The Green Party leader has urged people not to “shoot the messenger” when it comes to communicating the urgent need to stop climate change, reports RTE.
Eamonn Ryan said the weather events of recent months were “gone off the charts” and his team believed radical changes were needed but “not easy to do”.
However, he believes that the “tide will turn” for the party before the next general election, which he believes should be held in March 2025, rather than earlier.
The minister also said that his party should not be opposed to farmers, who, in his opinion, will be “frontline heroes” of a just transition towards climate neutrality.
In a speech at his party’s annual convention in Cork, Minister Ryan said the Greens are not “pointing the finger at any one sector of Irish society”.
He said: “What we get is ‘it’s you versus the farmers’ or ‘you are against this and you are against car drivers.’ That is not true. The farmers are going to be the frontline heroes of this transition,” reports RTE.
The country needs to improve its flood forecasting capabilities and better prepare for more extreme weather and heavy rainfall, Ryan said.
“We know we are going to get more intense rain systems and we have to prepared for them. We have to improve our flood prediction capabilities. We have really good prediction capability around weather now,” he said, reports RTE.
“We have really good modelling of weather systems. We need to enhance our modelling of flood systems so [we can understand] what is happening in those water levels,” he added, reports RTE.
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