Issues in Environmental Research: Politics, Anthropology and Sociology

Ecopolitics Series Vol. 3 www.ecopoliticsonline.com Liam Leonard & Michael O'Kane 2008 Galway: © Irish Greenhouse Press www.greenhousepress.blogspot.com & Micromarketing www.micromarketing.ie Cover Art: starseastone By: Brian Brennan www.brianbrennan.net Published in the Republic of Ireland All rights reserved ISSN: 2009-0315

Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank their families, colleagues and friends, as well as the activists and figures interviewed for this book. Particular thanks to Ollie Walsh, Amanda Dolan and ‘Biggs’ Biggley of Micromarketing, Brian Brennan for his cover art, Greenhouse Press and Eileen Leonard for their assistance.

Preface: This third edition in the Ecopolitics Series titled Issues in Development and Place: Politics, Anthropology and Sociology will evaluate the relationship between activists and the wider political system as part of the salient political frameworks surrounding environmental issues in Ireland. This is achieved by way of an examination of a series of engaging case studies which are analysed through a range relevant environmental of concepts. While these elements are sometimes competing, they exist within a sub- stratum of intersecting civic and governmental structures where political frameworks and opportunity structures overlap, embracing state agencies, corporate elements and environmental protest movements. With the arrival of the Irish Green Party in government as part of the 2007 coalition government with Fianna Fáil (alongside the Greens taking a seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly), environmental politics can be said to have travelled full circle in Ireland. While the issues of climate change, peak oil, nuclear power, bio-fuels and consumption have come to dominate news coverage and political debate in recent years, this book brings together two studies of green activism across a time span which commences with Irish-Australian anthropologist Michael O’Kane’s research on urban Green Party activists during the 1997 general election, and incorporates the journalism, research and articles of Irish-American political sociologist Liam Leonard from the period 1999 up until the campaign for the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty in May 2008. The fact that such research has been undertaken by two sons of the diaspora is in itself a remarkable reminder of the extent to which issues in Ireland continue to be the concern of a global audience; as the development of this once green and pristine homeland has become something of a paradox, economic growth now competes with traditional values while the Irish public often struggle with a rapidly changing society and environment.

The rise of the Irish Greens into power caused many activists to reconsider the direction of the environmental movement after so many campaigns going back to the campaign to save Viking Dublin or the ‘No Nukes’ protests at Carnsore Point in the late 1970s. Indeed, my first book on this subject Green Nation (2006) has been followed by many further studies on this subject. While John Barry has written several books on the philosophical basis of environmentalism, we have witnessed a rising number of academic studies on environmental issues in Ireland including Brendan Flynn’s the Blame Game, Hilary Tovey’s Environmentalism in Ireland: Movements and Activism, Mary Kelly’s Environmental Attitudes in Ireland (all 2007) and Ricca Edmondson and Henrike Rau’s Environmental Argument and Cultural Difference (2008) and my own book the Environmental Movement in Ireland (2008) have all added to a much wider understanding of environmental issues in the Irish case. This book adds to this ongoing process of documenting environmental issues in a changing Ireland. However, this book provides an insight into the realities and methods surrounding green activism and activists over a period when environmentalism has come to be the leading concern of our times. It has consciously and deliberately been published as an E-Book; following on the successful partnership between Irish Greenhouse Press and Micromarketing with the Ecopolitics Online Journal (www.ecopoliticsonline.com), the publication of an online only book seems to be a most natural progression, and perhaps points to a future direction for academic publishing in the future.

Liam Leonard, June 2008

Contents:

Section I:

Considering the Irish Greens: An Ethnographic Approach to Identity and Environmentalism

Michael Patrick O’Kane PhD,

Monash University, Clayton, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (1993-2003) The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (from 2007)

Dedication & Introduction ______1 Chapter 1: Engaging with Environmentalism ______5 Chapter 2: Being Green ______48 Chapter 3: The Kilmeanagh Landfill Dispute ______103 Chapter 4: The Party at Work ______112 Chapter 5: The Election ______122 Conclusion ______160 Bibliography ______166 ______Section II:

Understanding Environmentalism in Ireland

Liam Leonard PhD, School of Political Science and Sociology, ECI and Social Science Research Centre, National University of Ireland Galway (2001-2008) and Sligo Institute of Technology (from 2008). Senior Editor, Ecopolitics Online Journal

Chapter 1: Irish Environmental Policy ______170 Chapter 2: Environmental Policy Implementation ______180 Chapter 3: The Irish Response to Environmental Challenges ______193 Chapter 4: Policy and Practice: An Investigation of the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme (REPS 1) ______202 Chapter 5: Green Activist Methodologies: Journalism ______210 Chapter 6: Research Methods: Interviews______220 Chapter 7: Populism, Place and Protest ______242 Chapter 9: The Galway Water Crisis ______270 Chapter 10: Tara and the ‘Climate Change Challenge’ ______285 Chapter 11: The Rise of the Greens: From Protest to Power ______305 Bibliography ______316

Issues in Environmental Research

Issues in Environmental Research: Politics, Anthropology and Sociology Liam Leonard & Michael O'Kane

Section I: CONSIDERING THE IRISH GREENS: An Ethnographic Approach to Identity and Environmentalism Michael Patrick O’Kane PhD Monash University, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia

Michael’s Dedication:

I dedicate this work to my mother, Mary Elizabeth O’Kane (nee Cooke). As fate would have it, Mum was taken from us on the 7/11/2002 and thus did not live to see the completion of this work. There are no words for the loss felt by myself and my family at her passing and I can find no poem or line of verse that could express how much we all miss her. I would simply like to say that without her love, strength, dedication, devotion and faith I could never have attempted this thesis. Although it is not nearly enough to thank you for all you have given me, this is for you Mum. You taught me to grit my teeth and get on with it. Wish you were here. Acknowledgements If I knew what doing a PhD thesis was going to be like, would I still have taken the scholarship? That is a question I wouldn’t like to think about for too long. A far easier question to answer would be - could I have done this without the extraordinary support that I have received from my family and friends? The answer to that is ‘absolutely not’. Dad, I thank you for being there for me when I really needed your help and at a time when you had more than enough on your plate. You and Mum have given me so much that I could never repay you; all I can do is thank you and tell you I love you. Terry, no-one has a brother like you. Thank you for your loyalty and your friendship. You and Marta have never turned me away when I needed help or someone to talk to and I thank you both. Lisa, thank you for caring, worrying and all the advice big sister. Your wayward little brother would never even have made it through first year without your support and he has not forgotten it. Thanks for your faith in me. To my partner Erin, I love you and I thank you for putting up with me. No-one else in the world knows just how hard this has been to complete because no-one else has had to put up with me worrying and stressing about this thesis day and night. Thank you for loving me and being you. Let’s have adventures and then lots of children. To my supervisor, Dr Michael Stevenson, I thank you for the way in which you have helped and guided me. Without the benefit of your experience and support through what have proven to be some of the hardest years of my life, this thesis just may have killed me. I thank you for supervision and your friendship both. I thank the staff of the School of Political and Social Inquiry for their professionalism and for their understanding. I also thank the School of Political and Social Inquiry in its previous incarnation as the Department of Anthropology and Sociology for granting me the scholarship that allowed me to perform the research upon which this thesis is based. I thank my friend (soon to be Dr) John Martino for his speedy and thorough proof reading. John, one day one of our schemes will succeed and then we won’t know what to do with ourselves. I thank all of my friends for standing by me these last years. You know who you are and my door will always be open. Finally, I thank the members of the Irish Green Party/Comhaontas Glas for allowing me to conduct my fieldwork among them. I believe that there is nothing so noble as to strive to make the world a better place. That is exactly what the Irish Greens are doing. They are sacrificing their time and energy for the betterment of their society. I thank them for their friendship and their trust.

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Introduction:

This study aims to provide a further contribution to the engagement by anthropology with the phenomenon of environmentalism. My reasons for undertaking this project lie in my belief that anthropology offers the study of environmentalism perspectives and expertise not readily found amongst the other disciplines interested in the area. Chief among these is the art of ethnography, for ethnographic research allows the people who are its focus the opportunity to speak with their own voices and in their own words throughout the finished work. This is not the place to expand upon the many achievements of ethnographic fieldwork. Nevertheless, I wish to highlight the way it provides a space for those who read the ethnography to compare the researcher’s perceptions with the discourses of those being studied. The readers, while interacting with the text, are also able to connect with the people whose experiences are recorded in it, regardless of the subjectivity of the author. It goes without saying that the author is compelled to selectively present the discourse of the subjects, and that these selections will be guided by the author’s theoretical framework. The reasons I undertook anthropological fieldwork in Ireland with the Irish Green Party were threefold. First, I have a longstanding theoretical interest in exploring the way in which the environmental movement has employed social and environmental theory. In my Honours thesis I concentrated on a discussion of the synthesis of socialist and ecological theory which appears in the ‘Red- Green’ movement. I wanted to determine if this synthesis constituted a new theory in itself or was rather an adaptation of an older theory. While formulating my doctoral research proposal, I realized that I had become less interested in the ongoing theoretical discussions concerning the genesis or viability of the environmental movement than I was in the people who called themselves environmentalists and who were willing to give their time and effort to the environmental cause. I decided to study a ‘Green Party’ as an expression of a politically active environmental movement because I thought its members would display high levels of participation and commitment. I was becoming more interested in praxis. The other crucial aspect of Green parties, as examples of environmental activism, is their engagement with mainstream politics. On the whole their members are not people living on the verges of society; rather they are engaged in it on all levels. In short, they are not radicals whose primary purpose is to overturn the social order, and often they have gained substantial benefits from the societies in which they live. Furthermore, while performing the ethnographic fieldwork, I hoped the social position of Green Party members would enable me to gain broader cultural insights into the way in which activists saw themselves, while avoiding the complications that exist when trying to contextualise a marginal or subterranean social group within a greater socio-cultural whole. In Ireland I found that this approach helped me to position the Green Party activists in contemporary Irish society and culture thereby enabling me to portray the unique aspects of the Irish Greens.

The second reason that I was drawn to the study of a Green party as an expression of environmental movements is that I agree with their aim of discovering ways in which human beings can create social structures that are sustainable and humane in both environmental and social terms. I feel I must point out here that this does not mean that I am ideologically committed to their cause or that I feel any need to defend, or apologise

2 Issues in Environmental Research for, their beliefs or actions. I do, however, have a great deal of respect for any group of people engaged in a cause which they feel will benefit, not only those that they personally know and care for, but all of humanity. After all, we as a species can not survive the fall of the other species upon which our existence depends. Coming to my own perspectives on environmentalism and sustainability through Marxist and socialist thought, I found myself at times at odds with the Greens, especially in relation to issues of class differentiation and the functions of the capitalist market. I have striven in the writing of this thesis to raise their voices above my own as it is my opinion that the only benefit that comes of mentioning my own subjective views is to warn the reader that ethnographies are a deeply subjective enterprise. Accordingly, along with my reservations about the environmentalist movement I feel it only fair to say that I applaud many of their aims and all of their passion for finding a better path than the one we appear to be sliding down at present. The third reason for my choice of the Green Party in Ireland is possibly the most personal of the three. I come from an Irish Australian cultural background, being the descendant of convicts on one side, rebels on the other and all shades of heroes and villains in between. This means that, while I am deeply rooted in my own culture and nationality, there is a sense of coming from somewhere else, a place of origin, which I believe descendants of immigrants everywhere feel. There has always been much curiosity about Ireland in my family and I suppose that this affected my own sense of identity in my formative years. Maybe I would have been able to grow out of this fascination with Ireland but my parents saw to it that I would not be able to forget my ancestry when they gave me my name. So it seems that Ireland and I were thrown together by accident of birth and, as an Irish Australian trying to decide where I might conduct a twelve month fieldwork research on Green parties, I found the Irish Green Party an obvious choice. It presented me with the opportunity to experience and be part of a movement that I see as critical in humanity’s future relationships with its environment while immersing myself in a culture in which I had long been curious. Structure I have divided this study into five sections, not including the introduction and the conclusion. The first begins with a discussion of anthropology’s engagement with environmentalism, and it is particularly concerned with an ongoing debate between a number of anthropologists regarding the relevance of anthropological research to the study of environmentalism. I have focused upon the thoughts of Peter Brosius, Kay Milton and Eva Berglund who are engaged in this discourse in order to provide a theoretical context for my work and to position the research in the greater field of anthropological research involving environmentalism. The chapter then continues with a discussion of a number of works by Ade Peace in both Ireland and Australia. I have focused on Peace’s work as he provides valuable insights into both the study of environmentalism and the study of Irish culture. His discussion of discourse, identity and conflict introduces several important themes to the thesis and has significantly informed my own approach to my fieldwork data. Lastly, the chapter concludes with a brief history of the environmental movement in Ireland from the 1960s to the present day. This is intended to provide further context for the study and to introduce the Irish Green Party to the reader.

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The second is concerned with a study of identity in relation to the membership of the Irish Greens. The chapter begins with a discussion of Dublin in 1997 and my impressions of it during my fieldwork. Dublin was and remains the central base of the Greens in the Republic and, as such, was the site of most of my field research. Therefore, the discussion is meant to shed light on the particular urban environment in which most of the Party’s members lived and worked. The next section of the chapter is a discussion of identity concerning the Irish Greens. I have concentrated upon six members who I felt represented the range and diversity of the membership as much as possible. Each of these members has had their own path to joining the Green Party. My intention here is to present these individual case studies in order to form some broader statements about the membership’s understandings of their own identities as politically active environmentalists within the socio-cultural context of contemporary Irish society. In the summing up of this discussion, I present the Greens as a community of intellectuals engaged in the production and dissemination of a certain kind of knowledge. Furthermore, I make the case that they do not exist as a community in isolation but are deeply entwined with the other intellectual communities with which they co-exist. I also point out that there is, evolving within the Irish Greens, evidence of an emerging ideology that has yet to coalesce into an independently recognisable form. The third chapter is based upon a case study of a dispute which arose around a proposed landfill development in Galway. It is concerned with a two-day council hearing in which parties on both sides of the dispute debated the viability of the development in a public hearing. I have included this case study in order to demonstrate the way in which the Party served as an advocate for both the environment and the people objecting to the development regardless of their credentials as environmentalists. The point I make here is that one of the Greens most important roles, as an intellectual community, is to provide leadership and expertise in conflicts concerning the environment by engaging in, and attempting to have command over, the various discourses of science and technology employed by their adversaries.

The fourth section deals with the various institutions that constitute the organisational structure of the Party. The institutions discussed are those of the Local Group, the Regional Group, the Co-ordinating Committee and the National Council. This discussion describes the mechanics of the Party and the largely decentralised nature of its body politic. The chapter then moves on to an account of policy formation within the Party and attempts to explain the way in which the Greens’ policy direction has evolved over time. It concludes with a case study on a contentious policy issue, dubbed the ‘Drugs Policy’ by the members, in order to provide an example of policy formation at work within the Party. The fifth section is a discussion of the Party’s journey through the election campaign of 1997. After providing an overview of the election campaign and a description of the other parties contesting the elections, the discussion follows the three local groups that I was most involved in through their experiences during the campaign. It is intended to give the reader an insight into the way in which the Party operated at ground level while giving context to the complexities and themes discussed earlier in the thesis regarding the sense of identity within the Party, the various roles played by the active members and the way in which they were perceived by the public. While it is not appropriate to discuss my conclusions at this point, I feel it is necessary to state that I am

4 Issues in Environmental Research interested in the Greens ideas and perceptions because I see them, first and foremost, as people actively involved in striving for a better world. I have consciously striven to represent them as a group of multi-dimensional, complex and complicated individuals who exist within their own social, cultural, historical, political and economic context. While I strongly believe that comparisons with other such groups will, and indeed must, be made, I would like to preface the rest of the work with the thought that ethnographies are specific to the time, place and socio-cultural context in which the people they centre upon live.

Chapter 1: Engaging with Environmentalism

1.1 Anthropology and Environmentalism In recent years there has been much discussion about the relevance of the discipline of anthropology to the various emergent discourses on the environment. Among those researching in the area, reason for concern has been confirmed by a failure to make themselves heard as experts over the growing din of the other branches of social research passionately pleading the case for the relevance of their respective disciplines. This is evidenced to some degree by the lack of anthropological literature in the field of environmentalism, and comes into stark relief when compared with the extensive treatment of the area given by the political sciences. This chapter seeks to focus on reactions by anthropologists to this dearth of environmentally concerned research within the discipline over the last decade. The debate over the issues raised by this discussion has evolved principally between a small number of dedicated anthropologists and, while it is now spilling out into the wider anthropological community, it is from these scholars work that a path forward has been constructed. Anthropology traditionally has strong links to the study of the environment through its focus on human interaction in environmental context. This basic connection is depicted by Milton, who says: “If one accepts the anthropological cliché that culture is the mechanism through which human beings interact with (or, more controversially, adapt to) their environment (Ingold 1992: 39), then the whole field of cultural anthropology can be characterized as human ecology” (1993: 4). In light of this, it is pertinent to ask why anthropology has not come to prominence in the study of environmentalists and environmentalism? Brosius addressed this by noting significant differences between “the ecological anthropology of the 1960’s and early 1970’s and what some are calling ‘the environmental anthropology’ of the present” (1999: 278). In mentioning ecological anthropology, Brosius is referring to the meticulous work carried out by anthropologists studying the impact of human communities within the ecosystems they inhabit/ed. These anthropologists used concepts such as carrying capacity and systems theory in order to discern, among other things, the relationship between ecological variables and cultural adaptations governing patterns of resource use. They were interested in bringing anthropology into line with the natural sciences in an attempt to legitimise culture as an empirical phenomenon. Brosius regards this as an inappropriate direction for anthropology, in hindsight, and brands it ‘scientism’. Accordingly, he states that: One does not have to be a post-structuralist to recognize the valorisation of anthropology as a science, long a prominent element in our disciplinary self-identification (recall Radcliffe-Brown’s efforts to establish a ‘natural science of society’), reached a kind of

5 Issues in Environmental Research rhetorical apogee in 1960s-1970s ecological anthropology as we borrowed one concept after another - ecosystem, adaptation, niche, carrying capacity - from ecology. (1999: 300) According to Brosius and other like-minded anthropologists, this approach constituted a relegation of notions of culture to a series of competing strategies aimed solely at enhancing the chances of physical survival for the species. It is not clear as to whether or not the alternative approach was born out of the work of ecologically oriented anthropologists or as a response to it; however, a divergent stream did come to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. This has come to be known as ‘environmentalism’. Brosius (ibid: 278) argues that environmentalism refers broadly to the field of “discursive constructions of nature and human agency”. He makes the point that the study of environmentalism should encompass much more than an analysis of the different social movements involved and their various trajectories over time and space. As stated above, he feels that at the crux of environmentalism is the ongoing discourse about human beings and their place within nature. As a postmodernist thinker and an anthropologist, Brosius declares that the relevance of anthropology in this field of investigation is due to its unique concentration upon the phenomenon of culture. He urges anthropologists to see environmentalism as a “rich site of cultural production” (ibid: 277) and stresses that “a whole new discursive regime is emerging and giving shape to the relationships between and among natures, nations, movements, individuals, and institutions” (ibid). It should be noted here that, although Brosius is thinking about environmentalism in terms of his work with discourse theory, the assertion of a more holistic approach by anthropologists to the study of environmentalism is not dependent upon the use of that branch of social theory. Discourse theory, which came to prominence with MacDonell’s work Theories of Discourse (1986), has been aptly described by Torfing as “a constructivist and relationalist perspective on social identity perspective on social identity combined with an insistence on the heterogeneity of discourse” (1999: 3). Given this, Brosius’ interest in the discursive constructions regarding nature comes as no surprise. What should be appreciated here is not the fact that anthropologists using discourse theory have become interested in environmentalism but that, as “a rich site of cultural production” (1999: 277), environmentalism offers anthropologists of all theoretical persuasions many avenues of worthwhile investigation. The following discusses the different directions in which anthropology has been taken by the study of environmentalism over the last decade.

1.1.1 Kay Milton’s Anthropology:

Kay Milton has made a number of important contributions to this area of anthropological investigation over recent years. In 1993 she edited a work, entitled Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, which attempted to position anthropology more centrally within the multi-disciplinary study of environmentalism. Her introduction contains O’Riordan’s assertion that environmentalism preaches “a philosophy of human conduct” and is also “a state of being” (1981: xi, cited in Milton 1993: 1). This, for her, is a crucial observation as it allows anthropologists to see environmentalism as a social commitment undertaken by social actors in complex multi-sited cultural settings. Milton goes on to express the belief that environmentalism is, in the main, “a quest for a viable future,

6 Issues in Environmental Research pursued through the implementation of culturally defined responsibilities” (1993: 2). Obviously, these responsibilities vary between cultural settings but, as Milton observes, they originate from the recognition that environmental problems are caused by human interaction with the environment. She feels that the key to a viable future lies in a better understanding of human activity (ibid). Milton also raises the issue of the potential conflict faced by anthropologists concerning anthropological research and environmental advocacy. Although not calling for all anthropologists to become advocates for the environmental cause, she does outline three main ways in which anthropological knowledge could further the cause of environmentalism. The first of these is through an approach centred upon human ecology but would only be of merit if the initial premise was that all human interactions with the environment took place “through the medium of culture” (ibid: 5). As with Brosius, Milton recognises the pitfalls of the ecological determinism of the 1950s and 1960s while also being aware of the dangers of cultural determinism which, in extreme cases, “can appear to deny the very existence of objective reality” (ibid: 4). Therefore, the benefit of this approach lies mainly in its attempt to investigate the way in which people culturally perceive their interactions with the environment. The second approach concerns the cross-cultural interpretation of the “meanings imputed to reality” which are the building blocks of cultural understanding (ibid: 5). Milton feels that this would be invaluable when formulating broad reaching environmental policies such as those implemented by the UN and the EU. An understanding of the cultural meanings and symbolism at work in particular cultural contexts would greatly assist the linkage of local, regional and global action concerning environmental initiatives. Thirdly, Milton notes that environmentalists could be well served by the anthropological study of environmentalism itself (ibid: 6). Importantly, in keeping with O’Riordan’s notion of environmentalism as a philosophy of human conduct, she identifies it as a ‘social commitment’ gaining momentum through “the development and expression of ideas” (ibid: 6). It is in the analysis of what constitutes the environmentalist social commitment and the evolution of environmental theory that anthropology may further the cause of environmentalism. Again, the notion of discourse features prominently in Milton’s work and she defines it as follows: A discourse is an area of communication defined purely by its subject matter. In this sense, environmental discourse is communication about the environment, and environmentalist discourse is communication about the protection of the environment. There is no indication here that a particular mode of communication is being used, or that a particular way of understanding is being generated. (ibid: 167).

She describes environmentalism as a trans-cultural discourse that, not being rooted in any specific culture, spans the local through to the global and now has become a specific cultural discourse existing within, although not bounded by, other cultural systems. Thus, environmentalism is perceived by her to transcend many traditional geographical and conceptual boundaries such as east/west, north/south, first world/third world and left/right. As Milton describes it, environmentalism incorporates “all culturally defined environmental responsibilities, whether they are innovative or conventional, radical or conservative” (ibid: 11). Furthermore, in her view environmental discourse does not merely articulate perceptions of the environment, it contributes to their formulation. In this way, the whole spectrum of thought is included in Milton’s analysis because a pro-

7 Issues in Environmental Research environmentalist stance is not required for discourse to be considered environmental (ibid: 8). If we also take into account Brosius’ description of environmentalism provided earlier, we see that anthropologists have begun to discern environmentalism as being expressed through a myriad of social and cultural relationships and situations. Milton explains this well when she writes:

In this framework, social movements and political ideologies become specific cultural forms through which environmental responsibilities might be expressed and communicated. Instead of environmentalism being seen as a category of social movement or ideology, these forms of cultural expression become types of environmentalism (ibid: 8).

Milton’s Environmentalism and Cultural Theory (1996) extends and develops the ideas from her earlier work. Here she contends that anthropology is going through a time of fundamental theoretical change in relation to the concept of culture (1996: 11) and that this is evidenced by three different trends within the discipline. The first of these trends is what Milton describes as “dissatisfaction with the cultural relativist perspective which has characterized anthropology in the post-structuralist era” (ibid). This harks back to her earlier (1993) discussion of environmentalism and advocacy within anthropology but indicates that, in her judgement, anthropologists are now less inclined to entertain notions of cultural relativity when confronted with their burgeoning ability to contribute directly to environmental debates. The second trend she identifies is “a widespread reaction, both within and outside anthropology, against the Cartesian dualisms of mind-body, thought- action, nature-culture, which are seen as obstructing progress in anthropological theory” (1996: 11). These dualisms, or dichotomies, were seen by Milton to have outlived their usefulness “as a framework for understanding the human condition” (ibid: 12). She singles out the nature-culture dichotomy as particularly unhelpful and notes that this is an area within which anthropological investigation has much to offer (ibid). The third trend Milton points to is the increasing focus by anthropologists on the way in which cultural exchange is taking place in the modern world. Anthropologists have always been interested in how cultural influences are spread and Milton notes that, given the advantages of modern technology, the current high rate of cultural exchange “has led social scientists to ask whether it is appropriate to speak of a ‘global culture” (ibid). This is, she asserts, a direct challenge to the anthropological methodology of cross-cultural comparison. According to her, anthropology has only just begun to look at the cultural connotations of the world system theorised by scholars such as Wallerstein (1979), Nash (1981), and Chirot and Hall (1982) and is in danger of being marginalised in the debates about globalisation that have sprung from them. She goes on to urge anthropologists to refrain from assuming the relevance of the concept of globalisation to the analysis of environmentalism but rather to see the problems that surround it (ibid: 13). This argument is crucial in understanding Milton’s overall conception of anthropology’s position within the study of environmentalism. She notes that “the debate on the environment has adopted the concept of the global as both ‘motive and motif” (ibid) and makes no secret throughout her book that anthropological perspectives on culture are invaluable in the attempt to gain a clearer notion of what constitutes the ‘global’.

