An Taisce at the 2025 Mary Robinson Climate and Nature Conference

The Mary Robinson Climate and Nature Conference 2025 — 26th/27th May in Ballina, Co Mayo

The Conference describes itself as, 'a unique trans-disciplinary meeting point open to all voices to connect around climate and nature concerns and actions. The event addressed our courage to think and act differently to unlearn/relearn previous habits, pathways, and behaviours in terms of both everyday life and wider policy and governance change'. 

An Taisce's Head of Advocacy Dr Elaine McGoff gave an inspirational keynote under the conference's theme of 'Courage in Crisis'. A special panel event — Grassroots Action for Climate and Nature — from An Taisce’s leading environmental programmes shared actions and strategies to address the twin climate and biodiversity crises. The panelists outlined the challenges they face, how they overcome issues, and what’s still to be done. 

This session was designed for politicians, local authorities, educators, community groups and students. It was expertly chaired by Liane Costello, Clean Coasts Biodiversity Officer alongside colleagues Gráinne Ryan, Climate Action Programme Manager, Aileen Bright GLOBE Ireland Coordinator and Rachel Geary, Learning about Ecosystems and Forests (LEAF) Ireland Programme Manager.

Another special event from the conference was 'Sunsetting at Oweninny Wind Farm'.  After an introduction from Mary Robinson, there was a great discussion featuring Dr Elaine McGoff with Mark McCorry, Bord na Mona, facilitated by Sean McCabe of Bohemians FC, taking place in a setting dedicated to promoting the importance of renewable energy.

Image credit: Aisha Devoy, Climate Action Officer, An Taisce Climate Ambassadors Programme

Dr Elaine McGoff's full keynote from the 2025 Mary Robinson Climate and Nature Conference

From left to right: Dr. Caitríona Carlin, Lecturer, School of Natural Sciences and the Ryan Institute  - Conference Chair, Dr Elaine McGoff, Head of Advocacy, An Taisce, Mary Robinson, Dr Gerard Mc Carthy, Physical Oceanographer and Climate Scientist, Maynooth University, Prof. Hannah Daly, Sustainable Energy, University College Cork, Dr Sinéad Sheehan, School of Psychology and the Ryan Institute – Conference Chair, Dr. Alma Clavin, Lecturer in Sustainability, Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching and the Ryan Institute. Photo courtesy of The Mary Robinson Centre

You can listen back to the keynote on Soundcloud by clicking this link. Or read the full text of the speech below.

Or watch here (please give your browser for video to play):

Photo courtesy of The Mary Robinson Centre

Dr Elaine McGoff's keynote speech:

I’m head of advocacy with An Taisce, and I’ve been with them for 7.5 years. I’m often asked in my job how I stay optimistic, how I keep going in spite of all the bad news, all the losses. I usually flippantly answer that I’m just stubborn like that, but the theme of this conference, Courage in Crisis meant I had to really dig into it, think about it and examine what it actually is that keeps me going every day. To be honest, it’s been a little nerve wracking, in case my own motivation didn’t stand up to this scrutiny. 

The job of environmental advocacy isn’t particularly cheerful, we’re reading studies and articles on a daily basis about the accelerating collapse of nature and climate, and then our job is to try to make our politicians and decision makers care enough so they will be the leaders we need them to be, and take the necessary transformative decisions. Spoiler alert, they rarely do. And to top it off, we’re often then vilified in the media for holding our governments to account when they renege on their promises and legal obligations. Somehow in a world in which we’re hurtling headlong towards a cliff,  eNGOs have become the baddies for shouting stop.  

So the question I set out to answer is, how is it that I, and others like me, read those awful statistics and headlines day in and day out, face political apathy and inaction,  combined with public indifference and still manage to put on our game face and continue on with the fight?  

Part of the motivation, I must admit, is selfish, and totally separate from my work.  I have two daughters, who look to me to protect them and their future. I want them to know, even if we fail, that at least I tried. I tried really bloody hard. 

And it’s often things they say and questions they ask which I find the most challenging to deal with.  

My eldest daughter, Naoise, when she was younger asked me, in full naivety and optimism ‘what will we do when climate change is fixed?’,  

The innocence of that question almost broke my heart, knowing that climate change is going to have such a massive impact on their lives, and the lives of future generations. Our generation, and those before us have plundered their inheritance. 

