Eamon Ryan

Yeah, I write in the Irish Times every second week on climate issues.

And I think there's a really big and important story that kind of went under the radar because it was a vote in the Dáil last week on the critical infrastructure bill.

And that's a bill which is designed, in my mind, the primary purpose is to make sure that no project is delayed because of climate ambition, no big infrastructure project that the government might want to fund.

And I think it's particularly about roads projects.

The government want to build back, building bigger, more roads.

And that's not sustainable on a climate basis.

And they wanted to remove the legal impediment that might stop them doing that.

Now, it wasn't just, sorry, the vote, though, what kind of shocked me in a way, the vote was 132 in favour and only 15 against.

And that shocked me for a couple of reasons.

First, the opposition parties you would have thought would have been protecting climate interests, the likes of the Social Democrats voted for it.

But also it kind of shocked me because, in a sense, it was the exact opposite of the vote that we'd had four years ago to support the climate law.

So four years ago, it was exactly the opposite.

It was 125, I think, to 11.

And this time it flipped the other way, 132 to 15, in what could only be seen, in my mind,

as an attempt to undermine the climate law that we put in place four years ago.

Yeah, and I think there is an underlying, understandable frustration that it's so slow and so expensive to build things in our country.

So perhaps that explains it.

It came in under the guise of, oh, this is just about speeding up our planning system.

But we've just introduced two years ago a law that was designed to do that.

And Minister Jack Chambers, who introduced the bill in his contribution to the date, was clear.