The past week started with Mary Robinson, former president, member of the Nelson Mandela-founded Elders think-tank, and climate justice campaigner, addressing a jam-packed meeting room at the offices of the Dublin law firm William Fry. The occasion was the launch of 2026 activities by the Green Team Network, a group of professionals in the Irish investment funds industry interested in improving the sustainability of their work.

During the event’s Q&A session, I asked Robinson the following question: “There are people making business decisions at the moment across borders and time horizons. In this room, they’ll be deciding where to invest for the next, maybe, three, five, or 10 years, depending on what product they’re working on, and whether it’s on this side of the Atlantic or the other. People are making other decisions in other businesses, like where to place an office or sign a contract.

“I’m wondering, how can you help those people navigate the disjunction between all those areas they’re working on? A year ago, they were told they’d have all these new obligations under EU law. That’s being rolled back now, maybe it will come back after a summer of bad fires and floods.

“I’m not asking you to predict when things will shift again, whether it’s mid-term elections in the US or anything like that. But intellectually, how to navigate that? Things can shift again in two years, in five years, we don’t know. How do we make decisions in this environment?”

Robinson was frank. “It’s a difficult question. I’m not sure if I can give an adequate answer to it,” she said. She then proceeded to make the US political predictions I had been wary of asking her. “We have to survive the fact that the United States is led by somebody who’s now power-crazy,” she said.

Yet, while US President Donald Trump seeks “distraction” through actions like sending more naval forces to the Middle East and is indeed very powerful, she was confident that he had no following in his undermining of the rules-based order.

“We have the mid-term elections, and there could be real checks on his power if Democrats win both houses, which they could,” she said. 

“I understand that, at a political level, politicians may have to be far more careful, and I have to be an Elder. That’s precisely why I am speaking out so directly, and other Elders are speaking out as well,” she added.

“Truth is being so undermined. But actually, what happened in Minnesota may help,” she said. The Trump administration’s lies about recent fatal shootings by its agents in the US state have been widely exposed. “It’s all on video. People saw it. So it’s like the beginning of the emperor has no clothes.

“Trump is beginning to be unpeeled a bit. And I think, maybe, that will help. But we’re in difficult times – unprecedented in my lifetime – that the United States would be in the hands of an arrogant power-grabbing bully.”

John wrote on Wednesday about the risk of letting “emotion, comparison, and story” – all wonderful features of human life – take over decision-making. “The emotional, the relative and the narrative can combine to harrow and to harm. Too often, feelings dominate, comparisons confound, and stories simplify,” he warned.

While there was a dimension of wishful thinking to my exchange with Robinson on Monday, that was only the start of the week. Later that day, under pressure from his own Republican party and gun-rights activists, Trump began to reverse his policy of militia-like raids against suspected illegal immigrants in Minnesota.

Storm Chandra’s wake-up call

By Wednesday, attention had turned back home to the destruction caused by storm Chandra across the east of Ireland. It turned out we didn’t have to wait until the summer for disasters to remind us that, however quickly or slowly we decide to implement climate policy, any given amount of greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere will still cause the same amount of global warming and associated extreme weather.

As the Government opened financial assistance for families and businesses hit by flooding from Enniscorthy to Monaghan, it is also preparing to hold the EU’s presidency from July 1.

This is where Robinson next wants to see action. “I know from some of my European friends, there is a fear,” she told the Green Team Network event. “There’s a fear that Ireland, because we have so many tech companies with their European offices here – that we’re going to go soft. We’re going to go soft on some of the regulation.

“I see heads nodding, you know what I’m talking about. So you know, I would hope that this network could be a real voice for saying, ‘No, we must not be perceived as being soft on regulations for our self-interest because we house so many of these large American tech companies’.”

While Robinson hailed Europe’s efforts to date in achieving the world’s highest environmental standards, she said: “Now there are attempts to weaken them, especially to weaken the regulations that we have in the name of competitiveness. Now, there probably are some tweaks that could be done for competitiveness. But the argument isn’t that, really. The argument is to make it softer, be less able, needing to do less. And that is not on.”

The EU last year shelved additional sustainability reporting requirements for businesses in response to the Draghi report highlighting the impact of regulation on competitiveness, and to US pressure to roll back environmental, social and governance (ESG) obligations. 

Also in the past week, sustainability expert and columnist with The Currency Tara Shine and her colleagues told clients they were closing down their business, Change by Degrees. “While our purpose is to give every person on the planet sustainability as a superpower, policy changes at European level and political headwinds internationally have pushed sustainability down the agenda. As a result, the board made the decision to plan an orderly wind-down of the business,” they wrote to stakeholders.

Tara will continue writing her column and tell our members more about the lessons she has learned from eight years running Change by Degrees in the coming days.

A “no subject in the US”

This trend was evident during the week as the aviation industry gathered in Dublin for the annual Growth Frontiers conference. Jonathan heard some of the speakers at the event acknowledge this slippage.