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Regarding anthropological perspectives on culture, Milton identifies a broad and a narrow view at work within anthropological theory. The broad view of culture, most common in the 1950s, encompassed “actions, ideas and material objects” (ibid: 17). She believes that this view was only appropriate while “anthropologists were mainly concerned with describing and understanding whole ways of life, ‘whole systems” (ibid) as the discipline attempted to understand cultures as constituting discreet systems in their own right. The obvious flaw regarding the inclusion of material objects being the inability of this definition to cope with the flow of artistic and technological ideas through and across cultures. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, anthropologists were beginning to “distinguish between what people do and what they think, feel and know” (ibid: 18). In other words, ideas were being separated from actions and material objects in an attempt to redefine culture. Milton argued that the benefit of this “was that it opened up the possibility of studying the relationship between them” (ibid). Thus, at this point anthropologists were now not simply interested in how people reacted within their societies, but also how they used culture to change them. The notion of cultural relativity developed as a consequence of this new, narrow definition of culture as culture now began to be perceived as a way of knowing rather than a way of life. Milton pointed out that this had both positive and negative connotations for the study of culture. On the one hand it affected a significant decrease in discrimination and ethnocentrism while, on the other, its preoccupation with the contextual nature of culture problematised cross-cultural transmission to such an extent that that notion became theoretically impossible (ibid: 19- 20). Additionally, it sparked off a debate concerning advocacy within the discipline that still exists to this day. Some anthropologists, inspired by the new degree of dignity afforded to indigenous cultures by cultural relativity, became advocates for the people they studied while others, equally inspired by the cultural relativist standpoint, opposed advocacy as they perceived it as active interference by anthropologists into subject communities. By 1996, Milton argued that perceptions of culture among anthropologists had again shifted. The post-structuralist distinction between the mental and the physical was now seen as a continuation of the mind-body dualism that had been prominent in the 1950s. She stated that: ‘In an attempt to eliminate the dualism, the term ‘culture’ is being used less to refer to what people know and think, and more to refer to the process by which that knowledge and those thoughts are generated and sustained’. (ibid: 22).

Thus, the main thrust of Milton’s discussion concerning the concept of culture is that it has begun to be seen as something that “exists in peoples minds … consists of perceptions and interpretations (and) … is the mechanism through which human beings interact with their environment” (ibid: 66). This has, in more recent decades, given rise to a more interpretive and less scientistic perspective. As Milton explains:

Anthropologists have not given up the effort to explain cultural features, and some regard this as their ultimate goal, but since the 1970’s many have seen their task as interpretive rather than explanatory (see Geertz 1973). Their role has been to reveal how cultural perspectives make sense, by showing how they are related to the activities of those who hold them, and how their various components – assumptions, values, norms, goals – relate to one another (ibid: 102).

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Milton employs this more interpretive and hermeneutic approach to culture to investigate environmentalism as a “cultural phenomenon” of global proportions (ibid: 142). She singles out Robertson’s definition of globalisation because she feels it has the capacity to provide a framework in which the study of environmentalism as a cultural phenomenon can be seriously undertaken. Robertson’s definition, states that “Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (Robertson 1992: 8 cited in Milton 1996: 164). Milton understands the first part of this definition to refer to the process of linking the disparate parts of the world by economic, political and technological means and bringing each part under the influence, to greater and lesser degrees, of the others. She understands the second part of the definition to refer to the way in which people are becoming aware of this interconnectedness and the changes that this awareness is bringing to people’s perceptions about themselves, their own condition and that of others. In short, Robertson, for Milton, emphasises the cultural nature of globalisation and asserts that an awareness of this has been absent in, for example, the earlier theories of Wallerstein, Saurin and Giddens (ibid: 144-154). I contend that Robertson’s approach reveals that it is possible to see that relationships between east – west, north – south and first world – third world are not simply relationships where the more powerful and affluent sector influence the lesser while remaining unaffected. Here, for instance, Robertson indicates that the third world influences the first world significantly and that the power of the north has not made it invulnerable to the needs and demands of the south. I should point out here that neither Robertson nor Milton portrays these relationships as being between equals. They simply stress that the suppositions surrounding them have been unchallenged for too long. Thus, Milton advocates a role for anthropology in the study of environmental activism that is based around the notion of discourse and globalisation. For her, environmentalism is a transcultural discourse played out within and across the cultures of the globe but never rooted in any one of them. In this way environmental movements, and the discourses they gave rise to, can be studied by anthropologists as cultural expressions of a wider cross- cultural phenomenon. I have found this perspective to be particularly useful in understanding the Irish Greens and their perceptions of their identity as both environmentalists and Irish citizens.

1.1.2 E. Berglund:

Eeva Berglund is another anthropologist who wishes to establish anthropology as a legitimate participant in the study of environmentalism. Like Milton, Berglund notes the lack of anthropological involvement in this field. As she contends, it seems “curious that so little attention has been paid by anthropologists to the ways in which people around the world have joined the chorus of voices who are constituting as well as contesting, the notion of the global environmental crisis” (1998: 4). In her book, Knowing Nature, Knowing Science: An ethnography of environmental activism, Berglund explores the role of what she terms “techno-science” (1998:4) in environmental discourse. Her fieldwork was conducted in a German city of approximately 220, 000 people which she dubbed ‘Mittelstadt’. Situated near the eastern border of the former German Democratic Republic, Mittelstadt is the site of three different sustained actions by environmentalists

10 Issues in Environmental Research that provided Berglund with the central case studies for her research. The first case involved a protest against the continued use of a landfill site containing toxic waste that was leaching into the local water supply. The second protested against the construction of a high speed motorway running through the local vicinity, while the third opposed the construction of high voltage overhead power lines. Her research was inspired by her observation that, within the ongoing debates concerning the environment, the theories and conclusions of the ‘natural’ sciences are frequently used to establish credibility and authority. Furthermore, in many instances participants with opposing viewpoints, yet using the same data, draw vastly different conclusions. Importantly, Berglund was aware of the fact that, in modern western – or, alternatively, northern or industrial – societies, the language and symbolism of ‘techno-science’ carries much weight and authority as a direct consequence of the enormous influence still exerted within these societies by Enlightenment thinking (ibid: 6). However, science, she argues, is beginning to lose its sheen of invulnerability because, subject to multiple interpretations within the very public field of environmentalism, it becomes disputed terrain in a “contest between believing and knowing” (ibid: 10). This contest about the meaning and veracity of scientific knowledge was crucial to her research as an anthropologist interested in letting the social actors involved in her study speak for, and define themselves, in relation to their lived experience. As she sees it, her insights are gained by conceiving environmentalism as “a heightened awareness of the negotiability of human relationships” (ibid: 7). Science and its discourse, ‘techno-science’, operate for her within this context as a conduit through which the struggle between believing and knowing is waged.

While Berglund, in mapping out the field of inquiry, acknowledges the significant contributions of social theorists such as Beck (1992), Giddens (1990, 1991), Bauman (1993) and Melucci (1989), her work addresses the lack of adequate case studies with which to augment and further the theoretical debates underway in the social sciences. Like Milton, Berglund feels that this is legitimately the realm of anthropological investigation given its pre-occupation with cultural interpretations of reality and the comparative nature of its analysis. She argues that this is so even though there is a dualism within the discipline in relation to the treatment of science (1998: 12). On the one hand, anthropologists have traditionally placed great emphasis on the way in which human beings interact with and within their environments, but this has been predicated on an ecological determinism which portrayed culture as little more than a reactive coping mechanism. For instance, much of the ecologically based anthropology of the previous era involved the study of exotic cultures that were analysed as complex whole systems engaged in adapting human populations to environmental necessities. Thus, the emphasis placed on the information given by those being studied was often devalued in the face of the theories of modern science. On the other hand, anthropologists have sought to redress this problem in recent decades by taking a much more relativistic stance towards culture and the legitimacy of the different forms of knowledge derived from it. There has been a sustained push within the discipline to write both the subjects of investigation, and the investigators, back into ethnographies with both being seen as social actors in specific contexts.

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Berglund’s approach to participant observation gives full recognition both to her identity as a researcher and as an activist. She declares that the “many insights I have gained through environmental politics have come through taking up a series of perspectives squarely within the world I describe, even as having access to scholarly analyses distinguishes my experience from that of activists” (ibid: 13). Hence, Berglund’s knowledge or reflexivity about being an activist and a scholar led her to seek to engage more closely with her research subjects and more insightfully with academic theory. However, more than simply adding case studies to an existing body of theory and empirical findings, Berglund seeks to redress the determinism inherent in the work of some of the more prominent social theorists.

Taking Ingold’s criticism of social science’s predilection for the creation of categories in which to place social and cultural phenomena (ibid: 13), she reserves particularly harsh criticism for Douglas and Wildavsky’s social organisational grid theory (1982) in which the form of social organisation present determines the moral order of the day within each society. Interestingly, Milton is also uncomfortable with this deterministic approach on the grounds that it denied the possibility of change on any meaningful scale (1996: 97). For Berglund, their work “seemed like an almost trivial intellectual indulgence around eminently non-trivial issues” (1998: 179), and she feels that the placing of themselves within the most morally superior category “valuing resilience and an open mind” (ibid) was inspired by arrogance rather than any intellectual endeavour. This arrogance, she asserts, is a reoccurring theme within the work of western intellectuals as they consistently fail to see themselves as bounded by culture in the same way that they suppose other people to be (1998: 80). In many previous anthropological works the focus has been on the exotic ‘other’ with culture being something experienced by those ‘others’ but escaped by those who study it. Finally, through her study of the role played by modern western science in environmentalism, Berglund illuminates the ways in which people in modern western societies use different kinds of knowledge, many of them culturally specific, to understand their place in the world. Let us now return to Brosius and his article in Current Anthropology (1999) mentioned at the start of this chapter. I have paid close attention to this article and the comments that it generated as it provides an overview of the engagement by anthropologists in the field of environmentalism which includes aspects of the past, present and future. It also explores this engagement in such a way as to contextualise the above discussion principally concerning Milton (1993, 1996) and Berglund (1998).

1.1.3 P. Brosius,

One of the most striking things about the anthropological study of environmentalism in recent times is the prominence of discourse as a method of analysis. As we have seen, Milton, Berglund and Brosius have all employed this term and its mode of analysis in their research but it is Brosius most of all who provides us with a rationale for this strategy. His approach is based “on the premise that discourse matters and that environmental discourses are manifestly constitutive of reality (or rather a multiplicity of realities)” (Brosius 1999: 278). This is an approach that recognises the fact that struggles within the field of environmentalism have been, will be and are being fought through

12 Issues in Environmental Research discursive means. Whosoever can dictate the flow of information through discourse has an almost unassailable advantage in controlling the wider debate, and Brosius is well aware of the different agencies and institutions concerned with doing just that for many reasons (ibid). As to how these competing centres of discourse construction may be dealt with by researchers, he contends that:

Indeed, any attempt to understand the socio-cultural movement aspects of environmentalism must necessarily frame them within a larger set of questions about this wider discursive domain and examine the complex relationships which exist between historical and contemporary forms of domination, existing or emerging structures/institutions, the politics of representation, processes of discursive production, and emerging forms of political agency (ibid: 278) .

Thus, Brosius perceives the discursive aspects of culture to be the most productive way of understanding environmentalism as a cultural phenomenon. I should note here again that, although discourse theory is useful in the study of environmentalism, it is not the only valid approach. In fact, significant proportions of this thesis are intended to illustrate how a broad approach combining a number of theoretical points of view provides a range of analytical possibilities worthy of further study by anthropologists. However, for the moment, I shall remain within the realms of Brosius’ discussion. Brosius feels that anthropologists have become interested in environmentalism, after a long hiatus preceding the decline of ecological anthropology as a prominent field within the discipline, for three main reasons (ibid: 279). The first two he does not dwell on. They are, firstly, the discipline had been caught in the momentum created by other branches of the social sciences such as sociology, human geography, cultural studies and the political sciences and, secondly, the emergence of environmental groups within sites of fieldwork already under study. The third, a series of overlapping recent theoretical trends, he discusses more fully. He feels that the most noticeable of these is the move by anthropologists to redress essentialisations of Indigenous people by various civil rights groups interested in ‘proving’ their authenticity (ibid).

Given that Brosius has spent much of his academic career studying and working with Indigenous people, particularly the peoples of the Sarawak in East Malaysia, this tendency to essentialise both habitat and inhabitant by human rights and environmental organisations must have struck him forcefully and had a profound effect on his own research. Brosius believes that the way in which anthropology has sought to redress the consequences of its late engagement with environmentalism has been to re-engage with the cultural critique of ‘otherness’ in what Marcus and Fischer have called “repatriation of anthropology as cultural critique” (1986: 111, cited in Brosius 1999: 279). This ‘repatriation’, asserts Brosius, was accompanied by, among other things, a renewed interest in the discourse/power/knowledge interconnections discussed by Foucault (1972, 1980b, cited in Brosius 1999: 279); innovative approaches to the study of resistance predicated on a reassessment of humanity’s positioning within or outside nature (Brosius 1999:279); the rise of ‘science studies’ as a new field of investigation examining “the bases of scientific knowledge about nature” (ibid); globalisation studies; and finally, an

13 Issues in Environmental Research effort to understand the environment as a locus for inequality within the field of political ecology (ibid: 280). Brosius positions his own work in the context of a growing number of anthropologists studying environmentalism in relation to “globalization and the trans- nationality of these movements and discourses” (ibid: 280). As Brosius relates, these anthropologists are interested in the intersection of local concerns and global discourse (ibid: 281), and the way in which each is brought into the others sphere and becomes legitimated in the quest for information and funding. As he writes, anthropologists are now paying attention to how, within environmental movements, environmental discourses are “deployed, appropriated, transformed, circulated, and recirculated by variously positioned actors, as well as the ways in which environmental imperatives are framed and deployed with respect to claims about local authenticity, national sovereignty, or global significance” (ibid: 281). Indeed, he understood this kind of anthropology to be part of environmental praxis because anthropologists are bringing a critical perspective to environmentalism which can be used to refine the existing body of knowledge already in use by activists.

As part of this critical perspective, Brosius cites the further investigation of the significance of particular topologies, north-south and local-global, within environmentalism. He is particularly concerned that, just as topologies have been created within which to locate the environmental paradigm, so specific categories of inhabitants have been created in order to inhabit these spaces (ibid: 282). He feels that this is problematic when we consider that certain populations may become conceptually bounded by their habitat in a way that inhibits broader analysis through a comparative methodology. The example provided by Brosius is the valorisation of certain groups within the human populations living in the rainforests. The way in which Indigenous people have been portrayed in environmental campaigns has led to the widespread popular belief that only they, as “guardians of biodiversity”, ‘belong’ in the forest while others, such as “peasants and migrants from urban areas” (ibid: 282) do not. Brosius also calls for notions of temporality to be integrated into the study of environmentalism. He makes the point that dynamism is an important aspect of any debate and that environmental discourse has evolved rapidly. As the creation of knowledge concerning the environment and environmentalism becomes more widespread the debates that employ this knowledge become more complex. They are multifaceted, theoretically sophisticated, and are continually being influenced by the most recent developments (ibid: 283). This also raises for Brosius the issue of momentum concerning environmentalist actions and he cites the campaign for saving the Sarawak forest as an example. During the early stages the campaign built up such momentum that those involved believed at times that success was certain but then suffered disappointment when that momentum was lost (ibid). I feel that the notion of momentum in environmental campaigns is a particularly relevant concept when we take into account the political processes through which many environmental organisations have chosen to operate. Here it is important to note that Brosius identifies the deeply temporal nature of environmentalism. I have found notions of temporality to be essential in the descriptions and analysis of my own fieldwork and have attempted, wherever necessary, to incorporate this within my work. One only has to look at the speed of the rise of environmental movements to appreciate the significance of this notion. Indeed,

14 Issues in Environmental Research temporality does not only figure in the rise and fall of different environmental movements and campaigns, it also effects their form while in existence. Brosius feels that this is visible in the way in which most environmental debates seemed to progress through an initial emphasis on consciousness raising, typified by the actions of the more radical direct action group. The next phase is marked by the adoption of a more mainstream approach in order to promote and sustain long-term strategies.

Of particular resonance with my own research is Brosius’ call for a deeper analysis of the effects of national political cultures on environmental movements. He notes that anthropologists have generally failed to include the nation-state in a meaningful sense within their ethnographies and puts this down to a disciplinary preference for either, a narrow focus on the locality of fieldwork, or a linkage of local realities to “the transnational realm” (ibid: 285). He notes the identification of national political cultures with their physical surroundings and suggests that notions of national ownership can not be ignored in the study of environmentalism. Indeed, national political cultures affect vast areas of government planning and policy which in turn affect their physical, social and cultural landscapes. He cited Tsing (1993) and Rosaldo (1994) as two leading proponents of this area of study and proposes that anthropologists “have been so fixed on local social movements, transnational NGOs, and globalization processes that we seem to have forgotten about the need to understand how national political cultures might mediate between these” (ibid: 285).

In concluding the article, Brosius posits that environmentalism is “a series of transformative discourses” (ibid: 287) in which anthropologists have become legitimately engaged. Given this, he warns, anthropologists must be constantly aware of the effects that their participation might have on the actors they study and acknowledge that these effects may not necessarily be beneficial. He was concerned that anthropologists might become so single-minded in pursuit of their research goals and the advancement of the field of inquiry that they could jeopardise environmental movements, especially third world social movements also involved in struggles of resistance, by providing their opposition with intricate knowledge of their organisational structures and activities. Brosius calls on his fellow anthropologists to ask themselves ‘why’ they were studying environmentalism in the first place and to be conscious of the “politics of representing these [environmental] movements” (ibid: 287). Brosius’ article inspired a number of comments from fellow anthropologists engaged in the study of environmentalism. These comments span the full range of issues he broaches, of which I have abbreviated or omitted according to my needs, and offer suggestions on future research foci and constructive criticism concerning Brosius’ own understanding of the field. The following is not intended to be a full exploration of each of the correspondents’ views but, rather, a discussion of the points made in these replies that resonate most with my research goals and material. The issues addressed will be chosen to give the reader a sense of the direction taken by this thesis within the broader field of environmentalism. The relationship between anthropology and environmentalism will be held in mind.

1.1.4 Comments on Brosius

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The first of these comments to be addressed concerns the issue of what Bavaskar calls temporality. Baviskar (in Brosius,1999), in addressing Brosius’ comments on the way in which environmental debates are fluid and dynamic over time, warns that an over emphasis on the effects of temporality and dynamism in environmental debates would negate any meaningful analysis drawn from these discussions. He explains this by arguing that meaningful analysis demanded there be definite heuristic boundaries within which to examine data, make assumptions and formulate theory. If the passage of time erodes all certainty, then the analysis of data becomes impossible except in retrospect. Accordingly he wrote: ‘The heuristic need for stable topologies, reference points, and boundaries cannot be denied. This need is felt not only by members of environmental movements but everyone engaged in meaningful action. Practice demands working assumptions, temporary certitudes, and acts of faith. Where do we anchor practice if our conceptual shores keep shifting’? (Baviskar in Brosius, 1999: 288)

This statement, in addition to tying the practice of both environmentalism and anthropology to the necessity of a degree of temporal and conceptual stability, also reminded Brosius that, in that necessity, anthropology is no different than other social sciences. Baviskar praises Brosius’ “pithy review of themes in environmental anthropology” and observes that the “dilemma of interrogating categories even as one continues to use them is not exclusive to environmental anthropologists but shared with everyone who is sensitive to the political implications of academic practice” (ibid: 288, 289). As Brosius does not specifically address these comments by Baviskar in his reply, I will not speculate as to his position vis-à-vis excessive emphasis on temporality but it does appear to me to be a useful concept if applied thoughtfully. Similarly, Berglund finds much to commend it because of Brosius’ discussion of momentum and environmental campaigns. For her the concept presents the possibility of seeing “patterns in the highs and lows of activism which scholars would be better placed than those at the centre of the political action to document” (Berglund in Brosius, 1999: 289). She suggests that, due to the ease with which large bodies of information can now be sent across temporal and spatial divides, the activism inherent within environmental movements has the ability to move at speeds that could outstrip current research methods generally associated with the social sciences. In any case she poses the question as to whether this offers anthropologists an opportunity to make their expertise ‘count’ in the field (ibid: 290). Additionally, she stresses the importance of finding patterns by stating her belief “that anthropological insight can be extended to searching for systematicity across contexts without totalizing” (ibid). Here Berglund advocates a move towards a theoretical middle ground in which the postmodernist preoccupation with context does not rule out the possibility of commonality across socio-cultural divides with respect to experience and organisation in environmentalism. She states “There are huge similarities not only in the platforms but in the dilemmas faced by environmentalists” (ibid). This theoretical middle ground would, according to her, involve a new kind of ethnography that was “only contingently place-bound” (ibid) and could thus operate within a locus that included “regional, national, and global networks” (ibid). Notably, Berglund makes the statement: I would be delighted if more fieldwork-based material on environmentalism as a political commitment were available with the

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help of which I could begin to consider anthropology (along with disciplines such as cultural geography and media and communication studies) as compelling in its claims about environment-focused anxieties. The concept of momentum suggests one promising way for discerning connections between unique situations and systemic outcomes (ibid: 290).

Escobar began his comments by identifying Brosius as a poststructuralist who focuses on “social movements as privileged spaces for the production and contestation of discourses of nature and culture” (Escobar in Brosius, 1999:291). He commends Brosius on this focus as he feels that the study of social movements, as an area, has been insufficiently addressed by anthropologists in the past but holds the key to a future meaningful engagement with environmentalism for the discipline. In his words, social movements “are the key actors in the production of environmental discursive regimes and should thus be a primary focus of anthropological investigation” (ibid). However, he notes that Brosius, during his discussion of the disjunction between the anthropological approaches of the 1960s and 1970s and today’s post-structuralism, ignores the contribution of those anthropologists whose work is not largely informed by notions of discourse or power. To address this oversight, Escobar calls for a “renewed dialogue” between the various environmental and ecologically based forms of anthropology practiced throughout the discipline. He does not stop there. Importantly he notes that:

This need for dialogue also applies, in a different way, to the majority of Marxist and political-economy approaches that have made only superficial overtures towards the poststructuralist concerns with power, knowledge, and discourse. These themes would also have to be mapped into Brosius’ landscape of discursive regimes on the nature/culture interface (ibid: 292).

Escobar also detects two trends emerging from anthropology’s engagement with environmentalism. The first is the growing contribution to debates concerning sustainability and conservation made by anthropologists studying NGOs and ‘grassroots’ movements. The second is the increasing number of anthropologists articulating the discourses of environmentalism and struggling to theorise its social movements as evidence of “an entire political ecology” (ibid). He feels that these trends could be important factors in generating within anthropology a re-examination of the role of less traditional facets of the discipline, such as applied anthropology and anthropology based around advocacy and public policy formulation. These may well be taken to a more sophisticated theoretical-political basis than previously established (ibid). In his comments, Hornborg finds common ground with Escobar with respect to the exclusion of non-discourse based anthropological research in Brosius’ essay. He points out that, in theorising environmentalism through recourse to discourse models, the socio-economic realities upon which many of the debates concerning the environment rest have been neglected. He states that: Money and the abstractions of economics are cultural vehicles of exploitation and should be quintessential targets for anthropological analysis and critique (cf. Hornborg 1998b, 1999). Such cultural categories intervene in very tangible

17 Issues in Environmental Research ways in the ‘physical and biotic’ environment (Hornborg in Brosius, 1999: 294). When seen in the light of the comments made by Berglund and Escobar, this is a telling comment by Hornborg with regards to the future direction of anthropology’s engagement with environmentalism. Hvalkof understands Brosius article to be, on a fundamental level, a call for the re-politicisation of anthropology through purposeful contextual ethnography “that is so much needed in our postmodern era of relative truths” (Hvalkof in Brosius, 1999: 295), while Stonich calls for theoretical and methodological perspectives in anthropology to include “ways to integrate the political (broadly conceived to include power and power relations) and the material into our studies” (Stonich in Brosius, 1999: 298).

1.1.5 Brosius’ Reply

In reply, Brosius says Berglund makes a valuable contribution to the article by leading discussion about momentum in a direction that he had not previously contemplated. This prompts him to write “I share her concern for ‘seeking systematic pattern(s) as a principle for scholarly practice … without totalizing’ and, in a time of reactionary anti- environmentalism, see the value in this as a form of engaged scholarly practice” (Brosius 1999: 299). Additionally, he agrees with Escobar and Hornborg’s comments concerning his preoccupation with discourse and notes that, while it is a popular approach to environmentalism in anthropology, discourse theory is but one of many valuable theoretical tools at anthropologists’ disposal (ibid: 300). He also reiterates his concern that anthropologists be aware of their responsibilities to those whose lives their research effects. He refers to the way in which detailed ethnography can easily be used by forces antithetical to environmentalist causes, nevertheless he feels that the discipline has much to offer in the evolution of environmentalism regarding both advocacy and theoretical advancement (ibid: 302). As for the benefits to be gained by the discipline through the study of environmentalism, Brosius declares: ‘For those of us engaged in anthropological studies of contemporary environmentalism, it is the very diversity of perspectives among and between various kinds of actors and the shifts that we continually see in their perspectives and positioning that makes this such a compelling topic of research’ (ibid: 303). The above discussion provides us with a map upon which we can trace the history of anthropology’s engagement with environmentalism and the consequences of this engagement for the discipline as a whole up until the recently. The discipline has undergone several periods of change and seems to be fast approaching another. The functionalism of the 1950s gave rise to the structuralism of the 1960s and early 1970s which, in turn, resulted in a move away from structural analysis in favour of anti- metanarrative perspectives characterised by a deeply contextual focus on narrative. This has been accompanied by a parallel shift from scientific-ecological notions of culture, in which culture often seemed little more than a codification of survival strategies, to an understanding of culture as the medium through which human beings comprehend their physical and social environment. The anthropological study of culture has now been reconstituted as more than what we think and why we think it – it is also the study of how we think. The study of environmentalism has had major, and in some cases unexpected, consequences for anthropology. One of the most significant of these is that the discipline

18 Issues in Environmental Research has been compelled to seriously consider globalisation and its effects upon the theoretical and methodological fundamentals of anthropology. This has allowed anthropologists in the field to once again recognise the need for larger frameworks within which to place their observations while also seeing the dangers of over contextualisation arising from excessive relativism.

Anthropologists engaged with environmentalism in its many forms seem to be leading the discipline out of its recent trajectory in which extreme cultural relativism and deconstructionism had begun to isolate it from the other social sciences. Anthropology now seems capable of attaining a new relevance within the social sciences based on cross-cultural methodology and knowledge combined with a deepening analytical and reflexive grasp of globalisation. Thus social anthropology can now play its part, along with the other social sciences, in furthering our understanding of modernity and its discontents. Over the last decade, many anthropologists working in the field of environmentalism have used the study of discourse to investigate cultural phenomenon. In this context, environmental discourse contains both global and local aspects and incorporates many other discourses in its articulation. These two developments, the move away from the extremes of cultural relativism and the focus on global discourses, constitute major changes within the discipline but perhaps the greatest change is still to come. There is a clear call, within the ranks of those anthropologists engaged in the study of environmentalism, for a broader canvass upon which to portray their descriptions of those they observe. Milton (1996:164), using Robertson’s definition, encourages globalisation to be seen as a phenomenon in which the interconnectedness of political, economic and technological spheres is more relevant than ever before to anthropological analysis. As a series of interacting discourses deeply embedded in globalising processes, environmentalism can not be analysed adequately without recourse to a greater framework than cultural relativism provides. Brosius notes that any future serious analysis of social movements linked to environmentalism needs to take into account the wider picture of history, power relations, and political agency in order to be worthwhile (1999:278). Berglund takes this a step further when she calls openly for a search for patterns within environmentalism in order to create a space for comparative analysis - this she refers to as systematising without totalising (ibid: 289).

