My address to Joint Oireachtas Committee today discusses why we need a Commission for Future Generations in Ireland.
Joint Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth
Pre-Committee stage scrutiny of private members bill entitled – Commission for Future Generations Bill 2023
Tuesday 8th October 2024
Dr. Tadhg O’Mahony Assistant Professor Environmental Policy UCD/ Adjunct Professor Finland Futures Research Centre, University of Turku
Opening Statement
• I thank the Chairman and the members of the Committee for the invitation to contribute to its Pre-Committee stage scrutiny of the “Commission for Future Generations Bill 2023”.
• A chairde, the future is an undiscovered country, a journey replete with hope and promise, as with hazard and peril.
• Two decades ago when I began my journey in the field of foresight, a popular quote was circulating from the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke: “the future is not what it used to be.” Clarke recognised that while generations had known that many of the patterns of life would repeat, a new unpredictable epoch was emerging.
• This fundamental change has become known in public policy as ‘VUCA,’ as the world becomes more Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.
• We have many examples in recent years of major systemic challenges to public policy, across housing, transport, health, migration, climate change and biodiversity, and in the surprises of the financial crisis and the COVID pandemic.
• In response, public policy must become both better prepared for change, but also more adept at building vision for change, and at creating desirable change.
• Public policy needs the opportunity to move from firefighting the day-to-day to exploring new vision, to building coalition and consensus and to strategically devising the means to achieve our preferred future.
• Responding effectively requires four things from public policy, moving from; short-term reactions to long-term planning; from narrow approaches to holistic; from siloed departments to coordinated missions; and from top-down policy to participative governance.
• Our institutional structures were formed in a very different era, to respond to 20th century challenges.
• We can say with unflinching confidence that we now stand at an inflection point in history. We live in an era of climate and ecological breakdown, threatening economy and society and the natural world on which they rely.
• We also live in an age of threats to democracy, underlying economic vulnerabilities, growing inequality, geopolitical instability and the acceleration of technological change. We live in an era where the impacts of decisions that we make today will resonate for decades, marching down a voiceless line of unborn generations.
• Globally the scientific literature is robustly clear, addressing our current challenges demands transformations[1] of what we do, and also of how we do it. But it also highlights significant cause for optimism, within these transformations are opportunities for win-win outcomes, that improve our wellbeing and restore the natural world on which we depend, that bring us to what I have termed a ‘flourishing sustainable wellbeing’[2]
· In my work on ‘transformational governance and policy[3]’ for the Irish Climate Change Assessment, signed-off by institutional stakeholders, critical gaps in Ireland’s national foresight capacity were identified across three major functions in our ability; to foresee change, to proactively respond to change and to articulate desirable visions and the means to achieve them.
· In the same report I also had the opportunity to identify the significant livelihood and economic opportunities[4] that transformations can offer Ireland, for both urban dwellers and for rural Ireland. While cautioning that these will be foregone without a new approach to policy in Ireland.
· We know that the old certainties of 20th century policymaking are breaking down, that we need new knowledge to understand and envision change, and new capacity in public institutions and structures to create it.
· The Commission for Future Generations offers a response appropriate to policymaking in the Ireland of the 21st century.
[1] IPCC, 2023: Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, H. Lee and J. Romero (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland, 184 pp., doi: 10.59327/IPCC/AR6-9789291691647.
[2] O’Mahony, T. (2022). Toward Sustainable Wellbeing: Advances in Contemporary Concepts. Frontiers in Sustainability 3:807984. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2022.807984.
[3] Torney, D., O’Mahony, T., (2023) Transforming Governance and Policy, in, Róisín Moriarty, Tadhg O’Mahony and Agnieszka Stefaniec, Jean L. Boucher, Brian Caulfield, Hannah Daly and Diarmuid Torney, 2023, IRELAND’S CLIMATE CHANGE ASSESSMENT Volume 4: Realising the Benefits of Transition and Transformation, Environmental Protection Agency, Ireland, 284 pp,
[4] O’Mahony, T., Torney, D., (2023) Transforming Development: Economy, Innovation and Finance, in, Róisín Moriarty, Tadhg O’Mahony and Agnieszka Stefaniec, Jean L. Boucher, Brian Caulfield, Hannah Daly and Diarmuid Torney, 2023, IRELAND’S CLIMATE CHANGE ASSESSMENT Volume 4: Realising the Benefits of Transition and Transformation, Environmental Protection Agency, Ireland, 284 pp,
Dr Tadhg O'Mahony 
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