Earlier this month, south of Rome, there were more Irish accents than Italian to be heard during the Raising Hope conference. And that wasn’t just at the bar afterwards, breezily perched above a gibbous moon reflected in Lake Albano. I reckoned that if anyone was going to take a concept like “ecological conversion” and turn it into something a bit more earthy and lyrical it was likely to be someone from Ireland.
Jane Mellett — theology-trained, climate activist, and professional conscience-pricker — delivered: “It’s really simple, you know. Take what you need, but please stop feckin’ the place up.”
This week Ireland will go to the polls to choose a successor to Michael D. Higgins as its head of state. Whoever she is - and as it happens all of the candidates are women - she will have big shoes to fill. Despite his physical size, Higgins grew to cast a big shadow as president, lending the above-electoral-politics weight to issues like climate change and its deep connection with global poverty, debt, and justice.
With Higgins leaving the scene, some fear Ireland will no longer have the same moral clarity on the subject amongst its political leadership.
As climate policy expert Dr. Cara Augustenborg put it in TheJournal.ie:
Climate change is the elephant in the room and in the race to the Áras1.
In past general elections, it featured as a core question in national debates. It has also been a defining pillar of two Irish presidents, with Michael D. Higgins placing climate justice at the heart of his past 14 years as President while Mary Robinson spent those years championing climate action on the world stage.
Against that backdrop, the media’s silence on climate in the 2025 presidential debates is as curious as it is alarming. If climate was central to our previous presidents and general election debates, why isn’t it important enough to ask those seeking the presidency about it now?
That anxiety comes as the country’s head of government, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, recently signalled a retreat from some climate projects, saying, “I don’t think we can mitigate for climate change.”
Martin is hardly an outlier - political leaders who previously challenged each other to go further in their climate ambition have signalled similar retreats.
Canada’s Mark Carney as Bank of England governor pushed Big Finance to play an active climate role in the runup to COP26 in Glasgow. As Canada’s prime minister he’s overturned climate measures and watched with barely a word as the global finance coalition he built disbanded.
The Conservative Party that led the UK government hosting COP26 to much fanfare now says it will repeal all climate commitments and targets.
And on Friday, the US and Saudi Arabia succeeded in preventing the global shipping industry imposing a carbon price to stimulate the move towards Net Zero Fuels. In just a few months, the relatively modest measure went from sure thing to the latest capitulation, as countries - including many threatened with erasure due to climate impacts - switched their votes. Seemingly happier to court long-term destruction than short-term retaliation from an unstable tyrant.
“Climate pragmatism” and “greenhushing” are in, and political leaders see no downside in cheerily ignoring their own warnings from just a couple of years ago about the existential nature of the threat of climate change.
Raising Hope, Stíl Ghaelach
Against that backdrop, and following a message from Pope Leo that seemed to recognise the political climate had changed in directions as worrying as the physical climate, it was interesting to see how people would respond at the “Raising Hope” conference on the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si’ with plenty of reasons for potential despair.
Fortunately, finding the conference with an unexpectedly Irish accent and subversive sense of joy in adversity was itself a source of hope.
A cohort of Celts punching above their weight in climate and spiritual circles is in some ways surprising, in some ways inevitable. So much recent Irish history on climate is a story of missed opportunities to make necessary changes, but that puts the place squarely in the middle of climate action - knowing what’s needed but struggling to get there, and sometimes heading in the wrong direction.
No place I’ve ever spent time managed to feel like the world’s largest small town more than Ireland, and in some ways that makes people who live there better adapted to navigating the weird smallness and intimacy of a global civilisation conscious of its common fate.
Listening to Bishop Martin Hayes of Kilmore, former Green Party leader Eamon Ryan, and Jane Mellett of Trócaire, it’s striking how naturally they inhabit that tension between conviction and humility, big concepts and human-scale action. Hayes, the Irish bishops’ “care for creation” lead, talks about a rewilding initiative that asks the rank and file faithful to see holiness where they might at first see untidiness. Ryan, newly out of electoral politics, muses that climate diplomacy has become less about technology and more about “our sense of ourselves within creation.” And Mellett, who has spent the last six years standing outside Leinster House every Friday, quietly refusing despair, insists that faith still matters — but only if it’s the kind that shows up.