Escobar urges the resumption of meaningful dialogue between anthropologists employing Marxist and political economy approaches and researchers utilising discourse theory (ibid: 292). Hornburg calls for a greater emphasis to be placed in socio-economics in the future and Hvalkof (ibid: 295) and Stonich (ibid: 298) both point to the need to repoliticise anthropology. The question before us now, having identified the need for a broadening of the theoretical foundations that underpin the study of environmentalism, is how will this be achieved? One possible answer has been supplied by Berglund who, in discussing environmentalism as manifested in social movements located within her research site, writes:

Like all social movements, environmentalism in Mittlestadt forges a space in which to discuss expectations, desires and access to decision making. Despite its ostensibly technical character then,

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environmentalism, like developmentalism (Watts 1995) is not only cultural; it is ideological (1998: 188).

Thus, in keeping with theme of the need for a broader canvass upon which to articulate environmentalism as it occurs simultaneously in both local and global contexts, this thesis will include ideology as a conceptual tool in its analysis of the Irish Green Party. Used in conjunction with the other conceptual approaches mentioned above, ideology may well provide anthropological analysis the space it needs for a more robust treatment of environmentalism. However, we must put this aside for the moment in order to create a descriptive context within which to place further theoretical discussion. Having introduced anthropology’s engagement with environmentalism, the following chapter is based on the work of Adrian Peace, an anthropologist who has engaged with environmentalism through extensive fieldwork in both Australia and Ireland.

1.2 An Anthropological Model of Discourse, Identity and Conflict:

In dealing with the problems posed by the anthropological analysis of environmentalism in Ireland I have found the work of Adrian Peace (1997, 2001) invaluable. Peace’s ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in rural County Cork during the mid to late 1980s and the in-depth knowledge of the cultural, social and environmental forms, relationships and contexts he gained in the field provides us with a solid basis for the various themes of this thesis. What makes Peace’s work significant in relation to my thesis is his particular approach to the people in the environmental milieu upon which his research focussed. For Peace, the environment in which people live out their lives, in whatever capacity they interact with such environments, is of as much relevance as their social and cultural ties with each other. To put this in another way, his work demonstrates that the bonds formed within human communities are shaped to a great extent by the kinds of environments that they inhabit. Yet he is no environmental determinist. Although this section will, in the main, concentrate on Peace’s two books A Time of Reckoning: The Politics of discourse in Rural Ireland (1997) and A World of Fine Difference (2001), I have chosen to start this section by briefly discussing two articles published in The Australian Journal of Anthropology (1996, 7:1, 43-60 and 1999, 10:2, 144-162) which focus on different aspects of the environmental debate in rural New South Wales. These two articles will introduce the analytical concepts which Peace employs in his larger works and allow us a greater understanding of how he perceives the forms of environmentalism he encounters. The first of these two articles, ‘Loggers are Environmentalists Too: Towards an Ethnography of Environmental Discourse’ (1996: 43-60), is based on events which occurred during 1994-1995 when the contentious issue of wood chipping was brought forcibly to the public’s attention by both environmental activists and the greater timber industry. Rallies and actions by environmentalists and conservationists were commonplace. Similar protests by those working in, or associated with, the timber industry were a much rarer occurrence. Nevertheless, the largest mass gathering of those opposed to the further regulation of timber harvesting and wood chipping took place in Canberra on the grounds of Parliament House and involved some six to seven thousand protesters. Among this number, many different groups from major corporations, trade unions and logging contractors were represented under the banner of the ‘Timber

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Industry’. As Peace explains, his interest was not in the proceedings of the protest itself but rather in the social forces that led to a protest of this kind being possible especially given the antipathy shown by many involved towards mass protests in the past. His focus was on protestors from one particular area in NSW whose participation in the protest seemingly ran counter to the staunch individualism which was usually characteristic of their conduct. Peace points out that his “concern is to detail the presence among the mass of protesters of a small number of contractors, saw millers, loggers and hauliers, from the southern NSW coastal town of Ulladulla and the nearby inland town of Milton” (1996:44). He goes on to further explain his objectives by stating:

Clearly, I am not suggesting that the circumstances of those participants from the Milton-Ulladulla locale were somehow unique: they stood on the picket line cheek-by-jowl with timber workers drawn from small rural communities much like their own. The proposal is rather that by concentrating on a small and representative group, it becomes more feasible to unravel the factors which led them, among many others, to engage in this untoward course of political action. In other words, I seek to demonstrate the analytic contribution which social anthropology can make to exploring the novel political landscapes created by new social movements in postmodern society (1996: 44).

Once again, we see the theme of discourse and its importance in the anthropological contribution to the study of new social movements coming to the fore, but Peace’s article addresses the discourse of those on the other side of the environmental debate (contractors, loggers, saw millers and hauliers) and, as such, makes us aware that environmentalism creates new forms of social opposition to its goals as much as it creates new ways to achieve them. It must be remembered that the politics of environmentalism also encompasses those movements and individuals antithetical to its success and their activism does indeed create space for novel political landscapes. Peace contends that the reason for this “self-avowedly apolitical, rural population” (ibid: 45) becoming involved in a protest of such large and organised dimensions lay in their recent initial confrontation with elements of the environmental movement in their own locale. The event so unsettled their community that, consequentially, “their occupational culture no longer held unchallenged sway over the forest which provided their livelihoods, and, second, the institutional power relations on which they had long depended were now subject to major realignment” (ibid). The conflict arose in mid November 1994 after the NSW branch of The Wilderness Society declared its intention to halt logging in the Croobyar State Forest, some ten kilometres west of the towns of Ulladulla and Milton. One of the key claims made by The Wilderness Society was that the area to be logged was “relatively undisturbed”, had a “high conservation value” and contained “large old growth trees” (ibid). Another was that, as no environmental impact statement (EIS) had been produced by the state government, there was a dearth of information concerning exactly what flora and fauna occupied the area let alone what impact timber harvesting would have upon this particular environment and its life forms. Although the ensuing protest was brief, lasting roughly three weeks, and relatively small, consisting of thirty to forty protesters on the logging site at any one time, the ramifications for local social relations were quite

21 Issues in Environmental Research significant. In many cases protests such as this one have immediate and drastic economic consequences for the area in question but, in this instance, the effects were more social than financial. The implied threat to the cultural significance of the timber industry in the area and the social position held by those working in it was, in this case, of greater consequence than the immediate effects caused by the loss of any single potential contract.

Peace notes that the residents of the Milton – Ulladulla locale became polarised into those for and those against the continuation of logging (ibid: 46). Where once the populace would have been mostly local born and bred, the demographic of the area had changed in recent years to include retirees from urban areas and a burgeoning tourist industry had seen the region frequented by a growing number of tourists, some with an interest in settling. Conversely, the timber industry in the region had experienced a steady contraction since the 1970s and its influence, although still strong, was declining. Peace addresses the differences in perception throughout the district by emphasising the differences in the way the conservationists and the timber workers saw the forest itself. Whereas the conservationists regarded timber harvesting as something wholly detrimental to the well being of the forest and sought to have as little human interference in its ecosystem as possible, the timber workers had been operating throughout the region for a number of generations and viewed claims by conservationists that the forest was ‘relatively undisturbed’ as highly misleading. Additionally, in stark contrast to the view of the conservationists that the forest was a resource for all, Peace notes that the timber workers viewed the forest as “exclusively and unambiguously their terrain” (ibid: 49). Thus the interpretive gulf between the conservationists and the loggers was so wide that each party objected to the presence of the other within the forest at all. At the end of the third week of the dispute, a moratorium was put in place by the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the dispute came to a successful conclusion for the environmental lobby. This left the timber workers, and a large part of the local community, defeated and dejected. What rankled the timber workers most about their defeat and deeply concerned them was that their intricate local knowledge of the area, and its capacities, had been thoroughly overlooked by what they saw as a government eager to gain the Green vote. They felt that it had pandered to the whims of urban conservationists who displayed virtually none of the well honed skills and experience that they, as workers in the timber industry, had gained through generations of working in and living with the forest. However, what was more disturbing for the timber workers was that they felt that their relationship with the NSW Forestry Commission had changed from a respectful partnership to an uneasy association. It seemed to them that the main aim of the Forestry Commission throughout the dispute had been to appease the conservationists in the quickest possible manner and to direct the attention of the public away from the workings of the Commission with all possible haste (ibid: 54). Here Peace draws attention to the ways in which different discourses can wax and wane in relation to the amount of authority vested in them at any particular time by noting the anxiety caused among those working in the timber industry by the Forestry Commissions apparent lack of regard for their narratives and circumstances. For generations their discourse and their work had been accorded an eminent position concerning decisions made about the forest among the relevant government institutions but now their hegemony had come to an end. As

22 Issues in Environmental Research demonstrated in the subheading, ‘Towards an Ethnography of Environmental Discourse’, Peace’s article is not a report on a comprehensive ethnography but rather an exploration of a terrain he felt promising for anthropological investigation. Regarding his aims, he informs us that: ‘From an anthropological perspective, of course, the analytic concern is to establish how particular bodies of knowledge are socially constituted as authorative and definitive, to examine, in other words how they are accorded a particular “truth- value” by virtue of the social relations in which they are embedded’ (ibid: 56). With this in mind, the conservationist activism in the Croobyar State Forest and their subsequent success in bringing a halt to timber harvesting in that area had major consequences for the timber workers. For Peace, the most significant of these is that it “subverted some of the most important presumptions of their culture, and it did so in full view of the population at large” (ibid: 57).

The sequel to the article discussed above is entitled, ‘Anatomy of a Blockade: Towards an Ethnography of Environmental discourse (2), Rural New South Wales 1996’ (1999: 144-162). It focussed on the different kinds of discourse prevalent in the arena of environmentalism. Yet, this article differs from the first in that it discusses an environmental conflict from a point of view opposed to timber harvesting that took place soon after the Croobyar dispute. The article is based upon events that took place in 1996 in the Conjola State Forest, which is also in southern NSW but closer to Canberra than Ulladulla and Milton. The conflict had its beginnings in efforts made by some of the residents of the towns of Bendalong and Manyana to have a section of the Conjola rezoned as National Parklands in order to create a cordon of National Park which would, if the proposal was successful, extend to the south, west and north of their communities – to the east is the southern coast of NSW. The application was made to the NSW Forestry Commission in 1988 and it entailed the ceding of a major part of the Conjola State Forest to the National Parks and Wildlife Services so it could be incorporated into the Cudmirrah National Park. At the time the proposal was made, no objection had been raised by any concerned party but the relevant state and national authorities had been very slow to respond and the proposal had been bogged down in an overly bureaucratic process which was exceedingly time consuming. In November 1994 it seemed that the residents would be granted their wish but, just before the Minister for Forests was due to sign the necessary documents of transfer, the proposal was changed in such a way as to incorporate only two thousand of the desired seven thousand hectares into the Cudmirrah National Park. Shortly after this, the National Parks and Wildlife Service informed the applicants that it was no longer interested in acquiring control over the two thousand hectares still included in the proposal. In the mean time, the area had been earmarked for logging and the residents discovered that the regional authorities were proposing to construct a large waste dump in an area adjacent to the proposed National Park. At this point both the communities of Bendalong and Manyana began to coordinate organised local resistance. The residents’ apprehension first focussed on the way in which the initial logging of the area had been carried out. The many people living locally felt that the loggers had been excessively destructive in going about their work and, furthermore, suspected that this had occurred at the behest of the State Forests authority to whom they were under contract. They believed that the loggers were ordered to create as much devastation as possible in order to “diminish the ecological worth of the forest as a whole,

23 Issues in Environmental Research and thus further diminish, if not put to an end, any prospect of its becoming a national park” (ibid: 150). They further surmised that the approval of the waste dump would then be a forgone conclusion. The opening of a log storage site near the sole road linking Bendalong and Manyana became, as Peace informs us, “a catalyst to collective action” (ibid: 150). In fact, the access track that had been bulldozed into the bush could be seen from the road and was a visual reminder of the authorities’ plans for the area. Soon after a meeting was called, attended by two hundred angry residents. Those present decided that their best course of action was to initiate an immediate round-the-clock blockade of the site which was to be kept in place until their demands were met. Importantly, Peace notes that the blockade became, over time, so integrated in the residents evolving consciousness that the discourse associated with it was common parlance within weeks of the blockade’s beginnings. It also instigated, what he calls “an overall broadening and deepening of social intercourse” (ibid: 152) which was the result of the different interactions between the various participating members and groups who would otherwise not have had the frequency of contact made necessary by the need to organise and stagger attendance in order to keep the blockade viable at all times during its existence. Peace claimed that the community came to perceive itself as taking on the mantle of the forest’s protectors, a role which they saw the State Forests Commission as having clearly failed to fulfil. To this end he states:

In other words, State Forests lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the residents. Most important of all, since its commitment to forest conservation had been revealed as empty rhetoric, it became the community’s moral responsibility to assume control and force recognition of the forest’s enormous non-monetary value, a pronounced sense of moral obligation being, of course, one of the more singular indices of community identity (ibid: 153).

Thus, the local residents set about “making the forest special” (ibid: 153), finding ways in which they could identify with the forest in an intimate and binding manner. As evidence of this, Peace notes that those on the blockade started to regularly explore the forest to identify the different species of flora and fauna which inhabited it. Although the ostensible motivation for this was to bring to light any endangered or unique species residing in the area, it also served as an initiation for activists and groups newly come to the blockade and it helped to foster solidarity between them and those participants in the blockade who had been there from the start. This practice yielded better than expected results as, apart from the discovery of important ecological findings, evidence of earlier sustained Indigenous occupation was found. This introduced a whole new aspect to the importance of the blockade and, when members of the Indigenous community became involved, gave the action significantly more political importance than it had previously in the greater context of the incumbent NSW government’s relations with the various Indigenous communities. In these ways, the community formed around the blockade became so intrinsically linked to the forest it was attempting to protect that it saw the threat to the forest as a threat to itself (ibid: 155). Another consequence of all this activity was to place the activists in a position in which they were able to threaten the government with political embarrassment by a combination of extensive data on the potential harm to

24 Issues in Environmental Research flora and fauna by further logging, the introduction of archaeological findings in and around the site confirming earlier Indigenous occupation, and the weight of the local activists reputation as solid, educated and law abiding concerned citizens (ibid: 158). This resulted in a compromise position being put forward by government authorities in which only small scale logging would be allowed under strict regulation. However, as the activists had sought a total end to logging from the start of the dispute, the offer was not accepted. The involved parties then entered into another phase of negotiation but this time with the direct involvement of the Minister for Forests himself (ibid: 159). As Peace does not mention a final outcome to the dispute, I am unable to convey whether or not the activists were eventually victorious and, if so, to what degree. Ultimately, questions of success or failure are not as important in the context of this work as how Peace shows how the residents, when they perceived themselves to be given no other choice, embarked on a course of civil disobedience designed to protect and conserve a part of the environment which they deemed to be important to themselves. He also shows how the creation of a discourse, and the incorporation of the forest into the social life of the local residents, led to such a strong identification with the forest that it became integral to the resident protestors’ own sense identity. Peace perceives this a successful attempt on the part of the activist residents to legitimise their concerns and actions both to themselves and to those living outside of their locale. In other words, they sought to justify their opposition to what they saw as a serious incursion into to their way of life. As Peace puts it: ‘The elaboration of legitimising discourses (see Milton 1993, 1996, Descola and Palsson 1996) is precisely what local level populations constitute on their own account when talking between themselves and in specific opposition to rival groups within the same disputed political arenas’(1999: 145).

From these two articles we can see that Peace was concerned to illuminate the ways in which notions of identity and discourse are not only linked to each other but play an integral role in the creation of identity with reference to environment. Furthermore, his articles provide a clear insight into the ways in which different groups can come to perceive the environment in qualitatively different ways depending upon their own notions of identity and the relative social spaces which they inhabit within their own social milieu. We only need look at the different dispositions that prevailed among the protestors from Ulladulla and Milton and those amongst the participants in the blockade held in the Conjola State Forest. On both occasions the groups involved based their opposition on an intimate knowledge about their respective forest environments that had been gained through personal and collective experience. Additionally, the strongest points of contention arose in both disputes where notions of identity and ownership came to the fore. As we shall see, these are recurring themes in Peace’s work on environmental issues. The next text to be discussed contains both of these themes but, unlike the two discussed above, is set in Ireland and is a full ethnographic account of an environmental dispute as it was lived by those social actors who committed themselves to it over an extended period of time. Peace’s work, A Time of Reckoning: The Politics of Discourse in Rural Ireland (1997), centres on the Merrel Dow dispute in East Cork and is based on fieldwork carried out by Peace in the East Cork area from 1988-89. In his ethnography, Peace expands his earlier interest in discourse and establishes this concept as key to understanding the lived experience of his informants at that time. He delineates three

25 Issues in Environmental Research main meanings of discourse used throughout his ethnography in the following way. First of all he says that, “discourse becomes an essential resource in the explanation of relationships, the justification of social actions, and the legitimation of beliefs” (Peace 1997: 8). By way of further explanation he observes; “A discourse generally reflects and acknowledges the collective interests of a group or institution wedded to it” (ibid). The second dimension of meaning is that “Discourses are processual rather than pre- ordained” (ibid: 9). The third is that discourses cannot be understood in isolation. Thus, Peace states, ‘In that the articulation of a major discourse concerns contentious issues within a given political milieu, so the central premises of each discourse are continually being challenged by others’ (ibid).

For Peace, these three aspects of discourse crystallise within, and to some extent constitute, a political arena in which the discourses used by the different participant groups vie with each other for dominance. In other words, “In analytical terms, a political arena becomes the terrain upon which agencies and institutions in conflict mobilise the information, knowledge, expertise, and other cultural resources germane to their interests” (ibid). The key physical setting for this political arena, as we shall see further on in this discussion, was the institution of the independent review held, in this instance, under the auspices of An Bord Pleanála (the Irish Planning Board). Peace’s exploration of the way in which different kinds of discourse accrue varying degrees of legitimacy, in this seemingly neutral context, shows the way in which environmental disputes express the balance of political and cultural power expressed by those embroiled in them. As Peace puts it, the dispute became a struggle between “the political discourse of populist opposition against the chemical factory” on the one hand, and “the scientific and technical discourse of the proposals proponents” (ibid: 17) on the other. However before this can be discussed, the particulars of the case study need to be contextualised. Peace presents this dispute as one which ultimately occurred between two classes in Irish society. How these classes came to be in conflict stems from the historical struggle in Irish history which saw the nation strive to overcome the dependencies of its colonial past by embarking on a campaign of aggressive industrialisation designed to put it, eventually, on an even footing with the rest of its European neighbours. In Peace’s words: ‘The state assumed the role of coordinating the country’s industrialisation in order to transform Ireland’s peripheral status vis-à-vis the broader international order. In doing so, it unleashed an unprecedented array of class influences’ (ibid: 18). The two classes fighting in out in this conflict were, according to Peace, the political class – which he perceives as the political and bureaucratic elite who firmly control the decision making institutions within Irish society – and a small section of the petite bourgeoisie – the latter being comprised mostly of the small capitalists who make their living from the land, as well as resources or capital (fishing vessels and nets, farm machinery, and small businesses, etc) situated in the locales where they lived.

As Peace explains, the power of the political elite and their control over the industrial trajectory of the Irish Republic was born out of the economic realities of post- independence Ireland. When the Free State was proclaimed, Ireland was left as an economic backwater on the western periphery of Europe. What little manufacturing there was in the country was small scale, inefficient and survived only because of financial

26 Issues in Environmental Research support from the government of the day. Among other things, this also had the effect of forcing large numbers of Ireland’s workforce to migrate as there were few opportunities for employment in the private sector (ibid: 20). The nationalistic economic policies of the de Valera era, between the 1920’s and the 1950’s, had focussed on trade with America rather than with western Europe in an attempt to free Ireland from its economic dependency on Britain and to allow it to press its claims against that country for the return of the six counties within the ancient borders of Ulster that had come to be known as Northern Ireland. After thirty years, the obvious failure of these policies to generate any real industrial or economic growth, Ireland, under a coalition government led by Sean Lemass and T.K.Whitaker, embarked on a policy of rapid industrialisation through a greater involvement with the economies of Western Europe. According to Peace, the four main aims of the industrialisation policy were: to restructure and expand selected areas of the agricultural sector with extensive public capital investment; to expand existing, or to establish new State corporate enterprises, which could facilitate and direct the modernisation programme, the most important of these being the Industrial Development Authority (IDA); to encourage and develop by a wide range of measures modern manufacturing and industry; and to borrow from major overseas institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in order to finance the infrastructural reforms (ibid: 21). Owing to its geographical position and, as a consequence of the depressed state of the Irish economy and its small existing manufacturing base, the Irish government was able to offer potential investors access to western European markets, access to the Irish market, low wages, compliant trade unions and, “virtually non-existent environmental controls” (ibid). By borrowing heavily from foreign institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, they were able to offer generous terms to potential overseas investors while providing ongoing financial assistance. As Peace puts it: The terms of this invitation were extraordinarily liberal, including a zero tax on profits, lengthy tax holidays, major grants towards fixed asset accumulation, accelerated depreciation allowances, the ready repatriation of corporate profits, and a range of subsidies which would also be extended to Irish investors who advanced capital to foreign firms (ibid).

Not surprisingly this policy was so successful that its aims were realised in a period of about twenty years. Peace notes that, by the 1980s, at least a third of the Irish population were employed by the manufacturing sector and the population had begun to show a regular increase for the first time since the Great Famine of the nineteenth century (ibid: 23). As for the policy’s more negative effects, the foreign owned nature of Ireland’s manufacturing industry saw a rise in unemployment during the eighties because companies retained the skilled roles in their production processes at home and simply used Irish labour in the non-skilled areas of production. Owing to the fluidity of global capital, Ireland also failed to develop an indigenous export oriented manufacturing sector as very little capital investment actually stayed in the country long enough to build up a base for it. This was compounded by a growing foreign debt and an increasing dependency on exported raw and semi-processed goods as successive governments became locked into its overgenerous bargains with foreign investors and could not offer

27 Issues in Environmental Research similar concessions to its own agriculturalists. Finally, because companies took up to 85% of their profits out of the Irish economy, the cost of keeping foreign investment in Ireland threatened to prove greater than the benefits of having it there in the first place (ibid: 24). In its rush to accommodate foreign investment, the state allowed the wishes of foreign companies to influence its dealings with local governments and, in many cases, the demands of the IDA were given priority over the wishes of both local authorities and local populations. A political culture soon developed in which opposing developments sponsored by the IDA could be a serious impediment to any political career, especially if that career was dependent upon continued party support at the national level for advancement. This had serious implications for the everyday reality of Irish politics as it centralised power in the hands of those with access to development funds. As Peace explains:

Formal and informal decision making became contained within the corridors of Leinster House, while the majority of politicians played little more than the role of honest broker between their constituents and the welfare bureaucracies. Even at the regional level, the patron-client relations of elected politicians were divorced from fundamental policy making processes dominated by bureaucrats (ibid: 26).

As a result, a number of government agencies, the most notable being the IDA, achieved a large degree of autonomy from the sphere of democratic politics and the bureaucrats that ran them became powerful political players in their own right. In the case of the IDA, it became so autonomous that it, not the government of the day, both directed and executed government policy in relation to industrial development (ibid). This was the case when the American owned company Merrell Dow first expressed interest in building a chemical plant in Ireland. As a subsidiary of Dow Chemical it could promise to invest large amounts of capital into whatever local economy it found itself situated in, and the size of the plant it would need to build to fulfil its production needs made it a perfect candidate for the IDA’s approval. For its own part, Merrell Dow could look forward to all the benefits already enjoyed by other foreign investors in Ireland without the burden of strict environmental controls that had hampered its operations at home in America. That the authorities involved and Merrell Dow were of one mind from the onset is attested to by Peace when he writes:

Throughout the conflict of 1988, the language of development to which the IDA, Cork County Council, and the management of the multi- national company were committed, took the construction of large factories, the generation of exports, the expansion of the GNP, and the pursuit of substantial profits, as unproblematic goals. If major costs had to be borne by others, so be it. In terms of their common corporate culture, these ends were beyond critical reflection (ibid: 27).

Given this common corporate culture and the degree of cooperation each party could expect from the other, it would seem on the face of it that Merrell Dow’s proposal to build a chemical plant at Killeagh in East Cork should have gone through to completion

28 Issues in Environmental Research quite smoothly. What they failed to anticipate was the well organised and passionate campaign against them that was run by local residents concerned about their health, livelihoods, and local environment in which they lived their day to day existence. As I have mentioned above, Peace presents this dispute, on one level, as one between the political class of Ireland and the petite bourgeoisie. Just as the evolution of the political class was influenced by Ireland’s development policies, so too was that of the petite bourgeoisie. By the time of the dispute the nature of agriculture in Ireland had changed dramatically from what had traditionally been a culture of subsistence production in which a wide range of crops and produce were farmed. Instead, with government agricultural policy emphasising beef and dairy production, rather than the previously more common tillage, the resulting reduction in the need for farm labour had brought about a demographic shift in rural Ireland. Where the petite bourgeoisie had previously been just one group among many in the Irish rural landscape, it was, by 1988, the dominant force both economically and numerically (ibid: 28-29). As such, it could bring a level of cohesion to the ensuing campaign that both alarmed and confounded its opponents. Those responsible for the mounting of the opposition to the proposed chemical plant, chiefly the Womanagh Valley Protection Association (WVPA), were able to use common signals and signifiers to universalise their appeal to the wider community because precisely because the wider community was also dominated by small capitalists such as themselves, regardless of their specific occupations. As Peace puts it, they “were able to utilise the material and cultural capitals which they possessed to impress upon the broader population that they were, at least potentially, effective spokespersons for the region” (ibid: 43). The first signs of trouble broke out early in 1988 when information was leaked to the local community in Killeagh that Merrell Dow had purchased 90 acres of land from a nearby farmer. After confirming the sale and Merrell Dow’s intentions regarding their plans for it, a local woman began to gather what information she could from the library and the Internet about the operations of Merrell Dow and its environmental record. The information uncovered was so disturbing that, armed with it, she managed to enlist a core group of local farmers and initiate what was to become the Womanagh Valley Protection Association (WVPA). Indeed, Merrell Dow’s environmental record was so poor in America that the newly formed group had little trouble in further enlisting the services of an environmental scientist, Rory Finegan, who was known to them from the part he had played in the campaign to close down the ‘Raybestos’ asbestos processing plant in Cork in the early 1980s. Finegan, acting as an independent environmental advisor, conducted his own investigations into the potential environmental impact of the plant and, when Merrell Dow filed its planning application and gave public notification of its intentions, he was able to effectively counter the company’s claims of minimal impact. These claims were based around an Environmental Impact Statement funded by Merrell Dow and carried out by EOLAS (the Gaelic acronym for the Irish Science and Technology Agency). The document was not made available to the public before the application was approved but the group had been warned of the biased nature of these reports in the past. EOLAS routinely worked in conjunction with both the IDA and business corporations to produce favourable environmental impact statements; neither the group’s members (WVPA) or Finegan were surprised when its document gave approval to the application. Peace explains: ‘EOLAS was accustomed to producing impact statements for American corporations in

29 Issues in Environmental Research conjunction with senior officials from the IDA. In this instance, as was customary, Merrell Dow had funded the EIS and so owned the document’ (ibid: 53).

