MacGill summer school:Significant evidence of climate change is apparent in Ireland, including fewer frosts and much heavier rainfall, one of the State's leading climate experts told the MacGill summer school.
Rainfall on Malin Head in Donegal is now nearly double the winter-time levels of the 1940s, while frosts in the Midlands are occurring only half as often, said scientist John Sweeney of the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Potatoes will require irrigation to grow in some counties within 40 years, while water supplies in the east and the southeast will be significantly threatened well before then.
Highly critical of the Government's performance, Mr Sweeney said the 2000 National Climate Strategy, drawn up by the Department of the Environment, had been "a complete failure".
Green taxes have been abandoned, while the 10 per cent fall in the number of cattle which produce methane had been "achieved by BSE, not by Government policy," he said. "The political response has been feeble," said Mr Sweeney, who was one of the scientists who contributed to the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.
"Don't believe the tabloid rubbish that you hear on Channel 4, which has raised doubts that climate change is down to humans' activities. There is an overwhelming consensus that we are driving it," he said.
Planning laws must be overhauled if the State is to attempt to meet its international obligations, he added. "Tackling this problem requires a determined assault on sprawl," he warned, adding that changes to planning laws had "failed to stop the rezoning frenzy". "The planning profession has in my opinion been demoralised by a lack of support from within and without the local authority system," he said.
The Government's decision not to subject the National Development Plan to environmental stress tests beforehand was "inexplicable", though a change may be forced by the European Union.
Local authorities are now competing for projects because of the development levies that they bring: "That is not always in the national interest," he said.
Property rights must also change: "The Constitution excessively enshrines the right of private property to the detriment of the common good. Land ownership does not imbue the right to do with it what the owner likes any more than ownership of a river bank gives the right to pollute at will.
"The Irish environment belongs to us all and we all have an interest in its stewardship, especially as taxpayers," Mr Sweeney said.
Carbon dioxide emissions have doubled since 1992, a period during which car ownership jumped from 227 cars per 1,000 people, to more than 400. Nearly 60 per cent of Dubliners drive to work, while the number of children walking to school has fallen by 80 per cent.
Labour TD Eamon Gilmore said the public has not realised the scale of the cutbacks, that start from next January. "Ireland will be required to cut its carbon emissions within the next 10 years by the equivalent of the entire current emissions from the transport sector, including every car, truck, train and plane in the country. If we don't, the cost to the taxpayer could be over €1 billion every year," he said.
The Government should set up a national forum on climate change to work out a consensus on steps to be taken until 2020 to cut carbon emissions. Ireland, he said, produces 7.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide above its Kyoto commitments and will do so annually for the next five years.