Which isn’t to say that avoids thinking big, or challenging others to do likewise. At this conference before COP30, there was much speculation about the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative - and whether the Vatican and currently observer-status states such as Ireland might come out to endorse it.
What unites them isn’t dogma. It’s the decision to keep at it anyway — to find grace in the slog.
In a country where the Church once expected obedience, these are voices of patient persuasion. Just the quiet confidence that comes from having lived through collapse and still choosing to rebuild. Synodality — that unwieldy Vatican word for “walking together” — suddenly makes sense when you hear Hayes describe it as “a conversation in faith” pointing towards a pragmatic vision of a very different future Church.
That’s not the “pay, pray, obey” Church of old Ireland. That’s a parish hall full of people who might not even agree on God, but who understand that climate, like grace, is a collective act. And that working on it won’t come as a gift from wise and benevolent leaders. It’s up to us. Always has been.
Mentioning Thomas Cahill’s 30-year old “How the Irish Saved Civilization” can bring on an eye-roll and a blush as strong as someone pulling out your teenage diary and high school yearbook. But at moments like this, stories about sheer bloody-mindedness of seeing a way through that is about more than mere selfish survival go down as well as a decent pint of plain.
Post-Script: Climate Martyrs
That the collision between faith and action can sometimes come at a terrible cost. Before travelling to Rome I’d been reading up on Dorothy Stang, an Ohio-born woman who became a nun who chose to work amongst some of the poorest - often with little support and less thanks. She drew attention to the Amazon’s destruction and the indigenous people and small farmers brutally crushed in the process by Brazil’s powerful corporates and landowners - often just done with impunity, whatever the law said.
In 2005 she was travelling to a remote village to oppose a wealthy landowner seizing land to clear for grazing. Two hired gunmen confronted her on the dirt road. Sister Dorothy she took her Bible from her bag and began to read the Beatitudes: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice...
They shot her six times and killed her.
In January 2025 her relics were among those placed at a Sanctuary of New Martyrs at the Basilica of San Bartolomeo in Rome, after the Church recognised her as a martyr. Like other martyrs - Oscar Romero comes to mind - it was easier for people in power to find themselves supportive of her work once she’d been killed, less convenient when she was making people uncomfortable by confronting them with their own failures to stop injustice in life.
Stang was one of a string of names Cardinal Jaime Spengler of Brazil called out while saying Mass at the conference, calling them “climate martyrs”. 2
So before travelling back to the UK I planned to visit San Bartolomeo on the Saturday. Only to wake up to the realisation that all around us Italy had largely ground to a halt with a general strike and protests against the ongoing destruction of Gaza and the Israeli assault and detention of people on an unarmed flotilla to bring aid to people caught in a man-made famine. Including Greta Thunberg.
Though she has insisted it’s not the important story compared to the injustice and suffering she was drawing attention to, (upsetting content warning beyond the link) reports of her treatment at the hands of Israeli forces after being taken from international waters are harrowing3. It’s not a stretch to say that a kind of martyrdom could easily have been the outcome for her.
The contrast between leaders who succumb to the temptation to say things they know not to be true to avoid loss of status and people who put themselves in harm’s way to resist injustice and cruelty could not be more stark.
Most of us live somewhere in between.
“Aras” is shorthand for Áras an Uachtaráin, the Dublin residence of Ireland’s largely ceremonial head of state.
Spengler has form in this. From a July speech launching a plea from bishops of the Global South to COP30:
On behalf of the Latin American Episcopal Council and the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), as we commemorate the tenth anniversary of Laudato Si’ and the Paris Agreement, I am raising a voice that is not mine alone, but that of the Amazonian peoples, of the martyrs of the land - we could say of the climate -, and of the riverside, indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant and urban communities”, Cardinal Spengler said in his speech, speaking from the perspective of Latin America. “There is an urgent need to become aware of the need for changes in lifestyle, production and consumption”. He for example denounced the “masking” of economic interests under names such as “green capitalism” or “transition economy” or the opening of new oil wells in the Amazon and emphasized the Church rejects mechanisms such as the “financialization of nature”.
Seriously, the descriptions are of treatment designed to be degrading, humiliating, and revealingly revelling in cruelty now a feature, not a bug, of regimes meeting more appeasement than resistance.
