MINISTER FOR Communications and Energy Eamon Ryan has said healthcare and social welfare will be fundamentally changed by dint of next month’s emergency budget and the new economic model being worked on by the Government.
Mr Ryan said his impression was that the wider public has not fully realised as yet the full extent of the radical reforms which, he says, will have to take place in the next six months.
He contended the immediate political priorities for the Green Party had to be playing its full part in the shoring up of the State’s banking system and trying to get public finances under control.
But he said beyond that, the Greens were working quietly to ensure the model was replaced with one that prioritised the planet and sustainability.
“In Government, my sense is that the economic model in operation for the past 30 years is broken, that model of unregulated markets, lending increases, you have to have a sense of what it should be replaced with.
“Our ambition is to put this concept of sustainable development into the heart of Government thinking. I think if we can do that, we are doing well in Government. If there is a sense that we are building a new model that isn’t sustainable and isn’t fair, then that will be very difficult.
“The building block model that we had, that we could have low taxes and high services is not now tenable, so we have to make the changes to put us on a sustainable path,” he said.
Mr Ryan was speaking to The Irish Timesbefore he departed San Francisco for New York, where he is completing the second leg of his visit to the United States.
His clear impression during his visit, he said, was Barack Obama’s administration was taking climate change more seriously than his predecessor. However, added Mr Ryan, the policies seemed to be driven primarily by energy supply rather than climate change.
“I think the whole energy issue has moved to the top of everybody’s agenda. Unfortunately, I think it’s more on the energy security side than the climate change.
“The reality is that it was petrol going over $4 a gallon and the realisation across all policy departments that America is exposed and consuming 20 million barrels a day – that’s a quarter of the oil production – and has to change.
“It still has a long way to go. What we can see here is eight or 10-lane highways. It shows how exposed they are to any price rise in oil. That’s the key driving force. It will have the same effect of reducing emissions if they reduce fossil fuel use,” said Mr Ryan.
Now was a difficult time for the Greens in Government, he said: “Responsibility is about getting the country through a very difficult period.”