MINISTER FOR CLIMATE and Transport Eamon Ryan today warned that the world is verging closer to climate tipping points and irreversible damage to the earth’s ecosystem, he stressed however that a different pathway is still possible. 

“What’s happening to our climate is truly terrifying. If you listen to the best scientists, temperatures have leapt in the last year, jumped beyond anything that the scientists previously expected or modelled,” Ryan said today. 

He added, however, that climate action works and said while Ireland has previously been a laggard when it comes to emission reduction, that is starting to change. 

Ryan was speaking at the Mansion House in Dublin for the launch of the city’s Climate Action Week which runs from today until Sunday 15 September. 

The launch was hosted by Dublin’s Lord Mayor James Geoghegan and included presentations from a number of representatives from different community groups who have received government grants for sustainability projects. 

Among them were community volunteers working to improve awareness and knowledge of natural garden design, a GAA club which has saved over 1m litres of water by switching to dry urinals and a repair cafe looking to expand their services right across Dublin by empowering people to mend broken items on their own. 

Speaking today, Donal O’Laoire from the Kingfisher Project, appealed for volunteers to take part in a project to make the gardens (and balconies and windowsills) of Ireland more eco-friendly. 

The Kingfisher Project began in 2022 as an effort to transform what was a waste ground on the river Poddle at Kimmage but has now expanded to become a community education facility to reconnect people with the natural environment.

O’Laoire made the point that the 2m domestic gardens in Irish cities and towns make up 28% of the urban land. This equates to 205 Phoenix Parks. 

Through the group’s pilot ‘Pixel Gardens’ initiative, they are on a mission to transform gardens and outdoor spaces into areas of climate action, biodiversity and food security. 

“We’re trying to demonstrate a replicable and scalable urban transformation process,” O’Laoire said.

The group is currently seeking 100 volunteers to take part in the project which aims to transform outdoor space into living spaces for nature. 

“The most important thing for us is to maintain and reconnect with the common knowledge of how to grow stuff, how to relate to the environment, know the limitations of the environment, and through that moderate our attitudes and our behaviour.

“We’re talking about window boxes. We’re talking about containers. We’re talking about front gardens, back gardens, laneways, we’re talking about communal areas, a whole sort of plethora of different types of areas that we want to capitalise on,” O’Laoire said. 

Also speaking at the event was Neil Barrett from Naomh Olaf GAA club in Sandyford, who outlined how the club has been using government funding to go green. 

The club has installed solar panels, planted ‘mini forests’ around its grounds with almost 2,000 trees, introduced composting, placed beehives on its roof, and even switched all its urinals to dry urinals to save water, with plans to introduce similar changes in its ladies rooms too. 

Barrett appealed to other GAA clubs to engage with each other and use the knowledge of their members to introduce similar changes. 

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Roe from Tog Hackerspace, a shared workshop in the centre of Dublin that runs a repair cafe, spoke about how his organisation has used government funding to develop ‘repair cafes in a box’. 

Repair cafes offer a space, run by volunteers, where people can bring broken household items to be mended and fixed. 

The ‘repair cafe in a box’ model allows community groups to set up their own repair cafes by equipping them with the necessary tools free of charge. 

All of these projects were funded by the Community Climate Action Programme (CCAP) and supported by local authorities. €26m in funding was been made available for the first phase of the CCAP, with Dublin local authorities receiving nearly €5m. 

The core aim of the CCAP is to reduce the use of fossil fuels while also building climate resilience.