Urgent need to reevaluate our priorities - A new damning report on nature
In a month’s time, the result of the referendum on the Eighth Amendment will be known. Irrespective of how we vote, great energy will have been expended. Social division — our secularism-versus-religion culture war — will have been sharpened in a dangerous, polarising way.
Battle lines will settle into the immovability of the two steps forward, one step backward trench warfare that epitomised the western front during World War I. The process will show democracy at its best and at its worst. It will show social campaigning at its most passionate and most cynical. The issues are fundamental, but they are not the only issues that can be so described — even if the Eighth is fought over, by both sides, with a unique and one-eyed passion.
There are many reasons for this, and not all of them attractive, but they raise obvious questions. Why are we not as viscerally moved by other issues at least as important? Homelessness, a crisis fathered by eye-off-the-ball governments and an utterly cold, calculating market, is one.
Our ever-wobbling health service is another, but one accelerating crisis stands head and shoulders above all of these, though it languishes half-ignored on the edge of our consciousness. It is not adequately addressed by government policy, nor, more importantly, by delivery. French President Emmanuel Macron highlighted it in an unprecedented way this week when he attacked US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the superpower (like Ireland a country with a disproportionately large carbon footprint) from the Paris Agreement.
“I do think it is an actual mistake, both for the United States and for the planet,” Macron said, speaking in English at the Élysée Palace. He left no doubt: “Wherever we live, whoever we are, we all share ... responsibility to make our planet great again.”
And another in a long line of damning reports on how we abuse our environment was published yesterday. It showed, on a more intimate level, what can only be described as a kind of mass denial of how very destructive our impact on the world around us has become, and how that destruction will inevitably change everything. We demand and celebrate derogations from obligations designed to safeguard the future, while the biodiversity we depend on is under relentless siege.
Scorecard, a Europe-wide collective of environmentalists, highlighted Ireland’s failure to protect our natural heritage, habitats, and species. The report accused us of not fully implementing European directives to protect a growing number of threatened species.
In a depressingly familiar and lengthy charge sheet, the report pointed out that 45 management plans were drawn up some years ago, but have not been implemented. Significantly, it recognised a malaise afflicting every area of Irish life. It warned that the National Parks and Wildlife Service is “chronically underfunded” and does not have the staff needed to discharge its obligations. That these accusations can be made decades after climate change was confirmed can only be an indication of one thing — and it’s not something we can be proud of. Let’s quickly try to look outside our bubble, before it is too late.