And my 8 year old, Zoe, not long ago came up behind me as I was looking at horrifying footage of flooding in Spain, so she sat up on my knee and we talked about what I was watching, and climate change and she said ‘Mummy, I don’t want to die because of climate change’ . Which triggered my go-to motivational spiel, telling her that’s why I work so hard, and why others like me do too, that we’re doing our best to change things, to build a better future for her and for others. And she paused and quietly considered what I had said, before looking me straight in the eye and saying ‘yes mum, but it’s not working’........What can you do with that? She’s right.  

So how then, as both a mother and an advocate, do I explain this compulsion to keep fighting a battle that we’re losing, to keep holding out hope for a better future when everywhere I look tells me that we’re headed into an ever bleaker and more hostile world, to keep believing that we can and will do better.   

And I think it might be useful to share some of what I’ve read recently on this theme, because I know I’m not the only one looking for reasons to not give into despair. And I hope some of the ideas I’ve gathered from various sources will resonate with at least some of you, and help to inspire your ongoing determination and courage.  

To begin with, I found myself wondering was what is the opposite of hope? What happens when hope is thin on the ground, is that despair? Because if I’m being honest I’m not filled with hope about our collective future or that of my children, but nor am I crippled with despair. I’ve read a lot of people who say that the opposite of hope is grief, and I can see the truth in that.  

Psychologist Renee Lertzman views the climate crisis as a trauma that needs to be processed.  Like it or not we are living in broad landscape of grief — ecological, spiritual, civic. A world where the weather is unpredictable, the water more polluted, the land more worn out. We are living in a world which our ancestors would no longer recognise as home. We are sending our children to live on an unfamiliar planet. 

And given what we have lost to date, it is important to mourn, to recognise and process that. I think to grieve for loss is to be human, we mourn because we are connected, we mourn because we care deeply, we mourn because we are alive.   

And I believe that the first step in dealing with and processing our current crisis is to understand the full extent of the threat, with an honest appraisal of where we currently are, what we stand to lose, and how close to that we now are. The novelist and civil rights activist James Baldwin put it perfectly when he said: 

‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced’ 

Yet I frequently hear how we need to communicate hope, how doom and gloom does not win over the public. But this strict adherence to positivity can then often given rise to toxic positivity and techo optimism, and that’s something I see a lot in my field. One really stark example of it would be to do with data centres, and the argument that we need AI and far more data centres because then the energy guzzling AI will come up with the solutions we seem to be unable to agree on as human, it will save us from ourselves

I also see it in the field of water quality. Farmers are doing a lot, and jumping through a lot of hoops when it comes to water quality, but the reality of the situation is, the regulations and  the measures which are being put in place are good for certain pollutants, but in the South and South East of Ireland we have a nitrogen problem, largely from pasture based agriculture, often dairying, and almost none of the measures are addressing that.  

It’s like doing physio exercises for your arm in the hopes it might cure a broken leg.  

And despite a lot of people knowing that, the accepted narrative is that we’re making great strides, water quality is improving, the measures are making all the difference. Who does this narrative serve? Yes, we want to keep people engaged, but does false hope really achieve that? Or does it just further disenfranchise a critical group of people when the reality is laid bare?  

Does it serve our waterbodies, like the irreplaceable Ladys Island Lake in Wexford. It is a lagoon of enormous ecological, spiritual and historical significance. It is also the most polluted lake in Ireland, and ecologists studying it have said they feel like undertakers to Ireland’s natural heritage, writing obituaries. Should we be positive about that? Or does it make more sense to figure out what we’ve lost, why we’re lost it and chart a new way forward? Yes, the truth might make some uncomfortable, but when those practices are undermining our collective heritage should we not proceed with courage and solutions, instead of false hope? Does honesty not ultimately serve the collective good better here? 

Courage is another theme which I kept coming across, particularly having the courage to continue the fight without the assurance of a happy ending. As the philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte famously said:  

‘You don’t fight fascism because you’re going to win. You fight fascism because it is fascist.’”   

Courage is picking yourself back up, no matter how bruised and battered, and continuing on because you believe in protecting what we still have, because you know it’s the right thing to do, even if the deck is stacked against you, even when you’re afraid. 

So where do we find this courage? From what I’ve read, and from my own experience, I would say one place we find it is nature. Rachel Carson beautifully put it like this: 

‘those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts’ 

We must fall in love again with the rivers, bogs and mountains, and remember that we belong to the earth, we do not own it. And I speak from personal experience when I say there is nothing quite like the icy chill of a December river swim to make me feel connected, present and a part of the natural world. I measure out the seasons in river swims, it’s a weekly anchor back to myself, back to nature, a sure fire way to clear my head and recharge my heart.  Whether we realise it or not, our well-being is strongly linked to nature, and if we allow it to, it can bring moments of joy into every single day.   

