CLIMATE

John Gibbons: Like Sweden and Wales, we need a Ministry of the Future

Too often, plans to create and safeguard a sustainable future are chipped away to nothing by lobbyists and interest groups in the present. A Ministry of the Future would help fix that

Earlier this year, the Citizens’ Assembly’s recommendations on addressing biodiversity loss were far-reaching and ambitious – yet within weeks, both Fine Gael and Sinn Féin had caved in to agri-industrial lobbyists

Of course, we all claim to care about the future. After all, that’s where our children and theirs will have to live. Yet whose job exactly is it to really think about posterity? Or, as Groucho Marx quipped: “What have future generations ever done for us?”

Corporations operate in quarterly timeframes. Politics, too, is bedevilled by short-termism, dominated by the horse race of three- to five-year electoral cycles. Amid the constant clamour of competing demands, ...