With this information to hand, Finegan was able to translate the scientific terminology used in the EIS and explained that, in his opinion, the plant would represent a dire threat to both the local environment and the livelihoods of those who earned their living from it. Indeed his warnings of environmental catastrophe were so compelling that the WVPA was able to present their campaign to the broader community as one which involved all the citizens of East Cork, not just a few farming families in Killeagh. The campaign was given further impetus when a legal judgement known as the Hanrahan verdict, detailed in section 1.3, came down against a company trading as Merck, Sharp and Dohme and vindicated a family called the Hanrahan family in their struggle to bring that company to justice for the harm caused to them by pollution emitted from its chemical plant in Tipperary. As the Hanrahan’s had been a respectable farming family rooted for generations in the land they farmed, their treatment at the hands of the American corporation Merck, Sharp and Dohme was held up by the WVPA as a compelling reason to resist the construction of the Merrell Dow plant in Killeagh. To further connect the two disputes, the WVPA hired the same Dublin based legal firm that had represented the Hanrahan’s to advise them. In order to counter this increasingly organised campaign to sway public opinion against the proposed plant, Merrell Dow opened an office in Cork city. It then embarked on a public relations campaign in which the company held a week of ‘information meetings’ for the purposes of assuring the public that all safety precautions would be taken and that the technology used at the plant would be “state of the art” (ibid: 62). Peace reports that these meetings were largely unsuccessful in swaying public opinion as the American project manager not only used the somewhat tarnished EOLAS report as the basis of his claims but presented his case in a style more suited to a corporate meeting than a community gathering. As Peace explains: Clearly the style of corporate American salesmanship grated in this milieu. The carefully organised and illustrated presentation of details was locally interpreted as an attempt to pull the wool over people’s eyes: the emphasis on the financial dimensions of the development was seen as a strategy for turning attention away from important matters. But the influences involved were more substantial than this. Expressed in somewhat different terms, the tension of the August meetings provided a preliminary but emphatic indication of the cultural divide which existed between the corporate management from North America and the petite bourgeois property owners of East Cork (ibid: 63).

Importantly, Peace notes that there was a basic ideological conflict underlying this situation. The IDA, EOLAS and Merrell Dow were expressing the ideology of unbridled capitalist development and profit seeking that dominates the corporate world. In this, they were not seeking to ‘pull the wool over’ anyone’s eyes but were in fact true believers in the ideology of capitalist industrial expansion. The project was seen as an uncomplicated ‘good’ for the company, the state and the local community because it would generate significant profits. That the lion’s share of these profits would go to the corporation was,

30 Issues in Environmental Research for them, only just as the corporation was the key investor in the project. In relation to this, Peace states: ‘Neither management nor government spokespersons were engaged in some deliberate contrivance or calculated fabrication. Their emphases were derived from the model of economic progress to which such advocates are wedded: they were expressing the concerns which members of their class are driven to express’ (ibid: 64). Peace also sees the project’s opponents as expressing concerns that people of their particular class and circumstances are driven to express. Theirs were the concerns of the small-scale entrepreneur whose chief capital investment was, in most cases, the land they owned and farmed, the fishing boats they worked themselves, or the small businesses they daily operated (ibid). Their capital investments were not fluid or transportable; rather they were firmly grounded in the local physical, socio-cultural and political environment. Thus, the way they articulated their opposition was with these concerns in mind. While the opposition movement developed, so too did a discourse through which its members could express their concerns to each other and to those they were trying to persuade. Peace notes that there were frequent mentions of famous environmental disasters such as the Piper Alpha oil rig, Chernobyl, and Sellafield along with those closer to home such as the polluted condition of Cork harbour and the fate of the Hanrahan family (ibid: 70). These were all meshed together to provide the movement with a legitimate space within which to voice its concerns. An important part of this process is the development of a discourse in which the goal of the campaign can be presented as straight forward ‘common sense’ rather than a utopian or idyllic demand. Peace rightly comments that this kind of ‘common sense’ approach is universal to all environmental campaigns and that a claim can be made that it may be, in fact, a defining feature of environmentalism. In relation to the meetings held by the opposition subsequent to the Merrell Dow meetings, he notes that:

Many of these interpretations were rooted in ‘common sense’, which is never static, but always changing, never narrowly circumscribed, but always responsive to novel information (compare Berger 1969: 102). It does not sharply distinguish between what is ‘going on in here’ and what is ‘happening out there’ because its function is to provide practical guides to living efficiently in the social world. One moment people would be discussing chemical production in the proposed factory, the next, chemical pollution in Cork harbour; a discussion about diseased seals and fish with cancers would be followed by a discussion of a threat to their own livestock; talk about fire hazards in the proposed factory would lead to talk of explosions on the Piper Alpha (ibid: 71).

The creation of this discourse of ‘common sense’ also afforded the movement’s self appointed leadership, that of the WVPA, the authority to represent the many different groups and organizations that ultimately joined the campaign. Peace states that the discourse effectively created a populist myth about the “opinion of the common man” (ibid: 81) and that it was this myth and the leaders’ ability to be perceived as the ‘common man’ that welded the movement together as an effective political force. Indeed this political movement was so effective that it succeeded in being granted its wish that the whole issue of the chemical plant and the legalities surrounding the Cork County

31 Issues in Environmental Research

Council’s approval of Merrell Dow’s application be brought before a hearing of the Irish Planning Board (An Bord Pleanála). Here they thought their discourse of common sense would prevail, as the Planning Board at least could be counted on to give them a fair hearing and deliver an objective verdict. The local politicians and the IDA, on the other hand, could not use this tactic once it had been so firmly adopted by the opposition so they had to resort to thinly veiled threats instead. While painting the WVPA as a group of self-centred, affluent, farming families, they made suggestions that they may not direct investment towards East Cork in the future if the hearing went against Merrell Dow. They were also able to rally the pro-development elements of East Cork to their cause. There were many people who felt that the plant would provide jobs for themselves and their children. These people were those who had, in the recent past, been the rural labour force which had worked as wage earners on the local farms. Not in possession of the capital required to own their own farms and suffering from unemployment caused to a great extent by the increasingly mechanised nature of modern agricultural practices, they feared a continuation of the cycle of emigration that saw many of their family members forced to seek work in other countries (ibid: 88-89). In short, many from the rural working class in effect supported the IDA and Merrell Dow as they were desperate for wage work. When the time came, the hearing was held in the Cork Council Chambers and this, Peace found, had significant repercussions in relation to the kinds of discourse deemed appropriate in the dispute. To their dismay, the opposition movement found that their discourse of ‘common sense’ was not effective in the formalised setting of the hearing. The rituals and regulations that had to be observed left them unsettled and reluctant to speak in the face of the imposing officers of the tribunal and the various legal and technical experts present as part of the proceedings. In this way the relations of expressed power were strongly in favour of the corporation, the IDA, and their legal representatives. Even the spatial arrangement of the hearing was such that the Chief Inspector, the Merrell Dow management team, the solicitors and the Cork County Council representatives were all in the front facing the WVPA and other appellants seated at the back of the chamber (ibid: 106). Furthermore, the tribunal made it clear from the start that the only kind of discourse that would be given weight during the proceedings was that based on scientific findings and technical expertise. Thus, right from the beginning of the proceedings, the power of the local opposition led by the members of the WVPA to represent themselves in their own language was taken away from them. Additionally, they could not direct the hearing towards issues that they wanted to discuss as the course of the inquiry was firmly in the hands of the inspectors. Personal opinion would be regarded as hearsay and all references to the environmental disasters, so central to the opposition’s discourse, would be deemed irrelevant. From that point on they would have to rely, except when being directly questioned, on the skills of their legal representatives and technical advisors. As Peace puts it, the “inspectors had more than the authority to decide who should speak: they also exercised the power to determine what witnesses should speak about” (ibid). He further emphasises the significance of this in relation to the hearing when he writes:

Both inspectors were trained engineers. Although this information was presented matter-of-factly, it was of critical importance. It was a clear, preliminary signal that the language of technology would constitute the

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discourse of the hearing. Henceforth, the kind of cultural capital to be privileged would be qualitatively different from the populist discourse now current in rural East Cork (ibid: 108).

What followed was a three-day hearing in which the testimony of the technical and scientific experts was presented to the inspectors as the only legitimate form of knowledge concerning the dispute. Those within the opposition movement were, when called upon to speak, encouraged only to speak of their own situations and the impact that the plant would have on them as individuals. Any reference to a broader community was not deemed appropriate and, thus, no strong collective solidarity within the community could be expressed. The movement’s own environmental scientist, Rory Finegan, was disallowed from referring to Merrell Dow’s poor environmental record at its other locations and was made to present his data as his ‘opinion’ rather than as a product of detailed scientific investigation. Similarly, expert representatives from other groups, notably the Irish Tourist Board (Bord Failte Éireann) and the Southern Regional Fisheries Board were led by the inspectors towards detailing the requirements for a positive outcome for the IDA and Merrell Dow. Although the evidence that they presented was quite damning, the inspectors focussed discussion on ways in which the negative aspects of the plants emissions might be minimised to allow the project to proceed (ibid: 113- 116). As a culture of compromise existed within these agencies, the tactic was quite successful. In relation to the Irish Tourist Board (Bord Failte Éireann) and the Southern Regional Fisheries Board, Peace explains that these bodies “geared to the negotiation of compromise solutions through bureaucratically organised bargaining encounters” (ibid: 116).

For Peace, the efforts of the inspectors to procure the plant’s future signified an even more fundamental force at play. The formalised setting, the priority given to the discourse of science and technology over that of the opposition movement, and the direction of the discussion towards the plant’s facilitation were all made possible by the appearance of objectivity and neutrality fundamental to the hearing’s legitimacy. That is why the WVPA and the rest of the opposition movement were so pleased when they heard that the Irish Planning Board (An Bord Pleanála) were going to conduct the hearing and settle the matter once and for all. They firmly believed that they would have a chance to present their case directly to a neutral party and, in doing so, would be able to let the facts speak for themselves. Unfortunately, the hearing played into the hands of the IDA and Merrell Dow and resulted in the approval of the chemical plant despite the obvious danger to environment from its emissions. As Peace informs us: ‘Once the political significance of the Merrell Dow issue was clear, An Bord Pleanála responded with alacrity. It committed substantial resources to ensuring that the politics of the conflict were quickly subordinated to its own bureaucratic rules and regulations’ (ibid: 165).

Thus, once all parties involved had acknowledged the legitimacy of the hearing and the claims of neutrality of the inspectors, the outcome was never in doubt. The Irish Planning Board, in conjunction with the IDA, EOLAS and Merrell Dow, were able to use the authority ceded to them by the opposition movement to affect the course of the proceedings. In the end, the “authority of conventional and scientific discourse” (ibid:

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167) was used by those with political and economic power to override the legitimate concerns of the farmers, local businessmen and the fishermen. Ironically, although Merrell Dow won the right to build its plant in Killeagh, the campaign against it was ultimately successful. The objections of the WVPA and its supporters caused nationwide public consternation and significantly disrupted Merrell Dow’s timetable. While the dispute was raging, Merrell Dow’s parent company, Dow Chemical had placed it under review for non-profitability. When Dow Chemical took over another, more successful and less controversial company in the same field, called Marion Laboratories, it decided that it would be a better vehicle for investment than Merrell Dow. Consequently the company had to abandon its plans for the Irish plant due to a lack of funding. Significantly, by the time this had occurred, the dispute had gained the attention of the national media and had become widely discussed throughout Irish society. Despite the legalities, the opposition movement had succeeded in making environmental politics a major concern for the mainstream parties and had, albeit unintentionally, prepared the ground for environmental movements such as the Irish Greens to establish their legitimacy in the Irish political spectrum. Throughout the work, Peace raises many issues relevant to the modern practise of anthropology. To attempt to encapsulate them all in this section would not only be futile but would deny the scope and complexities involved in his treatment of ethnographic data. I have therefore concentrated on presenting the more important facets of the ethnography in relation to my own work. In this context, Peace’s treatment of discourse offers a practical approach to the analysis of ethnographic data. It is presented as a fluid, context dependent concept that conveys meaning on many different levels in relation to diverse conflicts. Regarding that of the WVPA and the regional opposition movement represented at the hearing, his position is stated clearly when he writes:

Any oppositional discourse can be thought of as ideational scaffolding which provides those who adhere to it with a framework for further action and the justification for protest; as with the physical scaffolding of construction sites, these conceptual frameworks have their own central footings and points of critical purchase. (ibid: 95).

Peace creates a space in which he is not constricted by rigorous theoretical templates but is free to bring the identities of his subjects to life through an honest recounting of the language used by them and the situation in which they find themselves. This treatment of identity as a priority in his work is also extended to a number of different levels. Hence, the farmers of Killeagh are not seen in isolation but as part of a network, from local community to national institutions, that define their lived experience. They are petite bourgeois, agriculturalists, members of political constituencies, family members, friends and rivals, leaders and followers, powerful in one context and powerless in another. They may be, to an extent, defined by standardised political concepts but are all the more interesting when they elude definition. While very aware of the political economy at work in Irish society, Peace does not try to contain their essence within this single dimension. Their relationships with each other clash and mingle with those they form with the state, its institutions and the corporations they opposed. Peace reminds us that good social investigation starts at the level of detailed, thorough and perceptive

34 Issues in Environmental Research observation. He presents his work as “a challenge to those macro sociologists and political scientists who try to account for the complexities of local community action with a priori analytic labels and categories” and goes on to say that this “is a recurrent tendency in the literature of social movements, frequently erasing the intricacies and refinements of individuals constructing their own projects and social action” (ibid: 176). As an anthropologist engaged in the study of environmental issues and disputes, he does not link the local opposition movement to the broader opposition movement but still manages to provide insight into the diversity inherent in that loose collective phenomenon by suggesting its heterogeneity. He warns that the “range of political issues constructed around the defence of the environment ensures that the putative claims about order, pattern, and coherence built into the concept of social movement, will obscure precisely those qualities which distinguish such events from one another” (ibid). In this manner Peace creates a space for a meaningful and productive encounter for anthropology with environmentalism.

The last of Peace’s works to be discussed in this section is A World of Fine Difference (2001). This work is a product of fieldwork carried out by Peace in a small rural community in the south of Ireland in the mid to late 1980s. Indeed the community in question, given the name of Inveresk for the purposes of the study, was situated not far from Killeagh and it was while undertaking fieldwork for this book that Peace gathered the information that led him to write the work discussed above. However, unlike that work, A World of Fine Difference (ibid) presents a more traditional approach to ethnography in that it is a product of an extended period in the field and does not centre on a single event such as the campaign to stop the building of the chemical plant in Killeagh. Although Peace carries through with many of the notions discussed above, his main focus is on the sense of identity created and maintained by those in the Inveresk community and the ways in which they find communality by the articulation of difference. In a broad sense, he investigates the ways in which the community’s engagement with modernity expresses itself along the lines of traditional structures of division. The analysis presents modernity as a pervasive force that, ultimately, acts as both a threat to the community’s cohesion and a stimulus for cohesion in the face of that threat. As the world closes in on Inveresk its inhabitants find it increasingly comforting to know that they may cling to a familiar social context in the face of massive external change. It allows them a degree of self-determination within the group identity which they would otherwise be denied. Peace brings to the fore the sense of belonging possessed by this rural community but does not attempt to extrapolate this on any larger levels. For him, assumptions of cultural homogeneity have been far too common in academic work in the Irish context (ibid: 6) and have, in the past, obscured the uniqueness of individual communities and denied the richness of context in the Irish socio-cultural landscape. Again, Peace defines the inhabitants of Inveresk as a predominantly petite bourgeois population but explores the richness of difference at play within this context. At the heart of his discussion is the notion that the community’s identity is kept intact by the friction generated as the three main groups contained within it interact and compete with each other. Peace also pays close attention to the ways in which those within each of these three main groupings interact and compete with each other, often with much more enthusiasm than was apparent in intergroup interactions.

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Hence, the discourse Peace describes is multi-layered, continually fluid and dependent on established rules of engagement that were rarely broken as the consequences for disregarding these rules were immediately apparent in such a small community. Additionally, in this context, discourse was closely linked to the creation and distribution of knowledge within the community. At such close quarters knowledge becomes a valuable assets in which both personal and financial wellbeing are dependent upon. As Peace explains:

So the natural discourse of each domain comprises the condensed, coherent, and collective conversation which draws on, and adds to, the ever changing stock of knowledge shared by those involved in its prevalent means of livelihood. This is not an evenly distributed body of knowledge: certain residents are adept at keeping valuable information to themselves, and it is part of their local reputations that they do so. Knowledge may not be interchangeable with power within this small scale setting, but it is undoubtedly a valuable resource and has to be marshalled accordingly (ibid: 41).

The three main groups dealt with in this ethnography were the farming families, fishing families and those families that lived in the town itself and ran the various businesses of the community. These groups abided in adjoining but distinct geographical areas which Peace called respectively the Country, the Pier and the Town. Each group possessed an intimate knowledge of one another and their livelihoods, although stemming from different resources, were intricately linked with each other. Thus, Peace continues his concentration on the importance of discourse and provides a valuable launching place for the discussion of the discourse involved in my own fieldwork based analysis. However, as the focus of his work is, in this instance, not concerned with the environmental movement in Ireland, I will forego any lengthy discussion of the work as a whole in order to bring the aspects of his discussion more relevant to my own work into greater illumination. Peace’s work contains an insightful discussion of the attitudes towards politics and politicians at play in Inveresk. Although he warns of the dangers inherent in attempting to extrapolate too widely from one community to another, his analysis in this case does offer an insight into the way in which many in Ireland perceive their political leaders. He points out that the existing literature in this field, while thoroughly discussing the history of modern Irish political parties and the strategies that they have employed over time, fails to address the different attitudes towards politicians prevalent in Irish society. He presents two aspects of this dearth of information as being particularly crucial to an anthropological understanding of Irish communities’ relationship with the machinery of their political parties. In his words: ‘The first is how deeply unacceptable local people consider their encounters with party political and governmental apparatuses to be; the second, which is closely related, is how resentful they are of the broader structures of inequality and power of which these apparatuses are a part’ (ibid: 109).

Peace points out that those small communities such as Inveresk often do not rate much attention in political circles. The only real exception to this rule is during election campaigns as the Irish political system is run on proportional representation and allows

36 Issues in Environmental Research competition between parties as well as candidates from the same party. It is only at these times that communities such as Inveresk, with approximately 450 adults, can become important in the scheme of things as their votes may be needed to tip the scales for one or another candidate. When this happens speeches are made and visitations are organised but the promises made are viewed with scepticism by the local people. As Peace notes, many constituents in Inveresk at least saw politicians merely as facilitators linked to different party machines. They could facilitate the delivery of services from the bureaucracy that were theirs by right in the first place. As Peace writes: Notwithstanding an abundance of political rhetoric about representing the people, redressing the balance between rich and poor, making the process of politics more accountable, and so on, it is nowadays assumed as a matter of course that the political class is wholly geared to the interests of major Irish corporations and the large transnational companies which dominate key sectors of the Irish economy. Alternatively, it is devoted to maintaining the structural arrangements within the European Union which have proved, since the mid- 1970s, such an indispensable source of the capital with which the political class can reproduce its regional power base (ibid: 110). In relation to this, Peace notes that, when seeking assistance, there were clear stages to be undergone if an individual or a community wished to have the good will of those in power on their side. The appropriate people at each level of power must be contacted and, indeed, even if this was done there was no guarantee that what was sought would be granted. With this in mind, he makes the point that even those at the lowest echelons of government may wield a great deal of power as gatekeepers to those above them and credits the close attention paid by the public to elections at all levels of Irish society as a direct consequence of this. As Peace put it, this “is why the election of county councillors as well as TDs is followed so closely in rural areas, for it is on such men and women that residents have to rely for assistance as they apply for improvement grants, pensions, health cards, fuel vouchers, and so on” (ibid: 118).

Finally, Peace’s attention to issues of class is also helpful in the context of this study. As mentioned previously, he clearly identifies the people of Inveresk and surrounding rural areas as petite bourgeois and much of his fieldwork analysis bears out that their socio- economic positioning within the broader Irish community has substantial implications regarding the way they maintain their identity and relate to one another. Without again going into the detail of Peace’s fieldwork, his use of class as an identifying category has shed light on many aspects of his subjects that would have otherwise gone unmentioned. Moreover, Peace feels that attention to class issues has been too rare a thing in the anthropology of Ireland and that many recent works have suffered because of it. In his words, “It has to be acknowledged that on the whole social anthropology has contributed but marginally to the interpretation of structural inequalities in the Republic, and this, one might propose, is one of the reasons for a decline in its significance over the past decade or so” (ibid: 128). Indeed, he criticises the marginal contributions that have been made as denying the ground level experiences of the people investigated in favour of a more theoretical approach that is far less complex than the lives of those being studied. He also points out that Irish society, and indeed all societies, does not operate within well-defined parameters or by the operation of some transparent logic to which all prescribe. By assigning his informants the title of petite bourgeois, Peace is not suggesting that they act

37 Issues in Environmental Research strictly in accordance with the various theoretical notions applied to that class but is rather using the category as a heuristic tool from which some useful analysis may be drawn. For him, the essence of modern identity can not be captured by the use of one label or another, but useful categories serve as signposts in the attempt. In this vein he writes that much “closer attention needs to be paid to the details and specifics of class within this fragmentary and ill-defined structure” (ibid: 128). Having discussed the debates and methodologies concerning the anthropological engagement with environmentalism, it is now appropriate that we situate the Irish Green Party within its own political context. In order to do this, we shall turn to the work of Susan Baker.

1.3 A Brief History of Environmental Groups and Conflicts in Contemporary Ireland:

Baker’s article, ‘The Evolution of the Irish Ecology Movement’ was published in 1990 while she was a lecturer in European business studies at the University of Ulster. Baker had conducted research into ideology and industrialisation in Ireland and one of her foci was “the relation between industry, the policy making structures and interest groups and, in particular, environmental issues” (Rudig 1990: 227). Her article contains a concise history of the emergence of environmentalism in Ireland and a thorough discussion of green politics in Ireland up to 1989. Baker eschews the more common term ‘environmentalism’ in favour of ‘ecologism’. This she defines as “the political analysis of ecological deterioration, which seeks a solution to environmental damage in political, social and economic action” (1990: 48). In reference to this thesis I have decided that the two terms are compatible and can be seen as representing the same concept. Of particular interest to Baker were the interrelated issues of the rapid industrialisation of Ireland since the 1960s and the pressures this placed upon its physical environment. She suggests that the patterns of environmental destruction caused by industrialisation has “more in common with Third World countries than with its more developed European neighbours” (ibid: 47). That being the case, she acknowledges that the environmental movement in Ireland was shaped as much by its particular path to industrialisation as it was by its proximity to mainland Europe. As she explains:

This duality means that the study of the movement in Ireland offers unique opportunities. On the one hand, it can provide insights into the nature of the European movement and, on the other, can bridge the gap between analysis of First World environmentalism and that of the Third World. Furthermore, there is increased realization that the cause of environmental degradation lies with western anthropocentric models of economic development (ibid).

While the relationship between First and Third world environmentalism is beyond the scope of this work, Baker’s analysis of the political economy of the Irish state provides an interesting framework within which to initially ground the research. Nevertheless, in many ways, the discussion of the socio-economic parameters of the modern Irish state does uncover predicaments and realities familiar to many nations on the fringes of political and economic power centres. Baker describes pre-1922 Ireland as a “classically’

38 Issues in Environmental Research dependent country” (ibid: 50) which was ruled from Westminster as a satellite economy for the purposes of providing cheap agricultural and trading goods for the British market. This effectively created a state that was “economically underdeveloped and politically marginal” (ibid) with the economy based on subsistence farming and exports almost solely dependent upon raw materials. In this period, Ireland’s economy was, by and large, based on the products of its agricultural industry that grew out of the prolific fertility of the soil in its midlands. This dependency deepened after 1922 with the creation of the state of Northern Ireland which, after starting out as a nine county entity, was eventually whittled down to six by a referendum held twelve months after its inception. It was within these six counties of Ulster that the majority of Ireland’s industrial capacity was situated and, while the Republic’s economy was still linked to that of Britain, there was little chance of further development. Poverty and economic dependency led the Fianna Fáil government in 1958 to abandon the policy platform of economic nationalism, in which the Irish economy was used to facilitate the reunification of the island, in favour of policies designed to foster foreign direct investment by establishing agreements with multinational companies. As Baker further explains, this “policy of export-oriented economic expansion achieved through reliance upon foreign direct investment has subsequently remained the major plank of Government economic policy in Ireland” (ibid: 51). As a result of these policies, Ireland managed to industrialise rapidly in the 1960’s but this has not served to rescue the Irish economy from the kind of dependency endemic within the colonial period. Baker points out that this dependency has simply been transferred to “multi-national companies engaged in export-oriented foreign direct investment” (ibid: 52). Regarding this situation, she states: ‘In short, the Irish economy has, in the last twenty years, changed from being a dependent underdeveloped economy to being a dependently developed one (Crotty 1986). Such dependent industrialisation has not resulted in the expansion of the home industrial base, and the industrial bourgeoisie remain economically weak’ (Bew and Patterson 1978).

