitalism, which is all the time. It was revealing that the only government speaker not from the Green Party so far, Deputy Brewton, his main point was to say we cannot be adopting targets that are unrealistic. So not to recognise that the science sets the targets, we have to drive to the targets and actually achieve them, he says ditch the targets. The only force that can stop this never-ending doom loop is an active mass environmental and eco-socialist movement that actually challenges ecocidal capitalism.