Eamon Ryan

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman. On Newstalk, with Ciara.

Ciara Kelly (0:10)

Now, Eamon Ryan, the chair of the EU Housing Advisory Board and of course, former minister and former Green Party leader. Thank you indeed for coming into us today. Loads I want to talk to you about, but we start with where we're at in terms of global warming, how Ireland is doing. I don't know if you saw the Sunday Indopole yesterday, just 6% of people put it down as one of their two priority issues.

Do you worry about it going off the agenda here?

Eamon Ryan (0:37)

Oh, it is off the agenda and it's not just here.

It's everywhere and it's because political science will always trump climate science. Because the politicians, it's not that they don't understand the risks and the science, but there's an assessment, always an ongoing one. Well, can we make the decisions to do what we need to do? And there's an understanding that that's not maybe popular at the moment. And as a result, there's withdrawal. You can see it across. Like you looked last week, UK budget. You know, the Chancellor there, Healy, saying, oh, well, we will hold back in the green because it might cost us something. Like what's costing us is our dependency on fossil fuels. And you can see that across the board, including here.

And I think but it will come back because unfortunately the issue is not going away. And if anything, it's it's accelerating and the scientific warnings are getting all the starker because actually we're not making the cuts and emissions we need to make. And the consequences are coming stronger every day. So we have to work out politically across the world. And this will be at the COP negotiations in two weeks time or the week after we've got next week in Turkey, is how do we build public support and then how do we use it to affect real quick change? Because it's it's getting much more more and more scary by the day.

Ciara Kelly (2:03)

If you were in government now, and I know you've moved on from politics, but how would you have done things differently in terms of what the government has done in relation to fossil fuels and reducing tax on them and in the face of of of huge protests?

Eamon Ryan (2:16)

I tend not to want to be looking back over the government shoulder because I think, you know, former minister, you give the incumbent's time and I could literally probably list 20 things like the first week in government, the first day they killed culture nature. And I'm thinking, well, that wasn't and literally from day onwards, there's been things we would have done differently. I suppose if there's one thing I'd focus on, I was writing about this in the Irish Times week before last, I suppose what's maybe closest to my heart, it's in transport. We are really taking a different course. We're going back to the car. We're going back to car development. And we're not funding public transport. And I think that has huge consequences for housing. It has huge consequences for economy. It's not efficient. It doesn't work. It has huge consequences for environmental implications, but also just socially. Like we're stuck in traffic. And the answer again is going back to less bill, more roads. And I think that's probably the... And I think what's really frustrating is what held us up in the recent years, the last decade was the planning system, which was, they couldn't turn anything over.

But now we're getting projects through the planning system and we're not funding them. So people will know across all the cities, major cities, we spent 10 years getting ready for bus connects. You remember that scheme where we were going to put 12 corridors into Dublin. We're going to really ramp up the bus services because otherwise city won't work.

We've now got those bus corridors through planning in Dublin. That's when George and finally agreed, one or two still waiting in the courts, but they'll all get through in my mind. The same in Cork, still have to get through the planning system, but we've got political agreement or had had political agreement. Same in Galway, same in Limerick and Waterford. Now once they're finally through planning, there isn't the money for them. There's only money for three of the 12 corridors in Dublin. There's only money for one of the seven corridors in Cork.

There may be money for one of the two main corridors we need in Limerick or in Galway. The Minister, Sean Canney, is saying, well, we'll hold back on the bus corridors until we start the motorway around Galway.