September 20th, 2019
Thousands of Irish students across the country will mobilise today as part of an international school strike calling for urgent climate action from world leaders.
Alongside major rallies in cities such as Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick, almost 70 local communities are taking action to support student-led groups such as Fridays for Future Ireland and the Schools Climate Action Network.
This global day of action already has over 4,000 registered events worldwide. Things are already heating up, with more than 300,000 taking to the streets in Australia.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg will be joining protesters in New York later today as the city prepares to host the UN Climate Action Summit next week.
Ms Thunberg has repeatedly told global leaders that she want their action, not words of praise or support.
Irish school strikers have used similar rhetoric at weekly protests in front of the Dail and in mass national events in May and March earlier this year.
But what exact action are Irish school strikers demanding?
List of demands
Demanded actions by
Irish young protesters can be found on a few different websites, but all sing
the same tune: Ireland must do its part in a global effort to radically reduce emissions.
A week before the
first international school strike in March, students met with politicians to
map out what policy changes they are seeking.
The Irish movement is
asking the Government to communicate the severity
of the climate crisis to the public and to build school curriculums that convey
it to students of all ages.
A transition to a
carbon-neutral Ireland must be “socially fair” and stronger regulations on
corporations directly responsible for causing the climate crisis should be
implemented.
Students also want to
see policy moves that will deeply reduce emissions from the agricultural that
currently accounts for one-third of the state’s total emissions footprint.
The movement is asking
the Government to enact all the recommendations
of the Citizen’s Assembly on Climate Change and to implement a Green New Deal
for Ireland.
The state should also
ensure that once students have left school they can have “livelihoods that
don’t damage the Earth”.
Finally, students have demanded that all fossil fuel supplies be left in the ground, that no new fossil fuel infrastructure construction take place, and that Ireland has 100 per cent renewable electricity supply by 2030.
‘Moral clarity’
“I think all of [their
demands] reflect the severity and the urgency of the challenge and the response
needed,” Dr Diarmuid Torney told The Green News.
The DCU academic, who sat
on the expert advisory panel for the Citizens Assembly on climate action, said
that the goal of achieving entirely renewable electricity by 2030 is the demand
that stands out in terms of “ambition and scale”.
While not
“theoretically unachievable”, Dr Torney said that fully integrating renewable sources
like wind into the grid remains a challenge with current technologies. He added,
however, that research and local innovations around the world are trying to
meet it.
Dr
Torney is one of a group of Irish academics to sign
an open letter “wholeheartedly” supporting the global climate strike
movement. The international letter signed by over 1,100 academics states that
the students’ concerns “rest on solid, incontrovertible evidence”.
Dr Joseph Curtin, a
member of the Climate Change Advisory Council, said that, science aside, the
most important thing here is the “moral clarity being provided by the kids”.
“Their whole lives are
going to be affected by what we’re doing to the atmosphere and the climate and
what we’re doing to biodiversity,” he said.
“They’re looking us in
the eye and saying ‘you need to act.’”
At the May mass
climate strike, Beth Doherty of School Strike for Climate did just that,
sending a warning shot to politicians for future elections.
“We’re on the streets today, but in a few years, we’ll all be voting. And we will remember the politicians who said something, who did something, who took the steps, and we will remember the ones who stood back and did absolutely nothing to ensure we have a future.”
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