McQueen (2001) presents an interesting discussion of this kind of phenomenon in his work The Essence of Capitalism: the Origins of Our Future. He describes the process by which corporations exert their vast economic influence upon nation states in order to create favourable conditions in which to conduct business. The nation states, eager for a share of the wealth generated by the activities of the corporations, make legislative changes that facilitate the corporations’ entry into their markets. They undertake to create special conditions in which the corporations are above the normal laws under which commerce operates. In effect, the state becomes the servant of corporate capital and protects it from the democratic processes of government in order to partake in the wealth of corporate economies. Although complicated in its application this simple tactic has lain at the heart of Irish economic policy for the last forty years and its effects have been significant. Owing to the dynamism of the 1960s and 1970s, Ireland’s population increased for the first time since the 1840’s. A greater percentage of the Irish felt that the imperatives that had drove them year by year to emigrate in their thousands were no longer as valid as before, because with the growth in economic activity came benefits not previously experienced in Ireland. Along with more opportunities for employment, the standard of living rose, free secondary education was introduced, access to tertiary education was increased, television arrived in 1962 and the hold of the Catholic Church

39 Issues in Environmental Research over Irish society decreased noticeably (Baker 1990: 52). Irish people now had increasing scope for broader outlooks and possibilities of travel and cultural exchange abounded. In the past cultural exchange had been a slow and unequal process in which far more of the Irish people and their culture had been exported than that of others imported. With affordable holidays an option for at least the middle class, cultural exchange could now happen on a larger scale and this, ultimately, led to the disruption of many older social patterns established in a more isolated era. Additionally, this growth spurt in the economy sparked a period of rapid industrialisation in which social and political norms were further undermined. Baker observes:

In particular, the scramble to ‘catch up’ with the development of its European neighbours through industrialization and modernization had disruptive effects on the accepted political and social processes and relationships that had existed throughout the island. Furthermore, entry into the modern industrial age was also to bring ecological destruction and with it an increased concern about the negative impact of the drive towards industrialization and modernization (ibid: 52).

Not surprisingly, the most vocal in their concerns about the negative effects of this new direction in Ireland’s trajectory were the increasing numbers of students in tertiary education. In the 1970s numerous groups such as the Contraceptive Action Program, the Divorce Action Group and the Gay Rights Group formed in response to social issues arising from these changes. Among these was the Irish anti-nuclear movement which was the “first movement to address itself to issues of an ecological nature” (ibid: 53). This led to the foundation of modern environmentalism in Ireland.

The impetus behind the movement came from the Fianna Fáil policy to build at least one nuclear power plant in Ireland in order to meet growing electricity demands. The EEC supported this policy after Ireland’s inclusion in 1973 and possible sites were selected. Fianna Fail, the dominant political party in Ireland at the time, used its influence to gain broad support among the other parties. Fianna Fáil had been committed for some time to a policy of rapid industrialisation and the power plant was an important part of its strategy to shore up Ireland’s new economy (ibid). As coalition partners, the Labour Party was also supportive of this policy throughout their time in government from 1973 to 1977 although there was a significant number of its members, including many in the union movement, that were antagonistic towards the prospect of nuclear power plants in Ireland. The proposed power plant was to be situated at Carnsore in County Wexford along the eastern coast of Ireland. The response of the local community was initially very positive but this was counteracted by a wave of dissent that swept through Irish society and which brought many pertinent debates concerning nuclear energy out into the open. All of this generated considerable apprehension in the communities close to the site. Consequently, organized opposition appeared in 1974 in the form of the NSA or Nuclear Safety Action (ibid: 53). By 1978 the anti-nuclear movement in Ireland had evolved into a coalition of groups from throughout the Republic with representatives from many different political traditions. Ironically, it was this drive towards unity that created what was to prove a lasting schism within environmentalism in Ireland. Baker then describes

40 Issues in Environmental Research the ensuing struggle within the fledgling movement concerning strategy and ideology. The first of the two opposing sides consisted of groups committed to achieving policy change by working within the boundaries of the mainstream political institutions as well as conducting non-violent protest campaigns through ordinary legal and administrative processes. Baker cites the Friends of the Earth (FoE) as an example of this kind of group and notes that they “adopted traditional organizational structures, with executives, a chairperson, etc, and a formal membership, and were a branch of FoE Worldwide” (ibid). The second contained the various groups that were hostile to the creation of formal structures and unwilling to renounce any form of protest, violent or non-violent, that may be effective in attaining the goal of a nuclear free Ireland. It was from campaigners in the former group that the Green Party was to emerge, and Baker treats those on that side of the schism with considerably more understanding than those on the other. She sees those opposed to formal politics as a conglomeration of small groups representing the anarchist and far left political traditions concerned with environmental issues only so far as they are consistent with the wider aims of their respective political philosophies. Thus she states: These groups wished to see a mass movement develop outside traditional parliamentary politics. Many were on the far left, had been in existence before the nuclear controversy developed or were active in issues other than the nuclear one, and saw nuclear power as but one example of capitalist technology requiring mass opposition. Furthermore, unlike FoE, they did not wish to become involved in campaigning or conducting research into, alternative sources such as solar or wind power. They saw this as a means of providing capitalism with a way out of its energy crisis (ibid: 54).

While it is not necessary to enter into a discussion of the different individual groups involved in this struggle, which is provided for the most part in Baker’s article, it is interesting to note her treatment of the various participants. Those committed to mainstream politics are presented as peaceful citizens with the health of the environment as their principal concern while those opposing them are framed as potentially violent subversives mustered together in a disorganised rabble with no other real goal than the downfall of the capitalist system. Baker’s identification of leftwing and anarchist groups as being dismissive of wind and solar power are, without presenting any clear evidence, presumptuous and unfounded. What can be discerned from Baker’s discussion is that the environmental movement faced, in its early stages, an internal conflict borne out of the need to change social structures while not wishing to be co-opted and subsumed by those structures in the attempt. Those activists willing to organise themselves within traditional political structures felt that they could only bring change to the system from within while those unwilling felt participation in mainstream politics at that level meant joining the system and, thus, maintaining the status quo. This was an enduring issue for Irish environmentalism and continues to be a common one for non-mainstream political groups the world over. Indeed, this kind of struggle was evident within the Green Party at the time of research and arose from the need to compromise with a modern multi-party democratic system in order to bring about change without the benefit of an overall elected political majority. It was my experience that political viewpoints were rarely as fixed, or

41 Issues in Environmental Research even as focused, as those described by Baker. Many committed Greens not fixated on the destruction of capitalism came from leftwing traditions and many of those who did not were deeply suspicious of multinationals and highly critical of venture capitalism. However, as this is dealt with later in the work, noting the division must suffice at this point.

According to Baker, the active anti-nuclear movement consisted of 102 local groups in both the Republic and Northern Ireland. These groups became involved in many different local campaigns including protests against the British Windscale/Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant, the Dublin Clean Seas campaign and campaigns against courses teaching training in nuclear related industries and the use of radio-active medicine in Universities (ibid: 55). They were also successful, with the help of Petra Kelly, in involving the trade union movement in the anti-nuclear movement and this formed the basis of a formidable opposition to the government. Additionally, the movement broadened its concerns from a simple anti-pollution platform to matters involving a potential threat to Ireland’s much treasured neutrality. They argued that Ireland would, by becoming a manufacturer of nuclear products, find itself involved in the arms race and thus the cold war if only as a potential source of radio-active material. The site of the proposed nuclear power plant at Carnsore was one of the major focal points of the anti- nuclear movement and, in 1978, a decision was made to hold a series of festivals on the site in order to promote and popularise the campaign. These festivals proved successful, with a total of five being held. While providing a point of unity for the disparate groups within the movement, these festivals also widened divisions by introducing the movement as a whole to many new ideas and ways of thinking via the different representatives of anti-nuclear and alternative groups from continental Europe and the USA. The success of these festivals was such that they were a major factor in convincing the Fianna Fáil government to hold an inquiry into the `proposed nuclear power plant and in fracturing the unilateral support for it within Irish politics. When Fine Gael withdrew their support for nuclear power in 1980, the government first postponed and then withdrew the proposal without an inquiry ever being held. Another direction in which the anti-nuclear movement evolved was in response to the policies of the Industrial Development Authority (IDA). The IDA drew investment into the Republic by rezoning Cork harbour as a suitable site for the manufacture of chemical and pharmaceutical products.

Subsequently, Cork has both a concentration of chemical and pharmaceutical plants and a long history of opposition to them. Campaigns throughout the 70’s were conducted by local groups airing mainly local concerns but in 1980 the Cork Noxious Industry Action Group (CNIAG) was formed and this, according to Baker, marked “the first signs of objections to the policy of attraction of foreign direct investment into Ireland” and gave the environmental impacts of this policy a national profile (ibid: 58). The CNIAG, originally composed of members of the Cork Anti-Nuclear Group, played a major role in the many environmental campaigns in Cork harbour at the time. The most significant of these was the campaign for the closure of a plant manufacturing asbestos products and owned by the American company ‘Raybestos’. The CNIAG conducted a lengthy campaign along with 17 other local groups that culminated in the closure of the plant in

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1980 (ibid: 59). For Baker, this represents a turning point for the environmentally conscious within the Republic as it encouraged similar campaigns and “focused attention on another related issue, the disposal of the toxic by-products produced by factories already in operation in Ireland” (ibid). Accordingly, there followed a number of campaigns, notably in Arklow, Cork and Mayo, against the creation of toxic waste facilities with the most famous conducted in Tipperary against a chemical plant owned by Merck, Sharp and Dohme. The plant opened in 1976 and two years later the first complaints concerning negative health impacts were made by the Hanrahan family who lived close by on property that had been in their possession for many generations. By 1980 there had also been a series of complaints made regarding a significant decline in the health of local cattle herds and other farm livestock (ibid: 59). The level of general concern within the community by this time was such that, in 1981, the Tipperary County Council bowed to public pressure and commissioned a report on the effects of toxic emissions emanating from the plant. The issue came to national prominence in 1982 when the Hanrahan family served the plant with a High Court writ claiming that the deaths of 67 of their cattle could be directly attributed to pollution caused by the plants operations. The Court case took three years and involved, in addition to the Harahan family and Merck, Sharp and Dohme, the National Farmers Association, the Tipperary County Council, the Minister for Agriculture, the Creameries and the Institute for Industrial Research and Standards (later known as Eolas). Much conflicting evidence concerning pollution levels and culpability was presented during the case and publicity surrounding the events reached new heights in 1985 when the High Court eventually ruled against the family and ordered the Hanrahans to pay one million pounds in court costs. This led to the sale of their property at auction and left them penniless. In 1988, the family won at appeal but the victory was pyrrhic as the family could neither regain their farm nor their previous lifestyle.

Although this episode had devastating personal effects on the Hanrahan family, Baker tells us that the real impact of this dispute was felt at the national level. The conflict captured the nation’s attention for a number of reasons. The Hanrahan family was deeply rooted in the locality and Merck, Sharp and Dohme could not easily dismiss their opinions. The family’s occupation as dairy farmers meant that the National Farmers Association was brought into the dispute and it came also to be seen as a struggle between the interests of industry and those of agriculture. The dispute gave the farming community a voice within the arena of environmentalism that it had previously been denied. Additionally, one of the results of the publicity surrounding the case was that people started to question the efficacy of the existing laws regulating the emission of toxic waste and other forms of industrial pollution. Concerning this, Baker writes:

Furthermore, the long drawn out legal proceedings pointed both to the lack of evidence and, when available, the conflicting nature of the evidence on the degree of and the dangers associated with the emissions from the Merck, Sharp and Dohme plant. This in particular highlighted the lack of knowledge by the policy makers and planning agencies that were charged with the industrialization of the Irish economy. This in turn led to the linking of concern with environmental protection to a

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critique of industrialization policy based upon the attraction of foreign industry investment, and forced a more general debate on environmental protection and the type of industry being attracted into Ireland by the IDA (ibid: 61).

The case also created new strategies and precedents for the anti-toxic industry movement which in turn “widened the net of potential activists willing to become involved in opposition to toxic industry” (ibid: 61). Baker also considers the Merrell Dow dispute in East Cork, discussed in the previous chapter, as a seminal dispute in the evolution of Irish environmentalism. As we have noted, the proposal to build a chemical plant in Killeagh led to the creation, by the local community, of the Womanagh Valley Protection Association (WVPA) who opposed the development on the grounds that the site was too valuable as agricultural land to risk being polluted by toxic industry. The WVPA initially wanted only for the plant to be relocated elsewhere but, as the campaign wore on, other groups such as the Concerned Citizens of East Cork and the West Waterford Citizens against Merrell Dow helped to change the focus from relocation to total abandonment. The campaign lasted until 1989 when the opposition coalition succeeded in forcing an appeal to the National Planning board (an Bord Pleanála) resulting eventually in a High Court action. Possibly because of this campaign and the inevitable delays countering it would involve, Merrell Dow announced it had no further interest in Ireland as a plant location. However, its denial that the widespread opposition to its plans had any bearing upon its decision seemed to Baker to be unconvincing (ibid: 62). Regardless of these successes, Baker warns against overstating the significance of the anti-toxic movement on the Irish political stage as most campaigns were unsuccessful and the movement as a whole failed to win over the trade union movement or the any part of the organised labour movement in general. She points out that the campaign often took place “within polarized communities” and that “within both individual groups and the movement as a whole, there can be different and sometimes conflicting interests” (ibid: 63). This being the case, she suggests that the protests of that era “should, therefore, be seen as indicative of the beginning of a questioning process within Irish society about economic and environmental policy [and] not as the end product of that process” (ibid: 64). This process of questioning was a turbulent time for those engaged with environmentalism in Ireland and was responsible for the creation of another split within the Irish environmental community. This division goes back to 1978 during the ‘Raybestos’ campaign during which there was conflict between those groups who wanted a complete ban on toxic waste disposal in Ireland and those who merely wanted the dumps moved to isolated, non-commercially valuable, sites. Those in favour of a state run short-term facility included Friends of the Earth (FoE), the Bandon Valley Protection Association, Earthwatch and Greenpeace, while those opposed to the idea completely included CNIAG, Revolutionary Struggle, GANG (Green Action Now Group), The Alliance for Safety and Health and Action for Safety and Health (ibid: 65).

Clearly, after its initial successes, the movement contained serious internal fractures but these were resolved during the campaign against a proposed state run toxic-waste facility to be built at Dunsink near the Dublin suburb of Finglas. After encountering vocal, impassioned and organised resistance to the idea of a dump within Co. Cork, the IDA

44 Issues in Environmental Research conducted a survey of Ireland and settled on Dunsink as the most likely place to build a new facility. This gave rise to the creation of the Finglas Toxic Action Group (FTAG) by local residents who were promptly joined by the Clondalkin and Baldonnell Toxic Action Groups (CTAG and BTAG) in a strident anti-dump campaign. These groups were all firmly supported by the anti-nuclear movement and the campaign resulted in a moratorium on the proposal and the abandonment of any alternative site as serious a consideration (ibid: 66). This action marked the beginning of a new phase in Irish environmentalism as it saw the involvement of a new kind of activist that emerged from the numerous local action groups that had been largely single issue focussed and thus, largely non-political in nature. Baker states that it was precisely this new type of activist that went on to later form the Irish Green Party within a few years of the campaign’s conclusion. She further explains, “Their politicisation on the toxic dump issue is not only a direct response to the state plans for areas such as Finglas and Baldonnell but also a consequence of the very active support that the Irish anti-nuclear and toxic-industry movement gave to these groupings when they were fledgling concerns” (ibid). This is descriptive of a knock-on effect where the movement as a whole underwent a period of frenetic activity in which the forms of organization it produced waxed and waned rapidly but the movement itself solidified and matured. Those activists that were lost to the movement were mainly from single-issue groups focussed on local concerns or those who became involved in other campaigns such as nuclear disarmament or issues pertaining to conditions in the Third World (ibid). Those that remained in the environmental movement by the start of the 1990s constituted the membership of the three largest environmental groups in Ireland – Earthwatch, Greenpeace and Comhaontas Glas/The Green Party (ibid: 71). The most successful of these three main organizations, the Green Party first formed under the banner ‘The Ecology Party’, and was founded by Christopher Fettes in 1981. Fettes was an activist for animal rights, vegetarianism and the Esperanto movement and succeeded in gaining the attention of environmental activists interested in working to garner community support through conventional political means. As Baker writes: The Party attracted support from the less radical wing of the anti- nuclear movement, most noticeably those who favoured a centralized structure as opposed to the loose network that the movement had evolved. The Ecology Party was formed specifically as a political party and, thus, its main concern was and is with parliamentary politics. This was a formation which stood in sharp contrast to the other groups’ activities at the time (ibid: 72).

True to its stated aims, the Party contested its first election in 1982 but received only 0.22% of the national vote. After this it formed an alliance with approximately 10 other groups and became known as the Comhaontas Glas/Green Alliance, a coalition which lasted from 1983 until 1986 when internal conflict broke it apart and resulted in the formation of several new groups, one of those being the Irish Green Party of latter times. During its brief lifetime the Green Alliance had to struggle with internal division caused by friction between the two main ecological traditions that it contained. As Baker explains:

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On the one hand, were those from within the anti-nuclear movement who were prepared to work inside the system, including groups such as the Tralee Anti-Nuclear Group. These groups were interested in parliamentary political activity, the formation of a centralized and highly organized group with formal membership and the development of a clear set of policies and manifestos with which people could be asked to identify with. On the other hand, Comhaontas Glas was also composed of radical groups, including the Green Action Now Group and the Cork Green Movement who had another vision of what constituted Green politics (ibid: 72).

This ‘other’ vision of what constituted Green politics was the belief that the individual groups within the alliance should maintain autonomy of policy and action within the alliance and, hence, pursue any course of action they deemed appropriate through their own internal decision making processes without seeking approval from the other participants. Baker singles out GANG and the Cork Green Movement (CGM) for further examination and uses them as examples of the diversity contained within the Green Alliance for the duration of its lifetime. Although the alliance was not a lasting one, these groups brought with them a rich tradition of environmental activism and made significant contributions to the forms and attitudes present in modern Irish environmentalism. GANG was formed directly from the Dublin Clean Seas Committee (DCSC) who themselves formed to campaign for the closure of the Sellafield/Windscale nuclear reprocessing plant. The DCSC in turn were formed by the Research Action Group (RAG) who had organised the Leinster Anti-Uranium Group which, along with other similar groups in Donegal, Kilkenny and Carlow, campaigned successfully to stop plans to prospect for and mine uranium in Ireland. The RAG was influenced strongly by the anarchist tradition and, as such, saw involvement in parliamentary politics as unhelpful and ineffective. It was these anarchistic tendencies that led both GANG and the CGM to argue strongly against any involvement by the Green Alliance in formal parliamentary politics. Baker describes the situation thus:

The more radical groups believed that the alliance could be tolerant of its varying traditions and that different and even conflicting traditions could be held by its component parts. They believed, essentially, that the groups which composed Comhaontas Glas could retain a good deal of individual autonomy and that as an alliance it did not have to address itself primarily to parliamentary politics. The less radical wing, however, believed that common policies would have to be thrashed out and the more anarchist traditions brought to toe a party political line. (ibid: 73). When the Green Alliance purged itself of GANG and the CGM in 1986 and started the move towards its eventual solidification as the Irish Green Party in 1997, GANG and the CGM formed the Alternative Green Network but this organization was not successful and became defunct in 1988 (ibid).

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As for the Green Party, it redefined itself and its policies and was successful in winning its first seat in the Dáil in 1989. Baker reports the Party’s membership as being around three to four hundred in 1989 and as high as one thousand in 1990. I would note here that this seems unlikely as in 1997 the Party’s financial membership was around five hundred while the number of members who had become unrecorded financially was of a similar order. When speaking to various Party members during my fieldwork I found no evidence of this level of membership at any time during the Party’s existence and this was also confirmed by the Party’s own records. Regardless of this discrepancy, further discussion of this point will be foregone as Baker’s sources for this figure are not clear. The main thrust of Baker’s discussion here is to point out that the Party enjoyed such growth as a result of its initial foray into parliamentary politics that its resources became stretched and its policy creation processes suffered. She explains that many of these new members had not previously been involved in politics or political activism and lacked the political experience and expertise needed to contribute meaningfully to the Party’s decision making processes (ibid: 74). This meant that active members had to devote much needed time educating rank and file memberships who were largely ignorant of the Party’s constitution while having, after a six month probationary period, full rights within it. By 1997, the Party’s active membership had stabilized at around sixty to seventy active members throughout the Republic and its resources were stretched to the limit during the election campaign of that year. Accordingly, many of their policies were still underdeveloped in relation to those of the other political parties that they had to contend with but, nevertheless, the policy creation process was ongoing. Baker’s description and analysis of the roots of Irish environmentalism, which she labels Irish ‘ecologism’, provides us with a valuable introduction to the history of those active within the Irish Green Party in 1997. While members who had joined the Party after 1990 were common, many of those involved within the decision making processes within the Party had participated in the groups and the era that Baker describes. Notably, Baker strongly commends the study of the ideologies used by ecological groups as a key to understanding their future impact upon the Irish socio-political landscape. When seen in light of the calls by anthropologists such as Berglund (1998), Brosius (1999), Escobar (1999) and Milton (1996) for a greater focus within anthropology on ideological trends within environmentalism, Baker’s following comments begin to contextualise the discussion of ideology, a theme within the latter parts of this thesis. She states: However, from the point of view of the study of ecologism, what is interesting is whether or not the critique contains a transformational potential, that is, whether we are seeing the birth of a radical change in social, economic and political life as a whole. To answer this we need to turn to the ideologies of political ecology groups in Ireland (ibid: 77).

In order to do as Baker suggests, we must necessarily examine the notion of identity among the Irish Greens because, as I intend to argue, the Greens do not yet have an identifiable ideological framework but rather an emergent one. This being the case, I feel that the best way to understand the still fluid emergent ideology of the Greens is to address the differing perceptions of identity within the Party’s membership and the ways

47 Issues in Environmental Research in which they perceive themselves in relation to their personal histories, their culture, their political aims and their perceived responsibilities as environmentalists.

Chapter 2: Being Green: 2.1 Dublin In this section of the thesis I will bring to the fore the ethnographic data gathered during my fieldwork period in Ireland. In concert with the discussion presented in the first section of this work, I hope to further advance my analysis of identity among the Irish Greens by discussing their perceptions of themselves and their lived experiences in the context of their historical, cultural and political realities. As identity is a fluid and extremely subjective concept, I must begin with my perceptions of the Greens and of Dublin as the main theatre of my fieldwork. Therefore, I will begin at the beginning in order to present the Greens as I found them in the hopes of creating the broadest canvas upon which to work. When I first arrived in Dublin I was struck by its size. Having lived in Melbourne for eight years and after briefly seeing Singapore, Hong Kong and Frankfurt, the city of Dublin seemed a small place, not unlike the regional cities of Australia. I had heard so much about Dublin from Irish friends and acquaintances at home that I somehow thought it would be bigger than it was. I remember thinking that, with a population of only approximately one million people; Dublin was similar in size to Adelaide and might turn out to be much the same in other ways as well. It did not take long to be disabused of that notion as the full weight of culture shock set in. Being a first time overseas traveller, I did not know what to expect from my new home and found that, although many things seemed similar, nearly everything was different. For a start I discovered on my second morning in Dublin that, although it was December and the sun was shining in a blue sky, at two degrees Celsius the jeans and t-shirt that seemed appropriate garb from inside my cousin’s house central heated house proved rather inadequate on the other side of the front door. My first impression of Dublin was that it was a place of extremes. It was home to both old and new, the rich and the poor, the fast and the slow. There were council flats built in the 1960s right next to a church built in the 1500s, well groomed business people passed single mothers begging with their children in the snow, and every so often the new cars powered along the streets of the inner city would have to give way to a horse and cart carrying a load of produce, children, or both. It is not uncommon in the outer suburbs such as Tallaght and Ballymun for cars to run into horses roaming the streets at dawn or dusk in search of good grazing. I never tired of being able to have a pint in the pub where the Fenian uprising of the 1800s had been planned and then catching the Dart (train) home before dinner. It seemed to me to be a world unto itself even though I knew this was not the case. The best way I can describe my first sense of Dublin is by relating my first trip into the Green Party offices, which were located in Fownes Street in the Temple Bar district.

Soon after I arrived in Dublin and settled in, I caught the bus into the city to make contact with the Irish Green Party at their national office in the Temple Bar district. Temple Bar has the reputation of being the more bohemian precinct of Dublin’s inner city and was home to many businesses catering to the thousands of tourists roaming through Dublin on any given day. The Green Party national office on Fownes St was situated across the road from a large square and right in the heart of the city so I had no trouble locating it on my

48 Issues in Environmental Research first journey through Dublin city. Wasting no time, I rang the buzzer on the door and, as I waited for someone to come downstairs to let me in, I had no idea that things were already not going according to plan. What I had not counted on was that my contact among the Irish Greens had recently left for America, permanently, and had not told the rest of the Party that he had given me permission to undertake an extended period of fieldwork with them. As a result, when I tried to explain to Mary, the woman who answered the door and who was later to become a friend, that I was the anthropology student from Australia who had come to research the Irish Greens for his PhD, all I got was a confused look and a belated offer of a cup of tea. However, all was not lost as Mary quickly figured out what had happened and put a contingency plan into operation in which I was introduced to the Party’s general secretary and put in touch with the local Green Party group in my area. It was from that point that I started to gain some first hand knowledge of the place I was to do much of my fieldwork.

The Dublin I encountered in 1997 had split into two socio-economic identities separated by its traditional life source, the river Liffey. The first of these we shall consider are the areas south of the Liffey. These were inhabited mainly by the middle and upper classes and a vastly different atmosphere dominated. Housing was in better condition, rental and property prices were higher, educational facilities were of a higher standard, and the majority of people were gainfully employed in well paying jobs that allowed them a level of affluence that was simply out of the reach of their neighbours on the north side. In short, as often happens in societies where wealth disparity is not only entrenched but widening, the gap between rich and poor was expressed ultimately in the geographical location of the different socio-economic classes within the boundaries of the capital city. As I was based south of the Liffey, my first encounter with the Green Party was in the electorate of Dublin South, what could be called the Green’s heartland as it was there that they won their first seat in the Dáil in 1989. As luck would have it, the Dublin South Greens had planned an eco-fair to be held on the second week I was in Dublin. The site of the eco-fair was only a walk away from where I was staying at the time so I decided to go along and introduce myself. What is most memorable about that day is the fact that, upon consulting my field diaries, my first meeting with the Dublin South Greens was also my first meeting with Dublin South. As I look back on it now, the eco-fair attracted the whole social spectrum that one could wish to encounter on that side of the river. The fair itself was held in a hall in the suburb of Dundrum and consisted of quite a large number of stalls of all sizes, each advertising or selling things such as recycled products, organic produce, or providing information about the aims of the Green Party and the other environmental groups they were affiliated with throughout Ireland. There were stands dedicated to solar energy and wave power alongside stalls vending hot dishes made from organically grown produce. The Greens, and the volunteers that helped them, espoused the virtues of their philosophy while putting the case for wool over polyester and pushbikes over cars. In this setting they were very much a community based group and were confidently advancing the environmental cause to their friends and neighbours. This is not to say that all of their views were met with warm approval or even that there were no faces made by local children upon tasting their environmentally correct, nutritionally potent, delicacies. As I walked around I saw many wry smiles, secretive winks and small shakes of the head but, all in all, it seemed to me that the local residents, who were

49 Issues in Environmental Research obviously affluent, had incorporated the Greens into their political ethos. As odd as some of their priorities may have seemed to the more conservative elements in that part of Dublin, I sensed that there was a shared experience, at least socio-culturally, between the Greens and those they were trying to woo in Dublin’s middle class, affluent, Southside.

