John Gibbons

speaker

1,007 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2d ago

John Gibbons’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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The Last Word with Matt Cooper · The Last Word On The Environment: The Climate Act · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

You know, so if we need to make critical decisions, like, for example, you know, let's take an infrastructural decision that we have to upgrade transport, say, between two cities.

And we have to decide, do we build a motorway or do we build a high-speed rail line?

They're the kind of decisions that having cognizance of Section 15 of the 2021 Climate Act nudges that in favour of the rapid public transport versus building yet more roads.

But what this government has decided to do is simply to set aside the legislation.

And I must stress this, Frank, the people who are doing this are the same people who trooped across the aisle in 2021 in the Dáil, which passed this, by the way, by an overwhelming majority.

including Micheál Martin, Simon Harris and Jack Chambers.

And I think it's important to say that no country has ever lowered its carbon footprint by exempting its biggest polluters.

And the plan here essentially is a carte blanche for projects that the government thinks, well, ah yeah, we'll push ahead with.

Now, who's to decide what they say is critical infrastructure?

What you'll find next, Frank, is they're going to start telling us that data centres are critical infrastructure, so we're not running them past the Climate Act either.

This is an absolute abject abdication of their responsibility to act with both as a government in Ireland, Frank, but also within our obligations as an EU state.

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things to say.

Number one, this is a great news story.

We've reached, Frank, an inflection point in Ireland where we've now got around 150,000 new EVs on the road in total as of July 2026.

26% of new sales in the last measurement period were full battery EVs, because that's what we need.

Not hybrids, not self-charging, but full battery EVs.

That's the transition that we need to do to get our, well, to clean up our transport, to get our emissions down.

And also, of course, to have our fleet powered mostly by domestic energy.

The great thing here is that 100% of every drop of petrol and diesel burned in any vehicle in Ireland is imported from all kinds of places, most of whom we'd rather not be doing business with.

So moving our fleet away, which of course is a huge source of emissions and fuel consumption, is a vital step.

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