No, it is not.

It is €10 million additional to the €1.2 billion we are providing to every household through this winter period, which the ESRI stated and showed protects the most vulnerable. That is what we are doing.

On behalf of the Green Party I would like to join the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste in expressing our sympathies to all three generations of the Aylward family. I remember Bobby first from the 2007 election, when he replaced his brother and joined this House. In that time we would not have had day-to-day dealings. With myself as the Deputy for Dublin Bay South and he as the Deputy for Carlow-Kilkenny, we did not have immediate interactions over the course of the time of that Government, which went through a fairly ard…

It is hard to switch from one subject to another. We have been speaking about Bobby Aylward and what people said is on my mind. That description of him as a republican stuck with me and I cannot stop thinking about it. I was watching the Civil War television programme last night on RTÉ. I do not know if anybody else saw it but it stuck out that people who were the best of friends were fighting one another. They were on the same side one week and were at odds the next week. Many parties in this House have roots in t…

Good morning, a Chathaoirligh. I am pleased to be back in the Seanad and to share some reflections the 27th meeting of the Conference of the Parties, COP, on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC. The conference was established in the early 1990s in recognition of the existential challenge of our time, namely, how to avoid the world switching from a stable environment that has allowed the development of civilisation over the past 10,000 years to one that would be chaotic and destructive …

That was the European Union's position. As we went into the second week and closing stages of the COP, there were a series of frantic negotiations where we listened to various countries. I credit the representatives of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union, who were leading the EU team, with making the right call. I was involved, along with Vice-President Frans Timmermans and others, in making the call that the countries most in need due to the loss and damage were correctly insisting that there…

I thank Senators for their contributions. Many points were made. I thought about Senator Chambers's granny and every granny. Senator Murphy spoke about farmers in Roscommon. This is now a matter for everyone. The vast majority of Irish people want to play their part. We are all worried about getting to the end of the week rather than what might happen at the end of the world, but people are increasingly aware that this is an existential threat, as was said at the start. As Senator O'Reilly said, they want to play t…

President von der Leyen, go raibh maith agat for your leadership during the Covid pandemic. Danke schön for your strength in our response to the war in Ukraine. Merci beaucoup for standing up for the Good Friday Agreement and the Irish protocol. On behalf of the European Green Party, I thank you for putting the European Green Deal at the centre of the whole economic strategy and social strategy for our Union at this critical time. We know it is the right strategy because Europe is at risk. We could end up with a si…

President von der Leyen, go raibh maith agat for your leadership during the Covid pandemic. Danke schön for your strength in our response to the war in Ukraine. Merci beaucoup for standing up for the Good Friday Agreement and the Irish protocol. On behalf of the European Green Party, I thank you for putting the European Green Deal at the centre of the whole economic strategy and social strategy for our Union at this critical time. We know it is the right strategy because Europe is at risk. We could end up with a si…

I thank all Deputies who contributed to the debate. I will start by reflecting some of the stories that were told at COP about the climate change happening in the world this year. It was heartrending to listen to the Pakistani Minister for the environment make the case that her country was destroyed this year and is still suffering from the scale of that damage, with some 35 million people displaced. Interestingly, she said that every single person in Pakistan is now fixated on what is happening to their climate be…

It was the Irish civil servants negotiating on behalf of the EU, the Irish civil servants, the top legal advisers within the EU, those Irish civil servants who have incredible expertise and knowledge, particularly in the issue of loss and damage. We are good at this as a country in terms of how we help the poorest. We do not have a colonial legacy; we have a tradition that goes right back to the missions, followed up by Trócaire, Concern, Goal and other agencies and followed up by what our Department of Foreign Aff…

To those who say that Irish civil servants should not take their place in the centre of global negotiations, I disagree completely. I commend them on their work and their public service-----

-----that reflects well on our country.

It is better for the world that we engage.

In the closing hours of those negotiations there were a number of things we stood up for and delivered. The most important, to my mind, was a change in the text, which, in the middle of the Friday night, took out the wording about protecting the most vulnerable. It was Irish civil servants and our negotiating team that put that back into the centre of the negotiations, recognising that the existing tranche of climate finance does not go to the poorest, by and large. The vast majority goes elsewhere. We stood up bec…

We should recognise that that change, namely, those words about the particularly vulnerable countries being put back in, which was put back in by the Irish team in the negotiations representing the European Union, was a significant development that we can and should be proud of and I want to commend them.

I agree with all those other Deputies-----

If I can I conclude, to all those who said we needed to get a better deal on mitigation, yes, we held the line so that it did not retreat from Glasgow but we did not advance. There is increasingly clear understanding, however, that this is the direction we are going. I agree that this is about delivery. Well, we have delivered in government in the past few weeks. We have delivered a completely new forestry programme that will be good for rural Ireland, good for the countryside as well as good for climate. On Monday…

We delivered last Friday with a new interconnector to France, which will help us go low carbon and bring down the cost of electricity. We are delivering now every day-----

-----and we are focused on that to live up to the promise we made to the poorest people in the world: we will not let it burn.