And as the Irish Examiner reported yesterday, a survery for the National Youth Council shows people under the age of 24 feel the Government is out of touch with the issues that matter most to them.

Perhaps that youth vote isn’t a priority for the ruling trinity — it was the segment with the smallest proportion of voters in the 2020 election — but a disenchanted, jilted generation is no good for this country.

Locked out of housing, squeezed from all sides by the cost of living, and having lived through record levels of homelessness, why would they want to vote for the traditional parties when they do decide to use their power at the ballot box?

Fine Gael faces an incredible changing of the guard, with 18 of the 35 TDs elected in 2010 not putting themselves forward for election. Even if the party were to come out with an overall majority, the loss of that level of institutional knowledge and experience, while giving room for fresh thinking and personalities, would not be surmounted in the course of a single Dáil term.

All this may be to the benefit of Fianna Fáil, which has run a generally steady course under Micheál Martin, though there’s nothing in the polling wind to suggest that it will be ruling the roost after the election day.

Meanwhile, it has been the case before that the junior party in a Government has suffered worse from a turn in opinion against a particular coalition. The Greens have been there before, although to their credit they grew again like a plant after a hard pruning.

And while this Government will be riding the crest of a budget giveaway wave while Sinn Féin languishes in the mud of various controversies, it remains to be seen whether the Greens having dominion over the transport and integration ministries will affect the party’s performance at the polls.

Which would be a shame, as Ireland is struggling to hit its emissions targets and the world isn’t exactly getting its house in order either.

Ireland sets admirable goal

It is admirable that Ireland — through a Green minister, Eamon Ryan — has co-proposed a plan that would allow the EU to force companies to electrify their car fleets.

While there are many among us who have never had a company car, the ministers from Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Austria point out to Ursula von der Leyen that corporate fleets make up the most new vehicle registrations in the EU, but that EV takeup is behind the private sector.

The ministers' focus on decarbonisation as well as the opportunities for jobs and investment in Europe, and Ireland’s name on the proposal speaks again to its outsized and welcome influence on the world stage.

In the wake of the budget here, we highlighted the provision seeking to make corporate EV purchases easier as a way of getting more secondhand vehicles into the market; corporate fleets typically being changed annually. We referred to this as “a peculiarly troubling sense of trickle-down economics”, and taken on its own it still does feel that way, given that it depends on companies to drive the change.

The proposal made to von der Leyen, however, better acknowledges that country-level measures aren’t enough to get corporations to embrace electric vehicles — even if it seems at odds with the wider push to reduce car use. The cuts to Cork’s bus services show we are a long way away from that.

Amid ongoing pushback against restricting the sale of fossil fuel cars from 2035 but the adoption of EVs themselves, it remains to be seen if the plan is even workable, let alone enforceable. It Ireland’s own charging infrastructure is very much a work in progress, with chunks of the country having no fast chargers and others only having a handful at specific sites, or not getting enough power to fast charge two cars at once.

Nonetheless, as a civilisation and a planet we are running out of regional or national options on climate collapse for what is, ultimately, a cross-border existential crisis.

A fast farewell

The aviation industry may be responsible for a substantial share of carbon emissions, but it’s not the fast turnaround of aircraft that’s inspired a New Zealand airport to limit “hug times” at dropoff.

Rather, it’s the fast turnaround of people.

Dunedin airport has put a three-minute limit on farewell hugs, the idea being that it gives other people a chance to have one too.

The airport’s CEO points out that other places fine drivers if they stay too long, or clamp cars, and they’re “trying to have fun with it. It is an airport and those drop-off locations are common locations for farewells”.

One quite wonders how it would go down at Cork or Dublin.

One wonders also, in a world seemingly on the brink of war everywhere and skidding toward climate collapse, if we would be better off just letting people hug it out for as long as they need.