DCU staff to show support for student climate strike
September 18th, 2019
Dublin City University has joined University College Cork in urging its staff and students to join the global school strike against climate inaction this Friday.
In an email sent to staff this afternoon seen by The Green News, the university’s chief operations officer Dr Declan Raftery invited staff and students to gather on Friday “in an act of solidarity with this global initiative”.
DCU will hold a climate vigil at the DCU sign on the entrance to St Patrick’s Campus at
Earlier this week, UCC president Professor John O’Halloran also encouraged staff to support young climate activists. “UCC supports those voices from a generation that will be most impacted by climate change,” he said. “We need national and international action now.”
Speaking to The Green News earlier this week, Síofra Richardson of UCC’s Environmental Society welcomed the university’s invitation of solidarity with young climate activists.
“We are proud to see our university not only recognises the gravity of the climate crisis but demonstrating solidarity with grassroots activists,” she said.
This Friday, thousands of young people in Ireland and around the world will walk out of their classrooms and take to streets to reiterate their demands for immediate climate action from world leaders.
In Ireland, rallies are slated to take place in various locations across the country including Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Tralee and Dundalk, with adult volunteers expressing their preparedness to preside over the youth rallies.
Around 20 Irish academics have signed an open letter “wholeheartedly” supporting the global climate strike movement whose concerns rest on “solid, incontrovertible evidence” of a climate breakdown.
The international letter is currently signed by over 1,100 academics mainly from across Europe as they outline their support for the global school strike movement.
The list of Irish signees includes some of Ireland’s leading minds on climate change policy, including UCD’s Cara Augustenborg and Diarmuid Torney of DCU, as well as legal experts such as UCD’s Andrew Jackson and NUI Galway’s Maeve O’Rourke.
The letter states that the students climate concerns are “well-founded and rest on solid, incontrovertible evidence”, pointing to the need for a rapid cut in emissions to stand a chance of limiting warming to 1.5 °C in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
While the strike movement – and Greta Thunberg in particular – have come under increasing scrutiny in recent months, the academics find that the youth movement “deserve[s] our respect and full support”.
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