Unfortunately, on the other side of town the Greens were not received with the same understanding. My first introduction with the north side of Dublin was as a house hunter. As my accommodation at my cousin’s house was not permanent, I was obliged to seek rental accommodation that was within my financial means. Before finally ending up in Stillorgan, I investigated a number of possibilities and trekked to various locales around Dublin. Thus, while in search of a place to live, I had reason to go to various places in the north side. What I encountered was a significantly different aspect of Dublin than that which I saw over the Liffey. There were far more Council Tenancy buildings and economically depressed neighbourhoods and not much sign of the affluence and social confidence permeating the Dublin South constituency. This was the home of the Dublin working class and, at that time, they were experiencing a raft of social and economic problems that were not uncommon in poor urban areas the world over. There was long- term and even generational unemployment, low wages, high crime and substance abuse. The housing was far older than that of the south and of a much poorer quality. As I came to understand more fully before I left Ireland, the working class in Dublin had failed to benefit from the investment in the information technology industry that had buoyed the Irish economy in recent years and had suffered directly from that. In relation to the Green Party, this level of poverty and social disenfranchisement presented a significant hurdle for the acceptance of their message. This was brought home to me during a conversation I had with the candidate for Dublin North West, Peter, at a Green Party election convention at Wicklow in February 1997. As part of the convention proceedings, the candidates were called on to outline the issues and contingencies specific to their constituencies and to discuss ways in which they might win support in their local area. Peter’s presentation to the convention was interesting because, while he had been successful on a number of local council campaigns and had managed to create a favourable public profile, he was seriously hampered in his efforts by the size of his local group and an inability to gain new local members. Peter’s local group was the smallest in the Party and consisted, at that time, of only himself and a friend.

When I questioned Peter about his situation, he reasoned that his main difficulties in persuading his electorate to support the Green Party were twofold. In the first instance he felt that, among the economically depressed neighbourhoods in his constituency, people were simply not in a position to take a chance on an untried candidate from a new political party. What they needed was someone with enough experience and bargaining power to achieve the kind of political outcomes that would directly and immediately address their main concerns. Understandably, the focus of these concerns were employment, education and welfare, and the prevalent perception of the Green Party as a group of well-meaning but eccentric middle class environmentalists did not inspire confidence among those whose immediate need was economic relief. In the second instance, and as a direct consequence of the first, Peter simply could not attract enough new members to his local group to effectively present the Green Party’s wider policy

50 Issues in Environmental Research platform to the constituency. With only two members, he had to rely on the good will of his family and friends in order to mount any campaign at all and even then, only the bare minimum could be achieved. He mentioned that, from time to time, potential new members did contact him but, once they became aware of the sheer volume of time they would have to commit to the campaign under these circumstances, they uniformly walked away from such a burdensome commitment.

As we shall see, Peter’s predicament was not unique within the Party and this raises a number of questions as to why the Green Party faired so badly in working class (and rural) areas. Strandbu and Krange (2003) argue that environmental movements are unpopular with working class people, at least in European countries, because of a basic difference in class based cultural perceptions. Their research into youth culture in Oslo found that young people from middle class backgrounds often had stronger pro- environmental attitudes than those located in the working class (2003:177). Using a previous survey in Norway (Skogen 1996), they report: ‘Compared to young working class people, the ones from the humanistic social fraction of the middle class were over- represented among the organizations’ members. Furthermore, members of an environmental organization scored higher on measures of cultural capital. There were more books in their homes and their parents were more likely to like ‘intellectual television’ and were less interested in ‘commercial television’ (Strandbu and Krange 2003: 178).

Thus, Strandbu and Krange argue that it is class cultural differences that present barriers to the western working class joining environmental movements in greater numbers than they have. If we ignore, for the moment, the obvious determinism that this approach evidences, it is possible to see that Strandbu and Krange may have a point in so far as it would make sense that people from different socio-economic backgrounds would have different political agendas informed by their differing socio-economic priorities. They go on to suggest that, as western environmental movements have sprung from, and continue to be dominated by, the middle class, they use a discourse which contains class culturally specific signifiers which appeal more to those from middle class backgrounds than to any other class group. Still using Skogen’s (1996, 1999a, 1999b) rather mechanistic theoretical conceptualisations, they further 5 Strandbu and Krange define this as “public services, teaching, aesthetic work, etc.” (2003: 177) expand this line of reasoning by positing that the working class have production-oriented cultures, while the middle class have abstraction-oriented ones. Regarding this, they write:

The abstraction oriented culture acclaims flexibility and strategic thinking and is developed in the sectors of society where symbols, rather than material objects, are manipulated. In the production oriented culture, practical sense is preferred over remote speculations, and theory is only legitimate insofar as it is a generalization of practical experience. Practical use of nature and a feeling of affinity towards concrete activities in nature are assumed to be more typical of the production oriented culture. Aesthetic fascination and philosophical reflections on nature are more characteristic of the abstraction-oriented

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culture. The abstraction-oriented culture is therefore presumed to be intrinsic to the middle class based environmental movement (2003: 179).

This theoretical framework is, in turn, embedded in Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic capital, cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu 1984, 1997). As summarised by Strandbu and Krange: Bourdieu uses the term symbolic capital to describe how certain people or institutions, certain forms of knowledge, and certain value orientations are ascribed respectability and prestige and command deference. Further, in this respect the concept of cultural capital encompasses familiarity and access to the legitimate and dominating culture. Cultural capital is an ‘inherited’ social competence that is unequally distributed in the class structure. Further, the theory of habitus explains how people, through socialization and cultural reproduction, acquire some basic dispositions for action, perception, feelings and interpretation. Habitus is not only cognitive, but functions just as much on a habitual, non-reflexive level (2003: 178).

Here it is also worth noting that Bourdieu’s notion of ‘social space’ (1998: 5) is also highly compatible with the framework set out by Strandbu and Krange. Stemming from his work on habitus, ‘social space’ describes the way in which the possession or lack of, cultural capital specific to the dominant culture may produce a cultural schism between different socio-economic groups. This, in turn, informs the decisions people make regarding their social and political allegiances and can also affect the range of possibilities they have to choose from in the first instance. As Bourdieu points out, the level of economic and cultural capital possessed by an individual or group often serves to inform their life choices in relation to association, consumption, entertainment, etc. He writes: ‘Thus, at every moment of each society, one has to deal with a set of social positions which is bound by a relation of homology to a set of activities (the practice of golf or piano) or goods (a second home or an old master painting) that are themselves characterized relationally’ (1998: 5).

Underlying these choices and preferences in Bourdieu’s reckoning is the idea that groups within society create gaps between each other predicated on the amount of cultural capital they possess. This notion of space, for Bourdieu, impacts directly on the way in which people create and maintain their personal and positional identities within society and it is for this reason that Strandbu and Krange have found Bourdieu’s work so useful in their analysis. As Bourdieu explains:

The idea of difference, or a gap, is at the basis of the very notion of space, that is, a set of distinct and coexisting positions which are defined in relation to one or another through their mutual exteriority and their relations of proximity, vicinity, or distance as well as through relations of order, such as above, below, and between (ibid).

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Indeed, this type of analytical approach is used by Adrian Peace in his work (Peace 2001) based on fieldwork conducted in the south-western coast of the Republic of Ireland in the mid to late 1980s mentioned in section 1.2. Peace treats the country, the town and the pier in the community that he has named ‘Inveresk’ as separate domains within a small regional location. Each of these domains has its own specific cultural identity which is maintained by the open acknowledgement of difference between the three separate, yet neighbouring, locations. By manipulating, to a greater or lesser extent, the cleavages that exist between each other, these three groups of people also managed to maintain an overall identity which is both remarkably flexible and ultimately definitive as the respective domains gain significance and integrity through their relationship with each other and the outside world. Peace also reasons that the same can be said for relations within each of these domains. Taking this line of reasoning to its obvious conclusion, each of the three domains mentioned by Peace had their own social hierarchy and set of rules dictating social position and power. Just as external relations were defined by difference, so too internal relations rested on what Peace called “A world of fine difference” (2001) in which, like Bourdieu’s definition mentioned above, economic and cultural capital was unequally distributed creating gaps between people and families which then became markers of identity. Strandbu and Krange make the point that these gaps, or fine differences, create cultural impediments which must be overcome before political incorporation can occur. They have named these impediments ‘symbolic fences’ (2003: 183) and, in relation to their study of the socio-cultural differences between working class and middle class youth in Norway, they produce identifiable symbolic differences between the two groups. In their words: They are distinctions the young people interviewed here experienced and acted in relation to. The symbolic fences should not be considered as concrete obstacles or barriers, but they make the process of becoming a member more difficult for working class youngsters. The road to the organization is more straight-forward for middle class youngsters (ibid 2003: 183).

Strandbu and Krange investigate two different youth groups. One is a working class dominated youth group involved in outdoor activities and the other is an environmentally active youth group involved in protests and actions revolving around environmental issues (ibid: 180-193). They present styles of dress, types of discourse habitual to each of the groups and accepted behavioural norms as examples of the kinds of symbolic fences that divide the two groups. They found that, while each group shared an interest in the environment, their focus was significantly different. The environmentally active middle class group were interested in drawing attention to the inherent worth of the environment while the activities based working class group saw the environment as a valuable recreational resource (ibid: 190-193). They took this as further evidence that participation in environmental movements is “socially situated” and that “notions of nature are socially embedded and are subject to cultural and social domination, as are other cultural forms” (ibid: 194). If we return now to Peter’s difficulty in gaining support within his constituency for the Dublin North West Green group, we can see that the above theoretical framework goes part of the way to explaining the lack of enthusiasm among the working class electorates in Dublin. Indeed, this also provides us with an indication as

53 Issues in Environmental Research to why the Party faired worse in every electorate, both urban and rural, across the Republic that did not hold significant numbers of middle class voters. However, habitus, cultural capital and symbolic fences cannot contain the full complexity of social behaviour and cultural forces that inform people’s decisions regarding either the environment or political loyalties. The decision to become active in one group or another is, as we shall see, a real commitment of time and effort that is, for the most part, not made lightly and does not come without personal sacrifice. The above theoretical constructs do much to illuminate the gaps that exist between different groups within society but do not mention the most simple of all reasons, time. We should remind ourselves that, owing to the competitive nature of late capitalism and the unequal distribution of economic resources that is definitive to the notion of class itself, people with less money have less time. Time taken to become involved and to participate in any group activities not directly related to earning income is, I suggest, a much more serious commitment for those people who do not have sufficient income in the first place. Likewise, time taken outside working hours for political activity is time taken away from the family unit and from much needed recreation. In Ireland, for many living on a minimum or low wage where time is a pressing issue, this was not a desirable or practical choice. Where people in these circumstances do commit themselves to political activism, it is usually for much more traditional class aims such as greater access to employment opportunities, wage increases, increases in the social security net, or matters relating to the nationalist ethic in the Republic and the situation in the six counties of Ulster called Northern Ireland.

Additionally, if we recall the latter part of section 1.2, Peace identifies Irish political culture as being defined by scepticism towards politics and politicians and suggests that, at least in rural areas, Irish people perceive their politicians as potential facilitators of bureaucratic machinery rather than agents of change within the political system. I would like to introduce the notion here that, if we extend that logic to the urban working class, the reason for the failure of the Greens to make significant electoral gains in the poorer areas of Dublin becomes clearer. With a pressing need for access to effective political facilitators, social change of the kind proposed by the Green Party is seen as both unrealistic and far less attractive than the promise of the alleviation of unemployment and the expansion of the social security net. In this atmosphere, and considering that the Green Party is still seen to be in its infancy in Ireland, it is a simple matter for the candidates of established parties to brush aside the Green Party candidates as being ineffectual and naive. Regardless of all this, there were indeed working class members active within the Green Party (although few in number) and the stories of their paths to environmental activism are particularly interesting. In the following chapter we shall see that, as always, there are exceptions that prove the rule and that theoretical constructs do not arbitrate people’s behaviour, they merely try to describe the more obvious trends. As for Dublin, I am tempted to say it was a strange place but it would be more true to say that all places are strange until one becomes familiar with them. How long this process of familiarisation takes and how deeply it goes is, however, another matter entirely. As for myself, as both an Irish Australian and an aspiring anthropologist, this process was both exhausting and rewarding yet ultimately incomplete by the time I left. Dublin, and indeed Ireland, is not a place you can ‘know’ after any period of time. I certainly know what I

54 Issues in Environmental Research experienced while in Dublin but these experiences do not easily translate themselves into print. The fact that I have an Irish name, come from a large extended Catholic family, and have been raised within a country where fully a third of the population claims Irish heritage had a significant impact on my perception of Dublin. So many things, for me, were culturally familiar that I found that cultural differences appeared in very stark contrast, much like a discordant note in an otherwise familiar melody. When I stepped off the plane I had definite ideas and preconceptions about Dublin but I think I may have lost them so completely that they are now hard to recall.

Dublin is at once small in relation to its overall size yet huge in relation to its place within the EU and its links to all of the other cities in the world where reside the tens of millions of people that make up the greater Irish Diaspora. It is divided by class, geography, politics and the river Liffey but is united by pubs, sporting events, nationalist sentiment and history. In some respects I found that, as Dublin became more familiar, I became more of a stranger. Many times people only really took notice of me when I spoke as they had presumed I was Irish and were shocked at my Australian accent. There was even a moment when I was approached by a young woman in a pub in Stillorgan who informed me that I had the worst fake Australian accent that she had ever heard and that I should “stop it right now”. I found myself in the odd situation of having to produce my passport to prove that I was indeed not “some chancer from the north side having us all on” but a ‘real’ Australian. Other than that, Dublin was dark, wet and cold in winter and light, humid and sticky in summer. What I mean to say is that hopefully Dublin will reveal itself to you as it revealed itself to me in the following pages of this work for my knowledge of Dublin is intrinsically linked with the people I met there and the impact that they had on me both personally and professionally. With this in mind, it is time to bring the Irish Greens into clearer focus.

2.2 The Greens as Intellectuals:

What does it mean to be a ‘Green’ in Ireland? How do the Greens perceive themselves and their place in the world around them? Given that they were participants in a new political movement, the members of the Irish Green Party had, of necessity, held other identities before they became Green. The act of becoming necessarily refers to a previous state from which members have changed in order to become Green. In 1997 the Party was only sixteen years old, and so there were still many members that had other political affiliations prior to the formation of the Party in 1981. I found this greatly interesting and, as I became more and more involved in the life of the Party, I also found that the disparate individual histories of the active members impacted significantly on its direction as a political organisation. I have chosen to present an in depth discussion of the six Green Party members whom I felt were most indicative of the Party’s range of identities. As a presentation of every individual active within the Party is impossible, these members were chosen because their own sense of Irishness, belonging, and identity contained the main themes that prevailed throughout the active membership of the Party. This discussion strives to portray the people most central to this thesis, to see them as they hurried through the rain from the bus stop on Nassau St, took in a pint or a story or two at the ‘Eagle’ in Dundrum, or tried to relieve a young Australian of his ignorance

55 Issues in Environmental Research about Irish culture, society, and politics on a rare sunny afternoon in Galway. However, before entering into a discussion of these case studies, I wish to make clear my perception of the Irish Greens as a group of intellectuals engaged in a political struggle. Without recognition of this, any investigation of identity and ideology in relation to the Irish Green Party would be inadequate. For this reason, I will present a brief discussion of interpretations of Gramsci’s theoretical modelling of the intellectual. For Gramsci, the intellectual plays a vital role in the continual struggle for hegemony that occurs within society. Equally, if the hegemony of a dominant group is to be challenged, then this task must also fall to the intellectual. As Holub explains:

Gramsci’s concept of the ‘intellectual’, which equally resists definition, is a way for Gramsci to begin to conceptualise, not perhaps primarily the production, but the directed reproduction and the dissemination of an effective hegemony, a differentiated yet also directive and value- laden channelling of the production of meaning or signification. A counter hegemony would, as a result, also depend on intellectual activities. These would produce, reproduce and disseminate values and meanings attached to a conception of the world attentive to democratic principles and the dignity of humankind (Holub 1992: 6).

While Gramsci’s theorising concerning the role of the intellectual was specifically related to Italian society in the early part of the twentieth century, the relevance of his work in modern social thought has been widely recognised since the 1970s and the scholars who have been influenced by his theoretical constructs are too numerous to mention here. I have found certain discussions about his conceptualisation of the role of intellectuals in modern society to be useful when thinking about the Irish Greens. For instance, Crehan notes that: In Gramsci’s eyes, intellectuals are crucial to the process whereby a major new culture, one that represents the world-view of an emerging class, comes into being. It is intellectuals who transform the incoherent and fragmentary ‘feelings’ of those who live a particular class position into a coherent and reasoned account of the world as it appears from that position (Crehan 2002: 130).

Without wishing to pre-empt the following discussion, it is my view that the Greens may be seen as fulfilling this role in many instances. According to Holub, Gramsci conceptualises the ‘intellectual’ as “a cultural and ideological producer” (1992:151). As such, it is important to recognise that knowledge production in this context is not limited to academics, governmental policy makers, or arbiters of cultural tastes. In the Gramscian sense, the intellectual is any individual possessed of specialised knowledge held to be legitimate within the confines and constructs of the knowledge producing socio-cultural institutions of his/her society. Furthermore, the possessor of this legitimated knowledge must also be ‘accredited’ with having gained some acknowledged degree of mastery in whatever field he/she is participating. This is in contrast to Gramsci’s broader notion of the ‘universal’ intellectual in which every person is capable of intellectual reasoning “in as much as every person is a philosopher and a legislator at once, one who has the power,

56 Issues in Environmental Research in the practices of everyday life, to propose views, to impose them on others, to insist on imposing them, or to refuse to impose them” (ibid: 25). Holub’s discussion of the “traditional intellectual: artist, philosopher, poet” (ibid: 153) provides a point of departure from the broader construct of the universal intellectual in Gramsci’s thought. Drawing upon Gramsci’s pre 1920’s manuscripts (ibid: 154), Holub asserts that traditional intellectuals promulgate the dominant cultural values necessary for the continuance of the status quo. For Holub, this model of the intellectual is significant because it “speaks of the non-neutrality of ideas and knowledge, of the partiality, that is, of the producers and disseminators of knowledge, of the political role of the intellectual as part of a system of relations that is inscribed by power and domination” (ibid: 23-24). In this respect I would argue that all formally educated intellectuals operating within the dominant paradigm are, to some extent, traditional in their outlook, or are understanding of a traditional position. Throughout the thesis we shall see that the category of ‘traditional’ can be used to describe a ‘mode’ of behaviour common to many of the Greens as social actors. This in itself is not surprising especially given that all of these actors bring to the Party formal training and qualifications attained through traditional forms of education and employment. However, Gramsci’s conceptualisation of the intellectual becomes more complex when we consider the organic intellectual. Holub writes of this form of intellectual in the following way: “In that every major social and economic formation produces its intellectuals, among other things functioning as legitimators of values and of the conditions on which an economic and social formation rests, feudalism and capitalism as well as socialism have each produced a category of organic intellectuals” (Holub 1992: 25). Thus, the organic intellectual has ‘organic’ links with, is ‘of’, a particular social and economic formation. Holub has further identified two forms of “organic intellectuality” linked to “a form of high capitalism challenged by the working-class movement” (ibid). These are the “critical specialist” and the “new intellectual” (ibid). In defining these terms, she writes: The new (also ‘organic’) intellectual of capitalist formations is also a specialist, a technocrat who knows his or her role but not necessarily how that role is related to other aspects of a complex system of relations. The critical specialist, on the other hand, is able to understand his or her activity as a partial activity, yet in addition the critical specialist understands that precisely because the activity is partial, it is related to other activities in a system of social, political and economic relations (ibid). Holub concentrates on the critical specialist later in her discussion. For my purposes in this study, the category of critical specialist is important as it articulates the way in which the Greens advocate both their aims and their organisation. Consider Holub’s statement:

So Gramsci’s celebrated new notion of an ‘organic intellectual’, which I have called here ‘critical specialist’, participates in specialized forms of production, distribution and exchange, while simultaneously locating the place of this form of production and distribution in a system of relations. That model of intellectuality is not a technocrat of advancing capitalism, but a ‘critical community’ which, tied to processes of rationalization and technologisation in the sphere of material and

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cultural production, does not forfeit attempts to grasp conceptually the system and subsystems within which rationalization and technologisation take place. Rather, it critiques such processes should the democratic project become jeopardized (ibid: 168).

As the name would suggest, the critical specialist critiques the established wisdom of the time and questions the tenets and actions of the dominant paradigm when it is felt necessary by presenting alternative conceptualisations that may vie with accepted theory and practice for legitimacy. I intend later to show that much of the Greens activities can be defined in this way. The relationship between the category of traditional and organic intellectual is also one of complexity. In Holub’s account of Gramsci, the capitalist intellectual community may be both ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’, and ‘new’ simultaneously. In her opinion, capitalist economic and social formations create an intellectual community which “seems to be both organic, traditional and new at once” (ibid: 167). It is organic in that it has been, and continues to be, created by capitalist entrepreneurs. It is traditional in that it “embodies the predominant values and ways of seeing the dominant class”, and it is new in that it “propagates intellectual progress, a technocratically functionalist future, and an instrumentalist rationality” (ibid). Hence, Holub sees these as aspects of intellectuality rather than fixed intellectual terrains. Holub interprets Gramsci’s conceptualisations of the intellectual as being positioned across the ideological spectrum – from those working within the dominant paradigm to those opposed to it – within “structures of feeling” (ibid: 155-160). These ‘structures of feeling’, while being impossible to quantify, produce a recognisable external form known as the “intellectual community” (ibid: 162). Intellectual communities are held together by a common epistemological language perceived by Holub as dialectic. It is through the use of these dialectics that intellectual communities maintain their identities in relation to the intellectual communities that have solidified around other co-existent structures of feeling. Hence, as intellectuals, the Irish Greens are subject to the wider flux and flow of ideas that exist in the various kinds of discourse that they come into contact with, both as individuals and as a collective. However, as politically active intellectuals, they are contesting the accepted wisdom of the dominant intellectual community and competing with other older and more established intellectual communities who, like them, are seeking primacy. In recognition of this contestation and of Gramsci’s underlying political agenda regarding this theoretical model, she states:

In some ways it theorizes the conditions of the possibility of mobilizing traditional intellectuals for the democratic cause. Yet it also analyzes the conditions of possibility of mobilizing resistance to democratic change, not only on the part of the intellectuals as a sociological group, but also, and more importantly, on the part of the subaltern groups (ibid: 24).

Here Holub is referring to the way in which structures of feeling linking intellectual communities may be a conduit through which consent or dissent for the ideas of the dominant group may be marshalled. She also refers to Gramsci’s supposition that the subaltern is manoeuvred into unquestioning agreement to the terms of their own

58 Issues in Environmental Research domination, known as ‘spontaneous consent’. However, it is not my intention to discuss spontaneous consent or develop a fuller discussion of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. My aim here is simply to introduce the concepts of structures of feeling and intellectual communities as they are useful for my analysis of Green identities and emergent ideology. Before returning to the main discussion, it should be noted that Gramsci’s work on the role of the intellectual has been subject to many different interpretations and is the topic of much debate. By briefly looking at a more recent interpretation of Gramsci regarding the intellectual, we can see that the nuances placed upon Gramsci’s writing by different thinkers produces these differing accounts of his work. For this I have chosen Crehan’s (2002) interpretation of Gramsci as it presents a far more radical notion of the intellectual than is found in the work of Holub. Crehan sees the role of the intellectual in Gramscian thought as primarily that of an organiser. In this, she takes her cue from Gramsci himself when he writes:

By ‘intellectuals’ must be understood not only those strata commonly described by this term, but the entire social stratum which exercises an organisational function in the wide sense – whether in the field of production, or in that of culture, or in that of political administration. They correspond to NCOs and junior officers in the army, and also partly to the higher officers who have risen from the ranks (Gramsci 1971:97 in Crehan 2002: 132).

The most striking difference between the accounts of Holub and Crehan is Crehan’s emphasis on the relation between intellectual and class groups. For her, the organic intellectual is one that not only has fundamental ties with a particular class, but has been created as “a class becomes a self-conscious entity, as it moves from being merely a class-in-itself to being a class-for-itself” (2002: 137). In this account, organic intellectuals either help to maintain the dominant position of their class or, should they have organic ties to a dominated class, help their class achieve dominance. This is done by both the generation of spontaneous consent and the creation of a coercive apparatus to enforce decisions should spontaneous consent fail (ibid: 138). In this way, intellectuals are responsible for “the transmission and reproduction of particular conceptions of the world” (ibid: 139). Stemming from this, Crehan’s interpretation of the traditional intellectual has a different emphasis on class than does Holub’s. Crehan concentrates on Gramsci’s assertion that traditional intellectuals were once organically linked to a particular class but have, over time, become a “crystallised social group … which sees itself as continuing uninterruptedly through history and thus independent of the struggle of groups” (Gramsci 1971: 452 in Crehan 2002: 141). Hence, in this account, traditional intellectuals see themselves as being largely autonomous from class struggles and as deriving authority from the continuity of their group. Obviously, in this context they present a barrier to any newly emerging group as they hold and maintain intellectual dominance. Crehan posits that they must not only be confronted by “the organic intellectuals of any newly emerging class” (2002: 141) but that traditional intellectuals must be co-opted to the cause of the newly emerging class in order for it to be successful. In her words, “A crucial task for any new class struggling to give birth to its own organic intellectuals is to win over and assimilate the existing traditional intellectuals” (ibid:

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142). Crehan notes that the ‘winning over’ of traditional intellectuals is, for Gramsci, one of the most important functions of the political party. As Gramsci writes: ‘It is within the political party that traditional and organic intellectuals are brought and ultimately welded together. Traditional intellectuals are merged and tightly linked to the group’s organic intellectuals in the party’ (Gramsci 1971: 15-16 in Crehan 2002: 150).

