It's a shame that the Green Party will be absent from the political debate on RTÉ tonight.
A High Court judge decided today that RTÉ's decision to exclude the Greens was neither unfair nor irrational under existing law, so it can stand. But that does not mean that it is a good decision. RTÉ exercised its discretion and viewers will lose out, in my opinion.
The Green Party would have brought to tonight's debate some long-term reality about THE most pressing problem facing us long-term. That's not the Special Criminal Court or even Ireland's creaking health service. It's climate change.
In a short-term general election, maybe it is too much to expect voters to think long-term. But climate change costs us already. Local rows about flood defences already show this to be the case.
And climate change will cost us a lot more. Ireland’s agribusiness is building on emission levels that are unsustainable. We look the other way at out peril.
So how will RTÉ tonight handle this most important topic? Surely not by ignoring it completely?
Will RTÉ give even the slightest nod in the direction of climate change, perhaps a brief question to those party leaders whom RTÉ is allowing in the leaders’debate? With the Green Party excluded, political parties that have shown little appetite to tackle climate change can tonight have a free run at claiming that they are up to the problem. It will be a performance, but one that resembles a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet without the prince.
Are we pretending that climate change is NOT a big issue? The World Economic Forum (WEF) last month identified the failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation as the number one global risk in terms of impact. Almost 750 experts recently surveyed by the WEF consider environment risk in practice now to have greater potential for damage than weapons of mass destruction, water crises, large-scale involuntary migration and severe energy price shock. Maybe Dáil Éireann knows better?
Just two months ago parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted in Paris an agreement that acknowledged that "climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet, and thus requires the widest possible cooperation by all countries, and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, with a view to accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions."
The overwhelming consensus of world scientific expertise now finds that the activities of mankind have resulted in a dangerous rate of global warming. Severe weather events such as recent flooding in Ireland are a significant part of current and imminent political debates. RTÉ would be remiss not to address in particular the acute conflict between environmental demands and pressure from vested interest groups.
US President Barack Obama said just last month in his State of The Union speech to the United States houses of congress, "Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it. You will be pretty lonely, because you'll be debating our military, most of America's business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it's a problem and intend to solve it. (Applause.)"
RTÉ’s coverage of environmental issues has been lacklustre at times, and in particular remiss in respect to fundamental contradictions between the present government’s commitment to international targets for greenhouse gas emission levels and what is ostensibly its policy on methane emissions domestically.
That contradiction led to considerable adverse publicity for the government in the print media in December last when An Taoiseach Enda Kenny apparently said one thing in his official speech to the Paris COP21 climate conference and another thing in remarks to journalists afterwards. Is RTÉ up to pinning him down tonight in the absence of the Green Party?
NOTE: Prof. Colum Kenny of Dublin City University swore an affidavit supporting the Green Party's application to the High Court. He is NOT a member of that party.