Eamon Ryan: Government has ‘utterly failed’ on environment

Green Party leader Eamon Ryan has accused the Government parties of having "utterly gone against a Green agenda".

Mr Ryan said he would not criticise the broad approach adopted by Fine Gael and Labour, but insisted they had “utterly failed” in the area of environmental policy and their climate change strategy lacked ambition.

He will contest the next General Election in the Dublin Bay constituency, having previously represented Dublin South.

“Labour and Fine Gael have utterly gone against a Green agenda in everything they have done…They do not have a green shred of clothes,” he said.

“And that gives me a certain place to go into this election saying if we want Ireland to be sustainable…if we think as a people we want to rise to that challenge and we can prosper from it, you will not vote Fine Gael and Labour.”

He said no TD had represented that sort of vision in the Dáil in the last number of years.

The former minister for communications, energy and natural resources, who narrowly failed to secure a European Parliament seat in last year’s elections, was a guest today on ‘Inside Politics’, The Irish Times’ political podcast.

Mr Ryan said the Coalition partners had rejected policies put in place, or “set up for them ready to go”, by the Greens when the party were in power with Fianna Fáil in the last administration.

Mr Ryan said the long-delayed Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Bill 2015, published by Government last month, had “no ambition”.

He accused the Coalition of “throwing out” a site-value tax “for no good reason” and opting for a “very unfair, just money-raising property tax”.

He said when the Greens left Government the retrofit industry was booming, with people improving and altering buildings to make them more energy efficient. “That’s halved since we left.”

Turning to the incinerator being built in Dublin, he said it would burn 600,000 tonnes of waste in the city. “That wasteful use of resources is not clever.”