 And the next session is the circular economy and demand reduction and keynote speeches from Hushin Smith who is a Green Party politician who served as Minister of State since July 2020. He's been a TD for Dunleary since 2020. He was appointed Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform with responsibility for public procurement and e-government and Minister of State at the Department of the Environment with responsibility for communications and which of course is the most important for us here today, the circular economy. Thank you Hushin. Okay, hello everybody. Thank you very much Michael and nice to see so many familiar faces. The circular economy does a problem with it, problem with the naming I suppose, the branding, because it's two abstract ideas as you know that something being circular which is too many syllables to get across and being an economy. And I think it really helps if you can quickly to the examples of what it really means in the real world. So it circular economy means that instead of going to a cheap shop to buy to buy clothing that you're going to the charity shop, and that when you get shoes in the charity shop and they wear out that instead of buying new ones made in a sweatshop in the other side of the world that you go around to your local shoemaker, and you get them fixed. And then you get your clothes altered, and that you get your bike fixed and that everything is that you try to renovate and that you reach for an idea that there is that one of the pleasures of get things and looking after things and buying things can doesn't have to be about brand something being brand new. It doesn't have to be about unboxing. It doesn't have to be about taking home a whole of goods out of new new bags with branches with the name of the shop that you can also have an immense pleasure from taking your old goods and fixing them up the ones that have that that have have worn in to fit you and that have some heritage and some emotional connection for you or that you've got it from your family and now you're you're giving it a new lease of life and that that can be a way that you can that you can signal to other people your your your taste and your eclecticism rather than appearing and saying look I've got something brand new from that from that brand. So I think there is a cultural challenge to shift people's and shift shift people's idea of what it means to to provide for themselves and their family in a way which is which is which is not wasteful. So I think we're kind of pushing an open door here for a long time. There was a general consensus that our our prosperity and our wealth in the world were about the success of capitalism and that what we had to do was we had to consume as much as possible. You remember George Bush telling people that we to avoid the recession we all had to go shopping. And there was an idea that if anybody like Michael or me said, hold on a second maybe GDP is not a good measure of wealth that you are a crazy hippie and that you should be shunned for your silly ideas. And then eventually the whole the whole edifice of GDP sort of collapsed and you know what I remember you know there was this idea every quarter. GDP is going up half percent we're half percent better or it's gone down half percent we should be worried. And then one day I think our GDP went up 25% and the CSO and everybody had to say, Oh, this is this is rubbish isn't this and it doesn't actually it doesn't it doesn't work at all. We've got to find another way of measuring whether we're prosperous and that this idea that we can measure our prosperity based on how fast we are consuming our finite resources is a stupid idea and that that is it doesn't make sense to say the faster you eat the food in your cupboards in your kitchen. The richer your family is that that's that's just not true. So we've won the kind of we've won that kind of argument. And there's a general consensus from people that consumerism is not the root to happiness that if you have to have something you're not twice as happy as he were when you when you had one. It's in fact it's more rubbish to look after and even that even IKEA eventually said that we'd reach peak stuff and everybody knows, you know, stuff is stuff is not going to make you not going to make you happy. So we're there in the abstract, but we're obviously not there at the individual level and still still it's very hard to get past. You know, to make those individual changes and say, Okay, I accept that I shouldn't that buying a lot of stuff isn't going to make me happy, but I'm, you know, I'm still doing and I'm still borrowing money to buy stuff so. We're at that point we're at the point where the general ideas agreed and the goals, but we've got to do the, got to do the action plan. How do we persuade people for this circular economy stuff. So, and I see this in the report. You know when you're trying to persuade people about things. You've got different groups of people, and you need to address their values. So it's easy for me, I suppose it's with a group of people who are young and progressive. You might be appealing to the right circular economy in terms of the environment and the future and time and action, but maybe with a with a more conservative group of people, you might be appealing to the values of their parents and grandparents, and using that approach and I went brought the circular economy and a bill to the Doyle, I was able to get people from every party, including the rural independence who generally will oppose anything that I do, even if the, even if the opposition are on site, but it got them to agree to say that they said oh yeah that's the way things used to happen where we used to get our shoes fixed and whatever else so so so being able to appeal to that those values meant to get meant that we got a very broad consensus. And so on an individual basis though and when we're looking at the getting people to agree to projects in their local area. And there is a real there's real problems really heartbreaking when you're trying to get things done in your area and people are coming up and opposing them. So something as simple as closing off the street outside the local school during school start the start of the school day and the school pick up on the drop off so you just say well why can we close 100 yards from under the school. And I guess the problem that we're having is that we put out an idea, and we say let's have a public consultation about it. And then people start to imagine all kinds of terrible things in the future, and they discuss it for years, and sometimes literally two years, three years of discussion about something that you just really want to try for a few months. So I think we, what we really need to do is move towards a different emergency governance to, you know, to take it into account that we're that this is