“It’s fair to say that the enthusiasm for ESG matters has probably peaked and receded. A reality check has been done by airlines, I think,” said Laurent Delvart, deputy global head of aviation and head of EMEA at Crédit Agricole Corporate Investment Bank.

The number of transactions in the sector qualifying as “green, sustainability, transition, or whatever you call it” dropped from around 25 in 2023 to around 15 last year, he estimated. 

“There’s been a decrease of interest generally, globally. But at the same time, we’ve seen new entrants from areas where you may not have expected it, like Asia-Pacific, for instance,” Delvart said. Geographical fractures are appearing.

“Airlines in Europe, or the UK to some extent, which is aligning closely to the EU regulation in some parts – that’s a mandatory thing. But this is a non-event or no subject in the US, for instance, and generally in many parts of the world.”

Deion McCarthy, VP of fixed income investor relations and sustainability at Dubai Aerospace Enterprise, agreed. “I think it’s very jurisdictionally specific,” he said. “It has not fallen off the radar for every investor. With the concentration of investors in the aircraft ABS [asset-backed securities] space specifically being in the United States, naturally that has caused a shift away from considering ESG or sustainability credentials as part of your overall economics of underwriting. But that hasn’t drifted out of the vernacular either, by any means.”

Another factor, McCarthy said, was low oil prices (around $60, or €50, per barrel in recent months), making it “more difficult to sell the story of the [Airbus] Neo and the [Boeing] Max fuel-burn savings when compared to when oil was at $90-100, but that too will change”.

As if on cue, Trump’s latest threats against Iran caused a brief spike above $70 on Thursday.

“If you don’t have the investors, then you don’t have the strategy.”

Sarah Bradley

Where does this leave the many asset managers eager to listen to Robinson on Monday, when she embraced the role of “moral conscience” for such business groups? 

Green Team Network event organiser Sarah Bradley, a partner at Grant Thornton, said that while professionals in the funds industry participate in the design of investment strategies at multiple levels, they have to factor in two things when it comes to ESG criteria.

“There’s investor sentiment, right? So, do they really want to do the right thing, and are they going to pay a premium for this when they think about if it’s coming into their pensions, or if it’s going to affect their bottom-line return?” she said. “There are some people who just won’t, and if you don’t have the investors, then you don’t have the strategy.”

The second factor was geographical and jurisdictional location, and Bradley reflected the same transatlantic divide reported above in aviation finance. “It’s difficult, then, for an individual to go, ‘Well, what will I do?’,” she said.

Even when asset managers believe in the value of sustainable strategies, the reality is that they’re investing other people’s money. Unlike financial returns – or even successful past policies to address other gas emissions affecting the clearly defined ozone layer problem, as outlined by Robinson – greenhouse gases and their impact on the climate are more “intangible” and harder to quantify into investment strategies, Bradley said.

This leaves many investment professionals at a loss. The strong attendance at the Green Team Network event demonstrated continued interest for sustainable investing. But a senior executive at a major international investment firm acknowledged to me that when clients don’t share this interest, teams are reduced to channelling their green disposition into local projects like planting trees.

Bradley acknowledged similar limitations to the Green Team Network’s impact. “Some action can come from it, even if it is just at your community level,” she said. “Sometimes you can feel, well, I’m only one cog in a wheel in the organisation, or Ireland is so small, or whatever, but, you know, we can all plant a few carrots in our own back garden… Mind your own, almost, and then that will spread.”

This might seem tokenistic in comparison to the billions of euro at play in funds managed out of Ireland. But Robinson was eager to value community-level climate action. “It’s the old ubuntu of my friend, Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu: ‘I am because you are’ – the relationship with the other. It’s the work with the other, it’s the community. So I want to see Ireland rekindle this meitheal, really start to understand that we are in a crisis situation, but we can actually do a lot.”

And while this starts with the likes of community beehives and school gardens, Robinson made it clear that organisations of like-minded people like the Green Team Network, should also engage in political activism. “Be a voice now during the six-month presidency, watch what Ireland is doing,” she told participants. “Don’t let us become perceived as we are a little bit, as being very in the pocket of big tech in the United States.”

*****

Elsewhere last week, Francesca spoke with the heads of litigation at Ireland’s leading law firms to review the past year’s commercial caseload. From high-stakes judicial reviews to the potential of third-party funding, they identified the latest trends shaping court battles. 

Ian interviewed Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment Peter Burke, teasing out the path that took him from a Westmeath accountancy practice to the cabinet table. Tourism was the area where Burke revealed some of the most interesting plans in his portfolio.

I joined forces with Laoise Neylon of the Dublin Inquirer to explore the fast-growing industry of commercial homes contracted by Tusla to look after the children in the agency’s care. We tracked €270 million in payments for 2024 to their ultimate beneficiaries and asked the largest companies in this sector about the quality of the care they provide, with several former high-ranking civil servants in the health service showing up along the way.