It is from this love of nature, from this connection to the natural world that the courage will flow. As the indigenous writer Robin Wall Kimmerer eloquently put it in her novel Braiding Sweetgrass: 

‘Gratitude for all the earth has given us lends us courage to turn and face the windingo that stalks us, to refuse to participate in an economy that destroys the  beloved Earth to line the pockets of the greedy, to demand an economy that is aligned with life, not stacked against it’   

We need to have the courage to imagine a future where communities can thrive as part of a sustainable ecosystem. We know it can be done, because our ancestors all did it, for more than 200,000 years before capitalism. And while we can’t go back in time, I think in moving forward we should look to knowledge of the communities who haven't brought the earth to the brink of destruction, and that is largely indigenous cultures. These cultures, generally speaking, put a lot of value on the importance of principles like interdependence, trust and reciprocity. 

So how do we structure our communities so they can function in this way? One concept  which resonated really strongly with me is that of the Children’s Fire, which a man called Mac McCarthy learned from a number of native American mentors from different tribes. At the beginning of every meeting indigenous chiefs would light a fire in the centre of their circle to symbolise the future generations of all beings, human and non-human, and to ensure that the primary consideration should always be the continuation of life when making decisions of any kind. The protection of the children’s fire was paramount.  

Which begs the question, what sort of a society would choose to douse the children’s fire? Because, to be clear, that’s very much what we are doing, day in day out. We have  colonised their future, pillaged their inheritance, defiled the nest.  How do we become a society that once again cherishes the children’s fire? As a start we need to recognise that we’re living in a society shaped by colonialism, capitalism and over-consumption.  

And in order to build resilient societies that can cope with the huge changes, shocks and uncertainty which are headed our way, we need to move away from the exploitative, colonialist mindset that caused them. As Einstein said, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. We must align ourselves far more with principles which are deeply imbedded in many indigenous communities. The principles of trust and reciprocity are crucial for well co-ordinated, swift and inclusive decision making.  

And we have demonstrated in Ireland that we are really good at deliberative democracy when we’re given the chance, which very much embodies these principles. The recommendations which came from the recent citizens assembly on biodiversity loss were testament to that. Give people the necessary information, access to experts and the time to fully discuss and understand the issues and really far-reaching and ambitious recommendations are achieved. In a way it was a rekindling of the children's fire through shared understanding of the issues at hand, and it was inspiring to behold.  

To those of you in the audience who are sitting there thinking that this sounds like some far fetched utopian future, where we have communities that truly value interdependence and reciprocity, we don’t have to look all the way to indigenous or aboriginal communities. In Ireland we have a practice called Meitheal, which is an Irish tradition referring to cooperative work and community spirit, often used to describe a group of people working together to assist each other with heavy tasks such as bringing in the hay. To the heart of the concept is community unity through cooperative work and mutually reciprocal support. The themes here are the same: reciprocity, trust, interdependence. It’s in our DNA.  

And I believe it’s time to have an intergenerational meitheal to tend to the children's fire. It’s time to come together to do the heavy lifting for sake of future generations, both human and non-human. What could be a more worthy cause?  In Ireland we haven’t all quite sold our souls at the altar of capitalism. We see that in the ongoing meitheals, in the ambition of the citizens assemblies, in the way community is still very much valued across this land. We see it in the community gardens springing up, in the rivers trusts, in the tidy towns. This urge to give back, to be part of a community, to make the world better. 

I don’t know if we’ll succeed in creating a world that values the children's fire, but I know even striving toward that goal will make the world a little bit better. Slavery was not abolished overnight, the suffragette movement similarly took years of fighting, and who could have predicted that one single girl refusing to go to school could trigger a global youth climate movement. These societal sea-changes are not predictable, but they all have one thing in common. People that believe in them, people that fought for them, people with the courage to stand up for their communities without the promise of success. 

So in summary to the question, what gives me courage in a crisis? It is immersing myself in nature, it’s in knowing what it is we’re fighting for and what we’ve already lost, it’s in seeing communities in action, it’s in knowing that even if the odds look bad, I’m fighting the good fight, and there’s an awful lot of us in this together. Can we collectively rekindle our children's fire and embolden a new wave of inter-generational meitheal. For that, we need people like you to see, to feel, to act, together.  

Please carry the children's fire away with you today.  

And then maybe one day I can look my daughter in the eye and answer her honestly that it is working, we will succeed. And let the children’s fire blaze.