an emergency and there's a climate crisis, and that we say look, if we're going to try something in front of the school, we should just do it. And we'll just announce it that we're going to do it next week, and we'll try it out for, we'll try it out for six months, and then we'll put it back the way it was, and then you can have your consultation so we're consulting about something that we tried, not something that we're imagining for the future, because what I found is that in my local area when I surveyed people, and like a professional firm to survey it, they were actually very much in favor of the projects I was trying to do, but the people who are against the projects had louder voices, they were more intense, they were more on social media, and they gave the impression, and also to the broadcast media that they were a majority. So I have a kind of a silent majority supporting, and I have a minority who are kind of acting in a tyrannical way. So that's, that's my, that's my challenge to get past that and so I want to move towards thinking about what's emergency governance, that's covered in this. I think something where we can, we can do something and have to have the consultation afterwards. A couple of things happening in Europe that are encouraging. One is the idea of durability ratings. So you go to buy a washing machine, and you see an array of machines and you're picking based on brand or you're picking based on super features that it's wash using AI or whatever, and really you're not really making an informed choice and you don't know whether the product is going to last a long time or whether it's got built in obsolescence. So the one of the ideas from the EU is that they are going to have an independent body testing all the consumer equipment, and giving it a rating for how many years it's going to last. So you go in and you see this washing machine last for five years. This one lasts for 10 years. And now as a consumer you can make, so I shouldn't say the word consumer as a citizen, you can make you can make an informed choice as this is this is that I'm going to buy this one which lasts twice, which lasts twice as long. And, you know, when I discuss that out of business people, one of them said well what if I own a washing machine factory, and I only get to sell half as many washing machines as I did before, and that's the vested interest angle is, you know, this thing you're trying to bring in, it's going to lower, it's going to lower my business or businesses overall, but of course it creates a new opportunity which is the opportunity for the whole business of renovation and repair, and a lot of that work is local rather than being globalized. And I've got a fair wind on the whole globalization thing is globalization is obviously falling apart. Thank you very much, Donald Trump for imposing trade tariffs on those different countries all at the same time which made companies say okay, we've got to put our own factories in each continent. The pandemic, destroying trade lines and China and everything else, and now the war in Ukraine, and really we've got to a point where, if you just can't rely on very, or it looks like that the business world can't rely on fragile complex long distance supply chains, and they're thinking we got to make things more locally and create things locally so this is a challenge to the whole idea of M of globalization I think is really is really starting to starting to shatter. And I think that so what's going to happen instead I think is a lot more, and a lot more local stuff, a lot more services, a lot more fixing things in your local area and a lot less waiting for a container of stuff to arrive from the other side of the world. How are we doing on circularity in Ireland, really badly so I think we're second last in in Ireland in Europe on your stuff circularity index. I don't say that very much but we are. And when I look to the details of it, because we don't mind, we don't really have much minds, we have like Tara or something. But what we do is we scrape a lot of aggregate, and we take, you know, we scrape off drumlands. And until recently of course we were stripping the bogs and everything, but we strip we so our construction industry involves a lot of a lot more raw materials than in other countries in Europe, even on a comparative basis, and we ship all our waste or most of our waste, although it gets sorted here, most of it ends up being sent abroad, a lot of burnt abroad. And, and so, you know, we, we have a lot, we've a long way to go. I've put in the law that we need to reach above European average in eight years time. And when I look at what the big bits are to do. It's not coffee cups. That's the bit that, you know, obviously that the media were interested in, but the biggest one is construction. Are we going to build loads and loads of houses for people? Are we going to build them in a green way? Are we going to renovate the existing stock? Are we going to, are we going to have low and body carbon? Are we going to reuse materials? When we knock down old things, are we, are we taking all the rubble and throwing it in a field? Or are we recycling concrete and so on? So that's going to, that's, that's the largest opportunity area is construction and development for improving our, our circularity. And people build things like coffee cups and vapes. They're things that people can relate to. And I suppose, you know, they do on their own. Each one of them is so tiny, you know, plastic bags, whatever. But it is worth doing each one of them because they are something that you can, you can relate to in your own life. And people do want to have a sense of a sense that they have a role in all this and that they have some kind of control. I'm very heartened by what I saw in California, where when they were reaching their electricity network looked like it was reaching peak and that they might have blackouts and they sent texts out to people and said in your area we might be reaching a blackout. Can you find things to turn off around your house? And the response was phenomenal. And I think, you know, you see a huge drop very quickly, but and you could see that people then felt that they had managed to avert a problem that they had some agency in it that they were given the information. And also the message was sent to everybody, whether you're a child or an elderly person, and everybody can kind of have an act in that because everybody can look around and turn something off or do something. So I'm looking at how we can do that here as well. So there you go. That's my unprepared words on this. And if you ever want to talk to me about circular economy, and you have ideas about how it should be running better. And I love to hear them because mostly everything that I've ever done is any good has always been a suggestion from someone else. So thank you very much.