At COP28 they rested on the 7th day and today restarts with a focus on ‘Youth, Children, Education and Skills’ alongside the continuous negotiations on the final text. COP28 has, so far, been a mixed bag with some incredibly promising agreements tempered by compromises and mixed messages. The Loss and Damage Agreement, which was rubberstamped… Read more »

Very few events during the Taoiseach’s present term will be as fundamentally happy as the safe return of Emily Hand to her family. The Tánaiste’s statement went basically unnoticed. Indeed, the Taoiseach’s full statement has also mostly been bypassed. What has been noted – with fury by many on social media and with rancour by… Read more »

What is loss and damage and why is it important? The causes and impacts of climate change are widely accepted. We know that more carbon pollution in the atmosphere, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels releasing carbon dioxide, leads to an overall increase in global temperatures. This causes a wide variety of impacts including… Read more »

This week the housing charity Threshold published its 2022 annual report. I was struck, reading it, that the numbers involved in their work were terrifyingly large. Over 50,000 people needed to reach out to the charity in an effort to avoid homelessness. It was a stark reminder of how the homelessness crisis that Ireland has… Read more »

Stop de Kindermoord ‘Stop de Kindermoord’, or ‘Stop the Child Murder’ was a road safety campaign in the Netherlands during the 1970s. It precipitated the widespread installation of active transport infrastructure for which the Netherlands is now famous. This campaign was led by parents who feared for the safety of their kids, and communities who… Read more »

“If we are confident in the capacity of human beings to transcend their petty interests and to think in bigger terms, we can keep hoping that COP28 will allow for a decisive acceleration of energy transition, with effective commitments subject to ongoing monitoring. This Conference can represent a change of direction, showing that everything done… Read more »

The new prison testifies to a societal failure … [w]e have an obligation to provide something better than a brighter prison.

The urgency in Francis’ communication to us makes it clear that ecological action cannot wait until it feels comfortable – we do not have time to allow his message to transition slowly from head to heart to hands but we must consider how the action of our hands can help us understand the crisis both intellectually and emotionally

Irish Travellers are overrepresented in homelessness services and Traveller families can be left in emergency accommodation for years, which adds another level of trauma to the institutional abuse they have endured for decades. In a group whose suicide rates are several times that of the settled community, the impact of every factor which impacts upon mental health must be lessened, making the provision of secure, appropriate housing for Travellers a matter of urgency. 

Laudate Deum is clearly written to inspire the delegates who will attend the COP28 meetings in Dubai in December. Francis carefully lays out how previous COPs concluded with high hopes that have never quite delivered. The reader can almost hear his frustration at how every year the Great and the Good gather and discuss these critical issues and every year they disappoint.