The Green Party needs to be more effective at countering the “false narratives” about the cost of climate measures, party leader Roderic O’Gorman has said.
Mr O’Gorman said his party’s disastrous showing at the last general election - where it lost 11 of its 12 seats - was driven by the perception that climate policies were adding to cost-of-living pressures.
“Unfortunately, for too many people, that false idea that climate action costs is powerful,” he told the Dublin Economics Workshop event in Wexford.
Mr O’Gorman said the additional cost to a litre of petrol or home heating oil from the carbon tax had been “grossly exaggerated” and had been used as a stick to beat the party.
READ MORE
The tax, which raises some €1 billion a year, had successfully channelled resources into vital other initiatives such as preventing fuel poverty and retrofitting, he said.
But it had “become totemic for those who say that climate measures have a financially negative impact”.
Referencing an RTÉ exit poll suggesting that only 4 per cent of voters considered climate change as the most important issue, Mr O’Gorman claimed there were almost no votes in last year’s election for the environment.
“The green tide” that delivered the party’s record-breaking result in 2020 “had very much gone out again,” he said.
However, Mr O’Gorman said the State had made significant progress on climate under Green Party policies and now had a “far reaching legal and regulatory foundation for emissions reductions”.
He also noted that climate scepticism had not yet been mainstreamed here as it was in other countries.
Separately, Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (Ifac) chairman Seamus Coffey told the event that Ireland’s net debt position could fall to zero in the next decade if favourable economic conditions persist.
While the State’s gross debt – at close to €220 billion - gets a lot of attention “on the other side of the balance sheet we have significant assets” making the State’s net debt position more benign, Mr Coffey said.
According to Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures, Ireland’s net debt position, gross debt minus assets, stood at €157 billion at the end of last year.
“If things were to remain benign for the next decade, that’s a very big if but if they were, we might not be far off a position where net debt gets close to zero,” he said.
Ireland’s net debt was low – around 20 per cent – in the run up to the 2008 financial crash. However, it surged after economy crashed resulting in a decade of big budget deficits.
Strong economic growth in recent years in combination with bumper tax receipts have put Ireland’s debt metrics on a more favourable trajectory.
“Our debt ratio (gross debt as a percentage of income) has been falling, and falling pretty dramatically, from the peak during the crisis years in 2010/2011 of 130 per cent of national income…it has now fallen to around 50 per cent,” he said.
If current conditions persist, the ratio is projected to fall further to perhaps 30-35 per cent by the end of the decade.