In this sense, the political party becomes the institution in which intellectuals themselves are organised and through which their skills are politically directed. However, in modern capitalist societies, a political movement may yet fail to succeed even after having co- opted traditional intellectuals within a party structure. This is because the movement must ‘be of’ and ‘speak to’ the mass culture of its day. As Crehan relates, “For Gramsci, only a political movement based in a popular, mass culture could have any hope of seriously challenging the power of a modern capitalist state like Italy” (2002: 156). Milner’s (1999) comments regarding new social movements and the intelligentsia are pertinent to the discussion at this point as new social movements such as the Green’s are firmly based in the popular mass culture of their times. Milner contends that a major characteristic of new social movements is that they vocally reject class-based approaches to social problems. He writes “Moreover, they have often imagined themselves to provide a radical alternative to proletarian materialism: whereas the old social movement had deliberately pursued the collective self-interests of the working class, the new movements more commonly claimed to pursue quasi-altruistic solutions to more generally ‘human’ problems” (1999: 164-165). Furthermore, Milner asserts that the fact that these new social movements tend to contain high concentrations of formally qualified intellectuals has had a qualitative effect on their approach to class issues. As he explains, “This preponderance of the intellectually trained within their ranks is almost certainly what has enabled and perhaps even required the new social movements to construct their collective identities in increasingly overt opposition to class-based identity” (ibid: 166). Indeed, it is in this very tendency to eschew class narratives that Milner finds clear evidence of the class-based nature of new social movements. In making this point he states that the “class character of the movements is at its most readily apparent in their developing preference for individualist and consumerist as opposed to structural solutions” (ibid). It is my intention to use the above discussion to contextualise the Greens as intellectuals operating in an intellectual community informed by various structures of feeling. The theoretical constructs I have discussed above are not an attempt to ‘define’ the Greens; rather, I have presented these ideas as a way of bringing into focus the Greens as intellectuals. They are not easily encompassed by one or another notion of the intellectual because they are complex human beings living equally complex lives. They are, however, a group of people that did, at times, fit quite squarely into the above categories. This is especially true for the concept of intellectual communities built around structures of feeling. The Party’s membership came from many different walks of life and many different philosophical starting points. They were not all just waiting for something to come along to inspire them into action. They were, for the most part, active in their own right either before the founding of the Irish Green Party or before their involvement in it.

2.2.1 Eileen (Activist 1):

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I met Eileen at the national office in Fownes Street during the election campaign. At that time she was the Green Party candidate for the constituency of Dublin South West and had been with the Party since 1993. She was also very active on the national council and was involved with the Party policy committee on education. I had many opportunities to speak to Eileen as I spent quite a lot of time observing her election campaign. Her local branch consisted of only four people and I was interested in the effect this would have on her bid to become elected. Eileen was then in her early forties and lived in Tallaght with her husband Kris and their five-year-old child Dennis. Eileen graduated from Trinity College in the early seventies, and then went to Germany where she undertook further studies and taught English at university level for a number of years. It was there that she met her husband and later married. It was also during this sojourn in Germany that she was first introduced to Green politics and thinking, although she herself was not exactly sure where or when her conversion came about. While some members recalled a moment in time linked to the reading of a book or an article, a television show, an event, or a conversation that put them ‘on the road to Damascus’, in Eileen’s case she simply said that it happened “when I lived in Europe … that’s where I would have originally got my Green ideals from”.

While many in the Party espoused recycling, water and energy conservation, and ethical consumerism, Eileen and her family took this philosophical stance seriously and tried, where ever possible, to ‘live’ Green as well as to ‘think’ Green. There was no television in the house, nothing was used unnecessarily, and nothing was bought that could not be either recycled or put to some further use after its initial purpose had been fulfilled. As well as being environmentally conscious, Eileen’s strong opinions on social justice and the plight of the people that lived in her constituency were also a major factor in her decision to join an official political party such as the Greens. Tallaght was a suburb built on the south western outskirts of Dublin. It was originally a well-to-do farming area but large tracts of land had been given over to council tenancies in the sixties. The government of the day decided to remove many of Dublin’s poorer families from the slums of the inner city and house them in newly constructed high rise flats in Tallaght. This had substantially increased the population in the area and changed the demographics of Tallaght permanently. By the time of my fieldwork the majority of Tallaght’s inhabitants were dependent on welfare subsidies and generational unemployment was a fact of life. For these people the much-touted ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy was more myth than miracle as it had passed them by without altering their living conditions significantly in any way. People in Tallaght wanted employment, a living wage, and a decent education for their children. Issues such as ecological sustainability and ethical investment were not what usually informed political debate in Tallaght amongst this embattled working class. Coming from a well-educated, upper-middle class background, Eileen felt that she could offer people in her constituency an alternative to the mainstream candidates and choice between the way things had always been and the way things could be. She envisaged that, through the Green Party, she could help people achieve both environmental consciousness and greater access to employment through better education and the promotion of the skills already possessed by those in the constituency. As to why she felt that the Green Party offered more to those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale in Irish society as opposed to the mainstream parties or the other smaller parties,

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Eileen explained that she saw social injustice as a symptom of the general malaise that was impacting upon the environment. In this Eileen was genuinely representative of the Party because she felt that there was an interconnectedness between the social and ecological problems of the modern era and that one could not be solved without addressing the other. As she recalled: I suppose I had a profound sense of disillusionment with the other parties and seeing that they’re only paying sort of lip service to Green ideals. It’s only window dressing. And, you know, the Green Party is the only one that has the answers in dealing with things like, you know, for example emissions in trucks or in the case of waste management, water management, and so on. The others will tell you their doing good – something like Helmut Kohl’s government in Germany. They’ve a huge big environmental program but in many cases it’s all just window dressing. It’s addressing the symptoms, sort of, but it’s not addressing the causes. I saw that as being a problem. I also think in education, for example, the Green ideals are much more relevant but they haven’t gained wider acceptance.

Eileen felt with certainty that the acceptable political mores of the time were inadequate to the task of identifying and modifying the social and economic practices that would exacerbate these problems in the future. When she mentioned the ‘lip service’ of current European governments, she was giving voice to the widespread opinion amongst the Greens that the destructive processes then in place would continue unless power could be taken away from these institutions and redirected in a more sustainable way. In short, Eileen felt that time was running out fast. Like many others in the Party, she was pessimistic about the ability of the current mainstream political parties to recognise the social and ecological problems that Ireland was faced with. She was concerned that governments were not open to the message that the Greens were trying to get across - namely, that economic and industrial expansion could not continue at the level it was currently proceeding without ultimately creating drastic consequences. However, closely linked to this rather negative analysis of the socio-cultural and political forces at work in Ireland, and the rest of Western Europe, was an obvious optimism about the potential for change. For all that Eileen believed that her society had taken a wrong turn down the path of industrialisation and technological dependence, her involvement in the political process can be taken as a clear indication that she did not think the situation hopeless. Indeed, with all of the messages of doom, destruction, and short-sightedness that seemed, at times, to dominate much of the Party’s environmental discourse, it was often easy to forget that committed activists must necessarily be optimistic and positive to some extent. Eileen’s positive attitude towards her activism was by no means exceptional in the broader context of the Party. The Greens as a whole truly felt that they had the power to change the system, to become a popularly elected government in their own right. After all, if this were not the case, it would be extremely difficult to justify the organisation’s existence as a political party. They would be in the untenable position of soliciting support for a lost cause. In relation to the role the Party would play in Irish politics, should this faith prove to be well founded, Eileen’s ideas for the future again reflected

62 Issues in Environmental Research those of many of her fellow Greens. Ultimately her vision of the future of Irish society was based on three key terms – decentralisation, education, and opportunity.

2.2.1a Decentralisation:

Eileen saw decentralisation as a key component of an ecologically sound system of government. This emphasis on decentralisation was predicated on the belief that, given free reign and a moderate amount of real power, local communities would be more than able to govern their own affairs using common sense and local knowledge. Eileen also felt that with the advent of smaller, more independent forms of local government the Greens would be able to get their message across to the public more easily as it would reduce the relevance of the nationally focused mainstream parties to the voting public. This strategy within the Party was referred to as ‘devolving power to the lowest possible level’ and would redress the current situation in which she felt that the institution of the local council had become “a kind of talking shop – they talk and talk and talk and vote and vote but really they don’t have any power”. After the election of 1997 was over, I asked Eileen if the concept of ‘small is beautiful’ could work in a centralised social arena such as Ireland. She replied: We’ve [already] taken a step down the Green road of Decentralisation with the splitting up of Dublin County Council into three. So you have Fingal to the North, you have Dunleary and Rathdowne on the east, and you’ve South Dublin County Council and that’s a start. Obviously, well one was hoping to be elected and one isn’t elected, but to push for that form of decentralisation is very much in the Green policies. As we say, decentralisation just doesn’t mean moving a government off to Castlebar, it means real decentralisation with decision making at local levels – revenue raising capacity, etc, etc. And I think it is important. I mean [take] the Dáil for example; it has one hundred and sixty six deputies. It doesn’t need one hundred and sixty-six deputies. It’d probably get by quite well with sixty-six. At the same time we need to enhance the local councils, increase their membership, and give them a real salary to encourage them to do a good job and to allow greater decision making power. I mean Germany has that sort of system, Switzerland has it, and Austria has it.

Thus, Eileen saw decentralisation as a progressive policy empowering greater numbers of people than Ireland’s Westminster based system. She firmly believed in the Party’s call for the devolution of power to local and regional forums by restructuring the established institutional structures that govern Irish society. Decentralisation was a crucial factor of the Party’s overall philosophy and, as such, was a cornerstone of their policy direction. For instance, the Green Party manifesto states that:

In Ireland too few people are making significant decisions that affect the lives of far too many other people. For a democracy to exist, there must be a sense of ownership of the decision making process, not just

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participation in irregular elections, but popular active involvement in decision making structures. We believe in decentralisation, not shifting a government office from one part of the country to another, but empowering people to make decisions about local issues. Real decentralisation means the surrender of power and devolving revenue raising power to local government (Green Party Manifesto 1997: 15).

Given this emphasis on decentralisation, the Party proposed to create a three tier institutional structure composed of local, district and regional levels. Each of these levels of government would have real decision making power but the crucial tier would be that of local government. Local governments would be given far more autonomy than they had previously enjoyed and would be, for the first time, able to raise revenue in their own right. In the view of the Greens, this would give local governments the power to determine their own direction and to introduce solutions to the problems of governance that were specifically suited to their respective local conditions. Other Green proposals included a strengthening of the Freedom of Information Act and the restriction of confidentiality laws, longer sitting time for the Dáil, and limiting government officials to one public office within government at any single time. The Greens were campaigning for a transformation in Irish electoral politics that would give priority to local politics and independent representatives over the established national party system and its partisan tendencies. The driving force behind this policy was the underlying belief within the organisation that their society could be changed dramatically through the implementation of a more vigorous form of democracy which would give citizens a direct and meaningful opportunity to be involved in the decisions that affected their local and regional communities.

2.2.1b Education:

Eileen’s emphasis on education expresses its significance in the Green’s discourse. Indeed, education is a vital element in the Party’s emerging ideology and, hence, it is not surprising to find that the opening line of the Party’s education policy reads as follows: The Green revolution is not a political revolution with educational implications. It is an educational revolution with political implications. (Green Party/Education Policy: Adopted 1991) More specifically, the first paragraph defines the Party’s conviction in the importance of education and delineates the Greens’ vital role as educators. It states that:

The Green Revolution is at heart an educational revolution. It is about putting new things on the world’s agenda. It is not restricted to text books, but then neither is education. If we are to save the world, not just politicians and captains of industry must be convinced, but millions of ordinary people must be brought to change the way we live. It is a remarkable project. And its lifeblood is knowledge (ibid: 1).

Clearly, the Greens perceived themselves as revolutionaries striving to build a new civilisation and, whether or not their notion of what is revolutionary matches socio- political textbook definitions, they saw their aims as revolutionary. More importantly,

64 Issues in Environmental Research they state that their revolution will be one in which education is the main agent of social, economic and cultural change. This means that their revolution is to be achieved largely by the dissemination of a particular kind of environmental discourse. This discourse is, in turn, based on a way of knowing particular to the environmental movement, for knowledge and knowing play a key role in Green Party thinking. As intellectuals, they thought of themselves as the holders of a certain kind of knowledge and as having a duty to spread this knowledge as far and as wide as possible. For them, this particular form of knowledge held basic truths about human beings and environmental sustainability that would be self-evident to many if only the Greens could gain the public stage often enough. Furthermore, they were, for the most part, an intellectual community not interested in acquiring political power for its own sake but were concerned to bring about positive change. They were, in a very real way, teachers rather than politicians. If we now turn briefly to the education policy, a description of the structure of feeling which informs the Party as an intellectual community and the other peripheral structures of feeling which it shares degrees of commonality start to emerge. One of the main themes running through the education policy is the offering of alternatives to the accepted mainstream practices of teaching. This is of importance because, while the Greens wish to make many of the current education methods defunct, they are concerned to make the transition from one system to the other as non-threatening as possible. This would involve large-scale, yet gentle, change over a number of years. The following statement, taken from the then current education policy, gives us some idea of the implications for social and cultural change contained within the Green philosophy of education. The policy states that: As it stands, our education system is the product of our industrial society. Schools are organised and run along factory lines. The structures, the timetable, the scale, the principles of organisation of our educational system, are left-overs from a rapidly passing age. A respect for human individuality and values, meaningful organisation of our time, flexibility and variety of vision are hall-marks of the most advanced and forward-seeing economies in every sphere. Education should be in [the] forefront of these developments (Green Party/Comhaontas Glas Education Policy 1991: 2).

Closely linked to this ambitious structural change is the creation of more choice within the education system through a broadening of individual freedoms. For instance, the policy also declares that:

We need to restore the decision making power over learning to those involved; to the learner, the teacher, the school, the community (See Green Policies on Decentralisation and Local Government). The system needs flexibility and local responsibility in the management of learning, to allow people to make their own use of a wide variety of teaching and learning styles and techniques (ibid: 3).

As we can see, the Greens place a great deal of emphasis on the rights of the individual to a wide range of choice and the notion that, if given this range of choice, most individuals

65 Issues in Environmental Research will take responsibility for their own education as they will perceive it to be a personal investment as opposed to a means to an employment opportunity. In other words, this is an aesthetic of learning for learning’s sake. In order to free people from their present level of financial commitment and enable them to take advantage of this new education system, the Greens also propose the provision of a Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) which would be a universal measure designed to replace social welfare. The GBI would not be means-tested and would be available, at the same level of funding, for all Irish citizens. According to the policy:

This will free parents and young people from financial pressures which often limit their commitment to learning, both inside and outside of academic structures. Our present economic circumstances make this difficult for many parents. A central policy of the Greens is the provision of an individual basic income (ibid: 2).

This was also consistent with Eileen’s personal opinion on standard educational assessment methods. As she told me: I think they have to take away the emphasis on this exam-based culture. At the moment we’re very oriented towards the idea of exams and if someone gets there they have to go on. They have to do a B.A. or they have to do an M.A., and so on … they’ll end up maybe doing a Doctorate. If you don’t do that somehow you’re not a success and the Green thing is to get away from that.

This plainly indicates a major commitment to the ethic of a rich personal freedom and self-education. On this level, the Greens can be thought of as not merely intellectual educators but as potential facilitators of education on a large scale. As we shall see in the latter part of this work, the Greens believed in the common sense of their world-view to such an extent that they felt that many people could not help but be persuaded by it if only they could be exposed to it sufficiently. For them, being Green was about equity and variety. They use terms such as freedom, respect, and choice throughout their education policy in a discourse featuring the central notion of the empowerment of the individual at the cost of the current structures of centralised power. In addition to this, they were also interested in reigning in the ethic of competition, which they saw as having a negative effect on society at large. Again, as expressed in the policy:

The principles of human sharing and cooperation are profoundly undermined by the competitive, exam-oriented structures of our educational system, which seek to compare and select rather than to facilitate and encourage, and are major sources of aggression in society. It is more important for the process of education that a learner be given the means for creative discovery, and be excited by the amount of progress that they are making, than that they should achieve any particular goal (ibid).

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Eileen felt that it was not so much what was being taught but the how it was being taught that was the problem with the Irish educational system. There was too much emphasis being placed on standardised qualifications and levels of achievement and this created an atmosphere in which the specific skills and talents of people were being overlooked in the job market. As a consequence, perfectly apt people were being overlooked when applying for employment because the educational system failed to give them official recognition for their particular strengths.

2.2.1c Opportunity:

The other major concern Eileen had for the future of the Party was to distance itself as an organisation from any public association with traditional leftist politics. Her conceptualisation of Green politics included the free market system as an integral part of a free and democratic society. Certainly the markets needed to be constrained in order to safe guard both the natural environment and the welfare of the citizens, but the market itself was not the cause of the problem. For Eileen it was how the market was used to justify greed that was at the heart of the issue. As she stated, ‘People are terribly greedy. We still have terrible poverty and in fact the gap between rich and poor is increasing all the time. People don’t see that because there is a large middle class who have become slightly more affluent of late and they’re so greedy they don’t wish to give that up’. With regards to the Party’s stance on the profit incentive of the market, Eileen explained that:

Profit itself is good. People say - I remember Mary Harney saying that the Greens are socialist, you know. I don’t think they are because, as far as I know, Socialists or Communists are against the idea of profit - it’s all [for] the community. I mean my own perception of Green values doesn’t say that. I believe that if someone has entrepreneurial skills and puts in the time, they have a right to make a profit providing that profit is not accrued at cost to either the environment or to society. That sort of profit is wrong and should be discouraged. But when you have, let’s say, someone working with calligraphy that puts in a huge amount of hours and goes out and markets the stuff. They deserve to make money and to have their effort rewarded in some sort of physical sense that they can see.

In essence, what Eileen was concerned about was finding a way to regulate the market in order to make it more compatible with the ideals of a sustainable, humane society. That she was deeply troubled by the notion that people might link Green politics to the more radical elements of the left in European politics was plainly evident. The reasons behind this, however, are worthy of further analysis. When considering attitudes towards leftist politics in Ireland one cannot discard the role of the Catholic Church in the formulation of public opinion. The population of the Republic of Ireland is noted for having the highest percentage of practising Catholics of any nation in the world. Additionally, the Church has been the single most constant institution in Ireland over the last fifteen hundred years. Neither can we ignore the close cooperation between the state and the Church in the formulation of Ireland’s constitution in the mid to late nineteen twenties.

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This reached its apex in the nineteen fifties when, Eamon DeValera’s reliance upon the leading clergy in Ireland for policy direction in civil matters saw much of the Catholic church’s doctrine enshrined in law by the state. This resulted in a widespread popular aversion to socialist philosophy and politics as the majority of Irish citizens adopted the Church’s stance towards socialist thought during the cold war period. As such, it was a significant factor in the underdevelopment of the labour movement in Ireland during the post-independence period and continues to colour the attitudes of the majority of the voting public regardless of religious denomination.

In light of this, Eileen’s attitude toward the ‘taint’ of socialism within the Party was not surprising. Socialism was not only ‘wrong’ on moral and spiritual grounds, it seemed to Eileen that the aim of socialism was to achieve a kind of artificial equality in which individuals were not allow to differ from the general community in any way upon pain of death. Like many in the Party she equated socialist thought with the political and social realities of the U.S.S.R and was convinced that, although it was a nice idea, socialism could not work in the ‘real’ world. She also employed on occasion the concepts of freedom, individuality, and incentive as justifications for her position against something she saw as being totalitarian and, ultimately, stagnant. In short, Eileen and many in her generation had what we might call an ‘Animal Farm’ view of socialism. To her it represented repression, subordination and secularisation on an unthinkable level. Thus, Eileen insisted that a Green society would not stifle opportunity but would encourage new ways of thinking in the market place designed to promote a form of consumption that would be sustainable and ethical. There was no detailed plan of how exactly this would be achieved if and when the Greens gained the necessary political power but I got the impression from her and the other Green’s that this would become clearer as the Party evolved over space and time. The important thing at that moment was that the Greens believed it was possible and that they would, through their political struggle, be the catalyst for this level of change in Irish society. Finally, we can see from Eileen’s account, and the discussion of the Greens’ viewpoints on decentralisation and education, that there was a clear and unswerving valuing of a rich autonomous subjectivity based upon a wholly new kind of cooperation and sharing of decision making power.

2.2.2 Joe (Activist 2):

I first met Joe about a week after I arrived in Dublin at the ‘Eco-Fair’. This was an event organised by the Dublin South branch of the Party to raise local awareness about Green lifestyles and politics in their local constituency. He was running a stall which promoted vegetarianism by offering free samples of various vegetarian dishes and was also handing out pamphlets on vegetarian cooking and animal rights to anybody who was interested. I spoke to him briefly and he invited me to come along to the local branch meetings of the Dublin South group. I didn’t know it then but Joe was to become one of my most constant sources of information during my stay in the field. Joe represented a significant proportion of the active membership of the Party: not so much in his journey of becoming Green but in that he did not find that journey remarkable. When researching this section of my work I realised that, although I possibly spent more time with Joe than any other member of the Party, I never managed to get a clear description from him as to why he

68 Issues in Environmental Research joined the Party. What I did manage to garner about this subject through the many interactions I had with him was that he had attended the University College of Dublin (UCD) where he had completed a degree in English Literature. During his time at UCD he had become aware of, and interested in, issues concerning animal rights. Subsequently, he became an activist in the campaign for animal rights in Ireland. He was also a strict vegetarian and was involved in running an organic food co-operative in Dublin. During the period of my research Joe was employed as a tour guide in Dublin and was also writing a guidebook to Dublin for tourists. He was the Green Party candidate for the constituency of Dublin South, the Party spokesperson for the environment, and the Party’s overall director of policy development. Many members were similarly vague when questioned about their initial motivation for joining the Party. At times I found it frustrating and put it down to a possible annoyance, on the part of the informant, at being asked questions of such a personal nature by myself. At other times I thought it more likely that the participants, despite my protestations otherwise, failed to believe that their personal journeys and thoughts could be relevant to a thesis written by someone from half way across the world. Joe presented me with a simple chronology of what he had done before joining the Party. He had attended university in Dublin, became a campaigner for animal rights, became involved in the Dublin Food Co-op, and finally, joined the Green Party. Furthermore, he presented this in such a way to give me the impression that he, personally, found it to be unremarkable and nothing more than a natural progression in a direction that he was always going to make.

We can surmise that university life gave Joe the opportunity to either come into contact with issues of animal rights for the first time or expand upon an already established interest that had not found its full expression. This led him into the sphere of activism as his views on the subject became more defined and a personal course of action crystallised. Involvement in this sort of activism would have certainly led to exposure to many other ideological and political stances that overlapped issues concerning animal rights. Indeed, Joe told me that his vegetarian lifestyle was grounded in his belief that human beings should respect the rights of all animals, and that it was not necessary for us to breed and slaughter millions of animals a year simply to gain sustenance. As a practising vegetarian, Joe became very interested in debates about food and the increasing concern about the wide spread use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers in modern agriculture. It was at this point that he became involved with the Dublin Food Co-op which, as a non-profit organisation, supplied affordable organic vegetables and other food-stuffs to a growing network of citizens similarly concerned about the quality of food produced by chemically dependent mainstream agricultural practices. I was told by Fintan, another Green Party member who was also a member of the Dublin Food Co- op, that the Co-op was always a strong supporter of the Irish Green Party and that there was a significant pattern of dual membership within the two groups. It must have been a short step for Joe, who was already a committed activist in many of the areas that were fundamental to the Green Party platform, to join the Party and continue his activism under its umbrella. What I failed to see at the time was that this all felt so ‘normal’ to Joe that he had ceased thinking about it as exceptional. Added to this, Joe’s pedigree of social and environmental activism was representative of many of his fellow Green Party members. Being Green for Joe meant being an environmentalist first and foremost. This

69 Issues in Environmental Research is not to say that he was not as concerned with issues of social justice as other members of the Party but rather that he felt that the needs of the environment were, ultimately, much more pressing than anything else. If we recall, in the initial stage of this thesis, I offered O’Riordan’s definition of environmentalism as “a philosophy of human conduct” (O’Riordan 1981: xi cited in Milton 1993: 1) as an analytical platform from which to proceed. Similarly, Milton’s definition of environmentalism as “a quest for a viable future, pursued through the implementation of culturally defined responsibilities” (1993: 2) was also noted. While these definitions are helpful, there was much division within the Party about what constituted a culturally defined responsibility and how those identified as such should be prioritised within the philosophy of human conduct that informed the Party’s culturally centred vision of environmentalism.

What interested me about Joe’s views was that, through them, I had the opportunity to examine the anthropocentric/ecocentric polemic that occurred within the Party. Joe understood environmentalism to be a philosophy in which human activity did not dominate and impact on the natural world but was brought ‘closer’ to it. This view was informed by a non-violent ethic in which human beings did not have the right to use environmental resources in any way they saw fit. For him, human beings had an absolute responsibility to create a culture in which their social structures were geared towards enhancing the viability of natural systems wherever possible and to minimise unavoidable impacts where no other option was available. Thus, vegetarianism and animal rights were high priorities on his program of culturally defined responsibilities that needed to be implemented for an environmentally sustainable society to emerge. One way of understanding how culturally defined responsibilities are identified by social actors such as Joe is offered by Eder. He asserts that there are three main ‘framing devices’ which are useful in understanding perceptions of environmentalism in their culturally specific manifestations. The first of these is “Man’s moral responsibility towards nature” (Eder 1996: 171), the second is “Empirical objectivity … linked to the mechanistic conception of nature that has caused scientific progress in modern societies” (ibid), while the third is “The aesthetic of the relationship of man with nature … closely tied to the way modern societies perceive nature as a relevant context of their reproduction” (ibid). By way of definition, Eder states:

The cognitive framing devices can be seen as organizing principles of a modern discourse. Within the discourse on nature these cognitive framing devices conceptualise the ‘problem of nature’ and give it cognitive consistency and coherence. The first framing device generates a form of moral responsibility of man towards nature. The second organizes the empirical observation of nature and the scientific mode by which it is ‘objectified’. The third refers to the qualities inherent in humankind’s expressive relationship with nature (ibid).

Importantly, cognitive framing devices are internalised by the groups of social actors employing them in ways that are consistent with their own cultural milieu. In other words, they are the culturally specific adaptations of framing devices. As Eder notes:

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Environmentalism is based on a cultural form within which moral, factual, and aesthetic framing devices provide the cognitive basis for framing the relationship of man with nature. These moral, empirical, and aesthetic framing devices in environmentalism are the elements that are used in ecological communication by environmentalists to create a specific image of themselves. This process is called symbolic packaging (ibid: 176).

