Ireland returned to its Brehon roots today as the world’s first Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss recommended constitutional change to protect the rights of nature as well as people.
It comes after 83% of 99 citizens voted for the move after six months learning about the issue.
The representative section of Irish society was whittled down from 2,400 responses to 20,000 invitations and 4% were farmers.
Following a seventh weekend of discussion, the citizens agreed “the State has comprehensively failed to adequately fund, implement and enforce existing national legislation, national policies, EU biodiversity-related laws and directives related to biodiversity”.
Speaking about their groundbreaking referendum call, Assembly chair Dr Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin said: “It’s not something I thought we would end up with at the start of this process but it’s been a tremendous education.
“We’ve had over 80 speakers since we began meeting in May and we’ve had over 650 submissions [which] included people from all across the world... indigenous communities in south America asking the Assembly to consider the rights of nature.
“Historically we did this. In Brehon law we actually gave nature a special place to say, ‘we value this and you shouldn’t do anything to these types of trees and things like that’.
“I guess in one way we are kind of harking back in time to very old Ireland - but maybe now it’s time for us to step back and say hold on - if we continue to go the way we have we actually won’t have nature there to provide for us in so many ways.
“Not just food, water, air but also our wellbeing, physical and mental.
“It’s interesting. It’s a surprise, but nonetheless it may be time now to start to consider how we actually have to conserve nature around us.
“That may be one constitutional change that could come about but also the right to a clean and healthy environment.
“It’s probably something we have all taken for granted but as we have seen in recent decades, pollution, climate change, everything is changing around us and it is not necessarily the case that you would have access to a clean and healthy environment.
“The citizens have decided that is something we should start protecting more.”
Other recommendations sparked by the government’s biodiversity failings include the need for government to “take prompt, decisive and urgent action to address biodiversity loss and restoration”.
Citizens’ also called for “adequate funding to address the crisis”, more public accountability for failings on the issue, including an environmental court at circuit and district levels to hold policy makers, businesses and citizens to account and at least one full-time dedicated biodiversity officer at each local authority.
We spoke to three people from across Ireland about the impact the Citizens’ Assembly on biodiversity has had on them.
Rebecca Ferguson from West Cork, told us: “I’ve learned that without biodiversity we don’t exist as a species.
“Our environment it’s what makes us, we survive on it. I hope the recommendations make their way into reality.”
Hillary Cronin of Dungorney, West Cork, said she didn’t know “a whole pile” about biodiversity before starting the Citizens’ Assembly adding it has given her “a bigger appreciation” for nature.
“We can sit here and go ‘government need to do this and government need to do that’ but we need to all take individual responsibility and appreciate our own interaction with nature and the impact everything we do has on it,” she told us.
“I’m not an environmentalist or anything like that... but when you walk out in the field or the lawn, just appreciate what you have and do your best to maintain that at an individual level.”
Patrick Joyce from Tuam Co Galway says biodiversity has always been on his radar as a full-time farmer.
He commended the process, saying: “Agriculture has been supported in this process which is vitally important for me but it is vitally important for the whole country when it comes to rural Ireland and protecting incomes, but at the same time protecting biodiversity.”
The Citizens Assembly on Biodiversity Loss was to close yesterday at The Grand Hotel Malahide.
But with specific recommendations on agriculture, freshwaters, marine and coastal environments, peatlands, forestry/woodlands/hedgerows, protected sites and species, invasive species and urban and built environments still to be ironed out, they agreed to seek an extension to their deliberations from the Oireachtas to allow further discussion.
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