Ireland’s emissions ‘peaked several years ago’, says Ryan

By Gráinne Ní Aodha, PA

Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan has said he believes Ireland’s emissions peaked years ago but that they now needed to “descend like a downhill skier”.

The Green Party leader mentioned end-of-year figures on how Ireland had made progress to meet its climate action goals, including on retrofitting homes, 20 new rural bus routes during December and moving to renewable energy.

“The advantage we have is the things we’re doing are going to be good for the economy in my mind, like switching to renewables rather than relying on imported, expensive fossil fuels is good for you. That’s not a hardship posting, that’s something we want to do,” Mr Ryan said.

With the #GreensInGovernment, rural public transport is taking off across Ireland.

🟢20 new rural bus services launched in December alone.
🟢2.3 million kilometres added to the public transport network.
🟢Over 60 new services added over the full year. pic.twitter.com/OTmYsnowuH

— Green Party Ireland (@greenparty_ie) December 19, 2023

He said that he did expect “a reduction in the herd size this year”, mainly in the beef suckler area.

“It’s not a huge reduction, but there is a reduction,” Mr Ryan said.

He said there were “challenges” in implementing transport projects due to the “acute issue” of planning system resources and delays.

But he added that the public transport numbers were 15 per cent above pre-pandemic figures and said he did not believe there were many similar rises elsewhere in Europe.

He said that Ireland was “smashing” its retrofitting target of 37,000, and had gone over 46,000 households this year.

“That’s an incredible success story of Irish householders taking up the grants that we’ve put in place and starting to see the benefits of cutting emissions, but also cutting your costs and improving the home,” he said.

The Green Party leader said that he believed Ireland’s emissions had “peaked”.

“The figures this year are quite startling: our coal use is down 50 per cent in power generation, our oil use is down 80 per cent and solar for the first time ever has gone from 20 million units of solar energy to 400 million units of solar energy this year. From 20 to 400 in one year, scaling up, and that’s not going to stop,” he said.

“We have peaked several years ago because back in the day when it was Moneypoint (power station) was our main power generation and you didn’t have any of these alternative technologies. So we have already peaked. We now need to descend like a downhill skier.”