Last Friday on Morning Ireland, David Hanly interviewed the Minister for the Environment, Martin Cullen. The Minister spoke about the possible introduction of carbon taxes. Under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, Ireland committed itself to limiting its carbon gas emissions to no more than 13 per cent above their 1990 levels by 2008.
Rather late in the day, the Government has realised that something must be done if the State is not to face a €1.2 billion fine for its abject failure to live up to these commitments.
In explaining why drastic measures may be necessary, Mr Cullen asked listeners to remember the "deluges, storms, enormous flooding, spring weather over Christmas" that are symptoms of climate change. David Hanly asked him if all of this could be attributed to greenhouse gases. The Minister's reply was stunning.
What Mr Cullen said was: "All of the experts are saying all of this is the greenhouse gases having an effect on the ozone layer and it's causing major changes in weather."
Read that again. The Minister for the Environment is proposing a major change in public policy. He is dealing with an issue of truly global proportions. And he hasn't a bloody clue what he's talking about. He has the gall to quote "all of the experts", yet he thinks that greenhouse gases affect the weather by damaging the ozone layer.
We all make mistakes, but this is a pretty basic one. It's like the Minister for Transport telling us that building more motorways will make the trains run faster or the Minister for Agriculture believing that building the Bertie Bowl will make farmers' incomes rise.
The hole in the ozone layer is caused by CFC gases (chlorofluorocarbons) that you find in aerosols, air conditioning units, fridges and plastic foam. It's a problem because it increases the amount of harmful rays from the sun.
Greenhouse gases result from the burning of fossil fuels. They do add to global warming and affect the weather. We are talking about entirely different phenomena.
THIS is not some abstruse or arcane form of knowledge. It is made pretty clear in my 12-year-old son's Junior Certificate geography textbooks. Charles Hayes's New Complete Geography explains that "the burning of wood and fossil fuels such as oil and gas products produces large amounts of carbon dioxide . . . Carbon dioxide traps heat from the earth much like a blanket. Increased amounts of carbon dioxide result in a greater greenhouse effect".
The hole in the ozone layer is something different, as another geography text for Junior Cert, Gus Healy's Spaceship Earth, explains: "Aerosols often contain CFCs. These gases are destroying the ozone layer, which filters out 99 per cent of the sun's ultra violet rays. Even a 1 per cent increase in these ultra violet rays would result in 20,000 new cases of skin cancer in Western Europe alone."
We expect children as young as 12 to know all of this. It is on the school curriculum presumably because we think it is the kind of thing that a functioning citizen needs to know. For any national politician not to know the difference between the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect would therefore be pretty alarming.
For the Minister for the Environment, it's ludicrous.
Mr Cullen, after all, is the quintessential professional politician. He has never claimed to be motivated by deep ideological convictions. He started out as a Progressive Democrat and switched to Fianna Fáil when that seemed like a good move for his career.
His appeal is that he's intelligent, decent, untainted by corruption, pragmatic.
That a man like this doesn't have a clue about an issue that has been in the news for 20 years now gives us an insight into the world of the professional politician.
It suggests a complete absence of curiosity about the world. It suggests that he doesn't read many newspapers or magazines, doesn't watch many documentaries on the telly, doesn't take a great interest in global affairs.
He must not have paid much attention when the Kyoto summit, whose conclusions he is now charged with implementing, was in progress.
DOES it matter that his sense of these issues is as hazy as the gases in the air, and as empty as the hole in the ozone? Yes it does.
For one thing, the compete lack of curiosity in a senior politician is almost certainly one of the reasons why the Government is only now waking up to the commitments it made in Kyoto.
For another, it is impossible to ask the public to take the pain of paying environmental taxes when the man who is proposing them has only the vaguest notion of what they're for.
Major changes in attitude don't come about without passionate leadership. Who's going to believe that someone who hasn't bothered to get even a basic grasp of the subject actually gives a damn about it?
But this is what we're stuck with. Some politicians have deep moral and ideological convictions. Some have the technocratic appeal of being able to understand problems and work out pragmatic solutions.
We're governed, to a very large extent, by people who have neither. We get all the brisk cynicism of professionals but little of the basic competence.