When the Covid-19 pandemic caused oil stocks to plummet, the US President was accused of facilitating “corporate socialism” by proposing to bailout the fossil fuel industry at a cost of $20 billion. However, this was not an isolated incident, brought about in exceptional times. The ailing fossil fuel industry has long relied on public… Read more »

Introduction Over the past decade, climate breakdown has come to be recognised as the greatest threat to human rights. Climate change threatens the right to life, health, food, water, property, education, work, culture, adequate standard of living, means of subsistence, adequate/secure housing, self-determination and a healthy environment. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and… Read more »

  Introduction In May 2015 Pope Francis published Laudato Si’, Encyclical Letter on Care for Our Common Home. This work of two-hundred pages addresses many aspects of the complex challenge presented by the ecological crisis. Francis proposes that we adopt a personal and cultural attitude of “integral ecology” recognising that “everything is interconnected.” The issues… Read more »

  In May 2015 Pope Francis published Laudato Si’, his Encyclical Letter on Caring for our Common Home. Five years on, his appeal to every person on this planet remains as relevant. “The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and… Read more »

  As we go to press with this issue of Working Notes, we at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice are keenly aware of how the theme of “Integral Ecology” might appear distant from the pressing concerns of the pandemic. But appearances can deceive. While Pope Francis does not mention the risk of novel… Read more »

Jubilee Caribbean (JCaribbean) is a newly formed non-governmental organisation, born out of the bigger Jubilee Campaigns from the turn of the millennium – Drop the Debt, Jubilee 2000 and Jubilee Debt Campaign – based in Grenada, but hoping to reach out to the wider English-speaking Caribbean islands. Due to our debt situation here, in the… Read more »

Speeding Towards a New City There’s an old quip attributed to Henry Ford that no one was looking for the car to be invented; they just wanted faster horses. Even that is not true. What city-dwellers in the late 1800s had a problem with was manure. One early urban planner predicted that the biological waste… Read more »

Sadhbh O’Neill  WHEN DOES A HARM BECOME A CRIME? Social media users will no doubt be familiar with the increasingly familiar campaigns by cyclists in Dublin to highlight illegal parking on cycle-lanes or dangerous driving. Despite being chided by the Garda traffic bureau, the campaigners share videos and photographs that highlight non-compliance with traffic regulations… Read more »

Thomas L. Muinzer INTRODUCTION Ireland stands at an important historical moment. We live in an era where the world is endeavouring at last to get to grips with what philosopher Noam Chomsky, recently deceased physicist Stephen Hawking, and many others have described as one of the greatest problems facing humanity, that is, anthropogenic (human driven)… Read more »

Sadhbh O’Neill Sadhbh O’Neill is a PhD candidate and Government of Ireland Scholar based at the School of Politics and International Relations, UCD. Introduction Climate policy falls into that strange category of things government does not want to do, but must do. There are no (or few) votes in it. Doing it properly entails more… Read more »