While this is simply one among many ways of understanding how people come to perceive themselves as environmentalists, or as being Green, it does identify a number of important culturally variable factors that were pertinent to the experience of Irish Greens such as Joe. Indeed, the Irish Green’s perception of themselves and the way in which they wanted to be perceived by the public was the cause of some tension within the Party. Working with Joe was beneficial in understanding this issue because he was quite vocal about the need for the Party to portray itself as an organisation whose first priority was the environment. This would sometimes put him into conflict with other Party members who felt that their best chance of a greater political acceptance of Green values within the voting public was to move away from the image of the Green’s as a one-issue organisation. An example of how this tension surfaced within the membership of the Party happened before the election campaign when there was much discussion about how the Party should present itself to the public. Many members were concerned that the public might perceive them as ‘tree-huggers’ and ‘new-agers’. They were quite anxious to get away from this image as they thought that it would hinder their attempts to put themselves across as a serious political party. When I spoke to Joe about this, he recognised that there was a danger of the Party not being taken seriously by voters but was concerned that the more conservative elements within the membership might be ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’. He felt that the Party had reacted by focussing too much upon areas other than the environment in an attempt to show the public that they were serious players on the Irish political scene. When discussing this, Joe said that he felt that the Party should concentrate much more on the creation of its environmental policies so it could have a more cohesive ecological platform to present to the public. I asked him about the probability of this happening and he replied:

But, like, a lot of people will feel they won’t want to do that because they won’t want the Party to revert back to an environmental image. My own view is that that is a fundamental mistake because, you know, everything is connected and, in a sense you know, if we’re not kind of leading on that issue well then we might as well just change the name of the Party and call us, you know, the Socialist Workers Party or what ever it is that we’re going to do. Oh yeah, and the public would be also confused if we went into government and didn’t focus on environmental issues. For instance, if we got the ministry for children it would be wonderful but the public would be utterly confused by that.

Joe was particularly concerned that the Party’s ambition of electoral success would draw it away from its founding principles and leave it open to manipulation by mainstream

71 Issues in Environmental Research parties hoping to secure power for themselves by offering the Greens a place in a coalition government. During 1997 there was much speculation amongst the membership about what to do if coalition became a possibility and it became a focal point of debate as the election drew closer. After the election I spoke to him regarding how the other members of the Dublin South branch felt he was perceived by the public. He told me that, while most of the members were happy with the campaign, there were those who felt that he was not taken seriously enough because he ‘dressed like a Green’. When I asked him if he thought that this was indicative of a move by the more conservative members in the Party to depart from its more radical environmental foundations, he replied:

This is it you see. Cathal, at the meeting the other night, we were talking canvassing and he says, ‘Yeah but you have to get out of these wool jumpers’. This is what you get as well you know, like Cathal does great work but his perception is that the Party has to get professional and slick and he said that I should have worn a tie, that it was the wrong image. Like I was really depressed when he said that, I was really disappointed. It was like kind of ‘let’s conform’, you know. I know what he was saying; he was saying you have to mimic what people like. And actually, because of my involvement in animal rights over the years, I’ve always been conscious of the fact that when doing any kind of television interview its actually important to look quite neat and almost ‘mirror image’ society. Then they do a double think on it because I’m not fitting into what they expect me to fit into – which is a new-ager or something. But having said that I think it’s depressing that – and there would be a lot people in the Party that would have Cathal’s view – I think it’s depressing that we have to leave that kind of image behind us. I think that’s one of the more unfortunate results of having electoral success – becoming more and more a political party in terms of winning seats. Is there something inevitable about, when you win a seat, that you do get swallowed up by the political establishment, that your policies become slightly diluted – [that] your radicalism becomes a little diluted? Does that happen? I raise this point because, for Joe, being Green was all about being ‘radical’.

He believed that focussing upon environmental sustainability, and creating a philosophy which aimed to structure societies in accordance with the boundaries set by their respective ecological limitations, was a radical approach to modern politics. In his eyes, the Party also had a responsibility to be seen as radical through both its presentation of itself to the public and the media, and also in its actions. However, during my time in the field I noted that public demonstrations and campaigns by the Party were not all that common. There was a demonstration about air pollution at the Dan O’Connell monument and a local campaign to introduce light rail in Sligo City, and as mentioned above, Joe had been instrumental in running a dual campaign about vegetarianism in conjunction with both the local Dublin South Greens and the Dublin Food Co-op, but the Party as a whole had not organised a single demonstration while I was in Ireland. I asked Joe about this as I knew he had been involved in quite a number of campaigns for animal rights in

72 Issues in Environmental Research the past. I knew also, from the many conversations I had with Joe on this subject, that he felt that the Party should be more active than it was in this area. In addressing this issue, he said: I think a certain amount of people see that as something that was part of our development in the past, and we’ve matured. And now we’re a ‘real’ political party and now we’re working in the parliament. You know, [as if] getting out onto the street is kind of like what environmental groups do is kind of prank stuff, or whatever - I get that impression. There’s less of a willingness to do that because certainly when I joined the Party first, and for the first four or five years, I used to organise quite a lot of demos and we used to get quite a lot of people out. And I would say that if I started to organise demos again I’d have a lot of difficulty getting people out. I might be wrong but it depends on what it [the reason] would be. But the other thing is that they do take a lot of work. The last one I did was blocking a dump in north Co. Dublin a year and a half ago with Brendan and we got good publicity over it actually, and I think it was very good for Brendan, but I wish I had’ve done it over in Dublin South because I got all of the waste action groups over in his constituency out. And we were on the main news and all that. We got all over the papers, it was a good thing to do but it took an awful lot of work.

Here we can see that Joe thought that the Party had come to a crossroads, although he did acknowledge that demonstrations were a lot of work. It could either cleave more firmly to its founding identity, as a Party intent upon bringing about social and ecological change in its own right through its own devices, or move towards the mainstream of Irish politics and present itself as an ecologically concerned potential member of any future coalition government. Again, Joe linked this to the more conservative membership in the Party. He felt that, as the Party came to be perceived as more and more conservative by the public, so to did it attract a new kind of member that was more inclined to be moderate rather than radical. On this subject, Joe felt that: I don’t think we’re getting many new members. I don’t think we’re getting many members at all who would have a real desire to change society. I think we’re getting a more conservative kind of member and we’ve very few members now who are kind of like pushing the Party, saying like ‘Why aren’t we doing this and why aren’t we doing that’ – in a sense what some people used to do. A lot of the more radical people have gone and that was either through disillusionment or because the Party tried to get rid of them. See in a lot of cases there was genuine reason for the Party trying to get rid of them because they were just causing a lot of trouble but I think, at the end of the day, when you look at the Party and you see so many people who used to be members outside the Party now who were genuine activists, that says something very bad about the Party. That we weren’t able to hold on to them, that we were too conservative.

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He also added that this could well impact upon the effectiveness of the Party if it were ever in a situation where it was in a coalition partnership. The compromises it would have to make to appear acceptable to its partners might very well hinder its ability to live up to its expectations as far as policy implementation was concerned. As he told me:

I’ve a deep suspicion about that in terms of our ability to maintain our own identity or even get those policies implemented because we’re just small. We’re small fish in that very, very powerful and very manipulative ocean of the main political parties and their long-term strategy isn’t to subsume us but it’s certainly to dilute us. To bring us into the political system and to get rid of our radical nature which can cause them problems because they know that the one thing they have no control of in an election campaign is the protest vote. And if they take our radicalism away from us well then we’re not going to get very far.

Here we can see that Joe’s thoughts on the differences between the kinds of activists the Party was attracting, as it became more established within the Irish political milieu, lends a certain credence to the way in which Holub discusses the passage of intellectual communities from an organic stage through to a traditionalist one (1992: 151-184). In other words, as the Party has becomes more acceptable to the public, it has begun to attract members with different expectations and priorities to those responsible for its foundation. Additionally, it would seem that Joe was of the opinion that many of the more long-term members of the Party had become less radical in their approach and now frowned upon the kinds of protest activities that were once popular and legitimate Party strategies. The point Joe makes above is that the Party had become less radical as it evolved. This is of interest as it is similar to Baker’s (1990) discussion of the enduring split between those environmental activists willing to participate in the established political process and those who felt that participation would involve too much compromise to effect real change. In this light, Joe’s concern for the future viability of the Party as an alternative to the mainstream parties could either be a further elaboration of this old division, which started with the initial anti-nuclear protests in Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s, or it could be a new division created between those members of the Party impatient to put Green policy into effect and those who had misgivings about accepting any offer of power sharing until a strong enough support base was established. I submit that this division was certainly informed by nostalgia for more direct action among those members who were personally committed to the strategy of political protest, however, there was definitely a feeling within the Party’s leadership that the more conventional political approach taken by the Party in the better part of the previous decade had started to win lasting public acceptance. They felt that they were about to emerge from the political wilderness and were anxious not to lose what they had fought so hard to gain. Joe found this uncomfortable for, as an environmentalist, he had always thought of himself more of an activist than a politician in the formal sense. Nonetheless, Joe, and people like him, managed to create sufficient space within the confines of the Party for more radical approaches to political action and, indeed, theirs was an accepted voice of opinion. Part of why he felt this conflict so keenly was that his role as Party candidate for Dublin South added a personal dimension to the dilemma which this thesis

74 Issues in Environmental Research will discuss in detail in the section. For now, however, we can see that Joe’s experience of being Green was, like many others, a complex matter.

2.2.3 Neave (Activist 3):

My first contact with Neave was at a Party conference held in Wicklow for the Party’s candidates in the election of 1997. Neave described herself as a “Green Mother” and by the way those present at the conference reacted to her, it was obvious that Neave was a significant person within the Party’s power structure but also, as I was to find out, quite an elusive one. My subsequent efforts to catch up with Neave in a more informal setting were hampered by the workload she had as one of the two Green MEPs (Member of the European Parliament) and her other commitments to the Party and the election campaign. What I did know at that stage was that she was quite a controversial figure in the Party and was not averse to conflict. Neave was forty-eight at that time, divorced from her husband and living in Wicklow with her elderly mother whom she was looking after. Apart from her work with the European Parliament, she was also the secretary of the Wicklow Greens of which she was one of the founding members. However, she was not a regular face at the meetings of the National Council or the various policy committees because her duties as an MEP dictated that she spent a great deal of time in Brussels where the Parliament convened. Neave grew up with politics playing a major part in her family life. Both of her parents were committed socialists and active in the civil rights movement both in Northern Ireland and against apartheid in South Africa. She suspected that this upbringing, although a prime factor in her eventual journey towards political activism, was not a common experience within the Party. Her opinion was that “I think that’s a little different from my impression of many Greens who grew up in very non- political households with no involvement in political issues such as the ones that I’ve described”. One would expect that from this kind of background a career in politics would have been an early choice for Neave but this was not the case. As Neave explained: So, I did grow up in a political household however I did not want to become involved in formal politics. And I would see that as very much as part of my development as a Green. I wasn’t attracted to any of the overt ways of political expression that my parents have engaged in. I don’t think that there was anything rational about that. I just felt as though that wasn’t where it was at.

Neave describes the break up of her parents’ marriage and her subsequent move to London with her mother as one of the most formative experiences in her life both on a personal and a political level. At that time, in her early teens, she was “really conscious of being taken away from a world which, at some levels, had an engagement with the natural world and taken into a technocratic industrial society”. This feeling of being disconnected from nature was so keenly felt by Neave at that time that it drove her to attempt to “get back in touch with the rhythms of nature” by living in a commune in her late teens and learning to sail. Although her parents did not hinder her actions, she did attract criticism from at least some friends of the family. She related that:

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I did things which, not my parents, but various politically involved friends of theirs would have described as escapist. And I did have a long conversation with a very intellectual Marxist friend of my mother’s who was quite horrified at what I was doing. I was living in a commune, growing organic vegetables, etc, and he thought that was absolutely outrageous who’d had my kind of education. They should be out there saving the world. I know I was sympathetic to all that but I wasn’t engaged by that. I was engaged with this other process which became Green. It was completely organic, it was just what I was doing that I enjoyed, and it was living in communes and sailing.

This period in her life was for Neave one of growth and transition. She felt it was crucial in relation to the path that her life later took and one that she draws upon constantly in order to give meaning to her career. With regard to all political activists, the path from philosophical support to active involvement is a deeply personal one. It can involve anything from a single incident or moment of insight which produces a ‘gestaltean’ change of perception, to a gradual alignment or realignment, to a political direction through years of life experience. In Neave’s case, her decision to join the Green Party was formed by her initial attempts to ‘find’ herself and to position herself mentally and physically in relation to her socio-cultural and socio-ecological surroundings. As she explained: I was really driven, in a sense, to engage and for me it was through sailing. I really engaged with wind and water. Sometimes it was freezing cold and sometimes I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but I was very engaged with the natural rhythms of life and of the elements. For me this is a fundamental resource of the work that I do now, which is very far from that. It’s taken me to a place which I would have never foreseen. I don’t like working in Brussels. It’s a horrific environment for any human being. I do it because I also feel that I must and I also have this resource of what I built up over nearly ten years of living an outdoor life – of living on a boat, of living without electricity.

Neave’s first experience with a formal protest campaign came in 1973 when the Irish government, as the newest member of the European Common Market, was called upon by Brussels to build a nuclear power plant. This would allow Ireland to conform to the Common Market’s policy demanding that every member nation move towards partial, and ultimately total, dependence upon nuclear power. As detailed in chapter 1.3, there was firm opposition from the public and a well organised protest movement determined to stop the construction of the power plant sprang into being. The Irish people had already experienced the dangers of nuclear power when an accident occurred at the Sellafield nuclear power plant on the West Coast of England in the nineteen fifties releasing large amounts of radio-active pollution into the atmosphere. The prevailing winds enabled clouds of radioactive pollution to cross the Irish Sea and settle over County Wicklow. This was the first large-scale environmental disaster to strike modern Ireland, and many of the subsequent instances of cancer and birth defects have been

76 Issues in Environmental Research attributed to it. No compensation was offered by the British government of the day and none has been offered by any administration since. In light of this it is not hard to imagine the furore that surrounded the Irish government’s plans to conform to European energy policy and construct a nuclear power plant of their own. As Neave recalled: Suddenly our government wanted to put a nuclear power plant into Carnsore, and this was about ten miles from where I was living. I was living on the banks of the river. Berril near Newroth and Carnsore is just south of Wexford, so it was close. And I got involved in the protests about that, not at any organisational level, but I was so completely outraged. I didn’t realise at the time that it was the EU who’d said ‘Here’s the money, what you absolutely need most is a nuclear power plant’.

However, the movement itself was not one in which the Irish people became antagonistic towards the citizens of other European nations. It was directed against the power of those presiding in Brussels to determine the way in which Ireland would deal with its energy problems in the future. Indeed, the campaign became, for a time, a focal point of protest against the concept of nuclear power all over Western Europe and helped to polarise attitudes towards it throughout the Union. Hence, according to Neave:

It was Petra Kelly who was one of the co-founders of what was then the European Greens, consisting mostly of the German Greens, who came over here to help us in that struggle. She was very closely allied with the trade unions. That alliance of the environmentalists, the anti-nuclear people, and the unions was extremely powerful and resulted in the Irish government backing off. So that was my beginning.

Neave later moved to Dublin where she studied psychology and ‘natural medicine and healing’ for a number of years. These studies made her increasingly aware of the high levels of pollution that people were being subjected to in the course of their everyday lives and the harmful consequences that this was having in the community. It was this growing concern about the harmful effects of pollution caused by modern industrial production and technology that strengthened her resolve to continue the involvement with environmental politics that had begun with the anti-nuclear campaign. As Neave recalled:

The two things that were really drawing me were the health effects of pollution and knowing how important it was that people felt good, that they had clean water, the ability to go into a clean sea. And I was very interested in natural plants and the access of people to natural forms of healing. Still, I would say that I’m very concerned about people being able to access these forms of natural healing without them being forbidden to be sold for one reason or another. That-and the anti- nuclear fight; to me they’re all aspects of trying to protect life from some kind of dreadful blight or insanity.

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Indeed, this was a theme that surfaced again and again during the course of my research in Ireland. There was a feeling among the Greens that somehow everything was getting out of hand and needed to be brought under control before disaster struck. They perceived that the forces behind the European Union and the rest of the capitalist economy had become impersonal and driven by greed rather than any logic concerned with meeting human needs. Neave’s comments about the possibility of “some kind of dreadful blight or insanity” approaching the world from just beyond the horizon was mirrored in many conversations that I had with her colleagues within the Party. From probationary members to the Party’s founders there was a definite anxiety as to where this dynamic would take the world and a feeling that groups like the Irish Green’s were charged with the responsibility to bring the problem back into human proportions. This concern was enshrined in the Greens’ policies on decentralisation and their attempts to theorise a way in which the power now held in largely centralised institutions could be diffused or devolved to the lowest possible level. As mentioned in the section dealing with Eileen, many in the Party felt that Green Parties had a responsibility to protect what was left of the natural environment while bringing about the kind of democratic, economic, and technological reforms that would enable the situation to be reversed in time. Neave made the progression from campaigning on health issues and trying to promote forms of natural healing to becoming a formal member of the Green Party after the elections of 1989 in which the Party gained its first seat in the Dáil. She recounted that: I didn’t realise there was a Green Party in Ireland then but there was, and I straight away knew that I would, of course, join it – which I did. I formed with my husband a group here in Wicklow and we started campaigning on the question of clean water. See, there was a sewage problem here. I suppose at that time I felt that the Greens were an amorphous mass of people like myself, enthusiasts. Not terribly political people, but people from all walks of life and all political backgrounds who had somehow come together with a kind of natural enthusiasm. Neave described being Green as being part of a large and complex ‘tapestry’.

This was crucial to her rationale for being Green because she felt that taking an ecological perspective in politics meant more than presenting arguments about the importance of the environment within the political institutions of the day. In her opinion, an ecological perspective meant that one should look at all issues, be they pertaining to energy use, unemployment, conservation or community, as if they were all interconnected. In other words, we should look at social and environmental phenomena as if they were part of one greater system. She argued that this inclusive philosophy was at the very heart of the Green movement and had been from its inception. As she put it:

I think the Greens, as they emerged, emerged out of the Environmental and Conservation movements and the Feminist movement as well. There was also a very clear commitment by women and a leadership of women in the Greens. Again, it’s somewhat incoherent but it’s present. It’s overtly part of our policy as well as civil rights and human rights.

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When I questioned her further on this point she added that: ‘There is, I think, an understanding by people in the Greens that it is all part of a tapestry. That animal rights is ‘night in terms of day’ and I might be involved in gender issues but we are all Green. So there is a kind of field effect, although people are involved in what might be superficial to a certain kind of mind. To us they’re not different things because we take an ecological view of it.’ This ‘field affect’ mentioned by Neave can be seen as another way of describing the different structures of feeling that inform the Greens as an intellectual community. For her, Green politics was a new kind of politics that was not doctrinal in the way that socialist and capitalist political movements were. Whether members were more concerned about fluoridation of water supplies, air pollution, gender issues or agricultural practices, they were still within the Green sphere of thinking as long as they recognised that all of these things were interconnected. As she said: ‘I think the Greens are a different phenomenon. It’s a different organisation than other political organisations. One of my Italian colleagues said the Greens are like an Afghan tribe and there’s a lot of truth in what he said because there’s a certain incoherence in it but a great strength’. Even so, this perspective did not make Neave immune to being frustrated at times with what she called the level of ‘incoherence’ within the Party and its decision making structures. Indeed, one of the most common criticisms by members of the Party was that the individualistic nature of the Party and its need for a high level of consensus made it extremely hard to act decisively, particularly in circumstances where swift action was called for. Neave observed: ‘the way I experience it I sometimes get quite annoyed at the lack of structure in the organisation. I know that we’re trying to create different kinds of structures and I’ve thought about these structures quite a lot – tried to engage with them. I also think that the Greens are too conflict [driven]. They’re all strong individuals, very individualistic, and yet they have this alienated hankering for some kind of communal group life – but it fails to grow somehow’.

Neave also felt that being an Irish Green was qualitatively different from being a Green from other countries. Through her involvement with Greens from many other countries in the institutions of the European Parliament, she had observed that the native cultures of those within the movement internationally had an impact upon how they experienced their ‘Green-ness’. As she explained it:

The European Greens are a lot more structured and have developed quite a sophisticated practice of what their structures are. I still don’t think they’re nearly tight enough but certainly there’s a process going on which I can see us in Ireland as more at the beginning of. There’s a culture of the English-speaking world, if I can put it like that, and there’s the political culture of the rest of Europe where they tend to have more of a political philosophy, whereas in the English-speaking world, the politics- particularly Green politics- are carried by the NGOs.

Ireland is in-between. We have a political culture so therefore the Greens have taken a political form in Ireland, which they are unable to do in England or America. They can’t

79 Issues in Environmental Research be ‘of’ the political process. It’s not the way the English-speaking world works. The English-speaking world divides politics and the rest of the things that we do. Whereas any European intellectual would immediately tell you who owns what and how things are resourced, it is always put into culture, but in the English-speaking world we’re not so used to thinking like that. Importantly, while she identifies Irish society as being part of ‘the English speaking world’, Neave also clearly identifies Irish culture as being something ‘other’ and the Green Party as retaining its own political individuality on a cultural level. Thus, a sense of ‘Irishness’ comes to the fore in the way that the Irish Greens have created themselves as a political party with a formalised structure yet they have still retained characteristics that are more usually associated with the English and American Greens. More specifically, Neave felt that the Irish Greens, because of their cultural background, were struggling with the same ‘incoherence’ that had dogged the American and English Green Parties, albeit to a lesser degree. She equated incoherence with decentralisation in such a way as to present it as a double-edged sword with which the movement, as a whole, was grappling with. As she put it:

In that sense they [the non-English speaking European Greens] are more coherent about their policies and their organisations, and we are somewhere in-between. I find the English Greens very incoherent and I think the American Greens are also very incoherent, even more so than ourselves. They’re very decentralised and this is one of their strengths of course, but it also a great weakness, particularly with a global economy. Which is what we are faced with dealing with because the environmental destruction isn’t just something that’s happened to a rain forest here or a sea there. It is a global assault. It’s economic.

Hence, in Neave’s opinion, the level of decentralisation within the American and English Green organisations was not effective in getting the Green message across even though decentralisation was, and remains, one of the most central aspects of Green philosophy. The very nature of the economic and political institutions that the Greens were dealing with on both the domestic and international levels meant that their organisational structure had to be focussed enough to make an impact. Indeed, it was not only the nature of these institutions that she felt the Greens had to overcome but also the philosophy behind them. Neave linked the centralised nature of modern political institutions to the reality of the global capitalist economy and a utilitarian ethic. According to her: ‘It’s a very utilitarian approach. I mean France is absolutely Cartesian, for example. It’s very interesting to listen to, in the European Parliament, the debate on technology and have this really Cartesian view put forward as ‘correct’. Whereas I would feel that we have really moved on or should be, after four centuries, going somewhere else’. Furthermore, she placed the Green movement, as a whole, in direct opposition to this kind of approach and made it clear that she felt that this opposition was a defining one for Green activists. As she explained: Its absolutely clear that this utilitarian view of life, that everything is a resource and everything is to be exploited, is seen by people as normal. I think the Greens do not see that as normal. We are children from the heart of this kind of society and we’re saying “Wait a minute, if

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everybody and everything is to be exploited, what kind of a world are we making”.

2.2.4 Tim (Activist 4):

Tim was a senior Librarian at Trinity College Dublin and was in his late forties. He was the Party’s candidate for the constituency of Dublin South East, where he lived with his partner, as well as a policy convenor on foreign affairs and the Northern Ireland peace process. He had been a member of the Party since 1984 and, having written and published a short book on his theoretical rationale for becoming a member of the Party, was widely regarded as a ‘thinker’ within the Party. During his period of involvement with the Party he had also held various other positions of responsibility including being a member of the Co-ordinating Committee and the National Council.

Tim’s tale of becoming Green involves a process of conversion from one way of understanding the world to another that hinged upon a change in perception regarding social and ecological issues. He had been a long time member of the Socialist Labour Party when it dissolved in 1982 due to internal factionalism and ideological differences. As Tim recounted, “that was a sort of full stop which, I suppose, left me free to do a bit more reading and thinking”. During this period of reflection, Tim became interested in ecological philosophy and it was this investigation which led to a sea change in his thinking. In Tim’s words:

I date my conversion, if you like, to 1984 when I read one of Bahro’s books. (Although Tim couldn’t remember which of Rudolph Bahro’s works he read first, he has referred to The Alternative in Eastern Europe (1978), Socialism and Survival (1982) and From Red to Green (1984) as main sources in his pamphlet). I mean it wasn’t the first thing I read but it was one where he talked about contradictions. I don’t know if you can know just by reading it how crucial it was to me, the idea that the contradiction was between the environment and the industrial system. That’s the major contradiction in modern society. That was a major turning point in my own thoughts and when something happens like that it takes time for the rest of your ideas to come to fit with it. Like, if I could give a parallel example from an earlier existence, the particular passage in Marx that made me call myself a Marxist in 1966 – it was actually Engels’, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, where he points out the difference between state capitalism and socialism. And yet I wasn’t a member of anything that could be called a socialist organisation until ’71. So it took years to be clear as to how things were actually sorting themselves out. Perhaps I’m just a slow thinker (laughs), but if I adopt a new point of view it needs to relate to other things before I know how to act on it.

Tim felt that the environment under socialism was something that got “added on” to what was basically a political theory of change dependent upon the consciousness of the

81 Issues in Environmental Research working class and its struggle against capitalism. This tension between the working class and the capitalist was, for him, a dynamic that was no longer a vital one. As he put it, ‘I don’t see that the dynamic of the class struggle is going to produce anything more than the occasional outburst or temporary victory so it doesn’t seem to me to be a way in which the transformation of a whole society is going to occur’.

In his pamphlet, Colours in the Rainbow: Ecology, Socialism and Ireland, Tim describes the socialism that came out of the nineteenth century as a “wages struggle” (Goodwillie 1988:4) or a struggle in which the working class was engaged in an attempt to redistribute wealth by gaining a greater share of the profits made by the capitalists. Tim came to believe that this dynamic was inadequate as a basis for revolution because, in modern times, it had not served to further the cause of socialism. Accordingly, he stated that: But nowadays, wage rises lead rather to improvement in productivity with, on occasions, rationalisation and redundancies. Pressure on profits is continual, but wage rises do not lead to the progressive impoverishment of the capitalists. Employers and unions are locked into a symbiotic relationship where each depends on the other. The industrial system needs a constant incentive to improve productivity, as the forces of productivity are often distorted or act only in a long-term way. If you look at the way in which, after the death of Franco, Spanish capitalism managed to welcome the return of free trade unions in place of the sterility of a decaying fascism, you can see how little of a threat to capitalism the wages struggle is (ibid:4-5).

Underlying all of this is Tim’s belief that capitalism, in itself, is not the fundamental cause of the degradation of the world’s environmental systems. In relation to socialism’s overt aim to make the market system redundant, he felt that this was not achievable in the foreseeable future. While talking about the Party’s approach to capitalism and the market system, Tim remarked:

I think we can’t look far enough ahead to work out how we can do without the market mechanism. I mean there are a lot of things wrong with the market. The only problem is that when you try to control the market you end up creating a bureaucratic method instead, which is no better.

Thus, as stated earlier, Tim came to believe that the real cause of the current environmental and social crises was the industrial system that had evolved during the rise of capitalism after the dissolution of the old European feudal systems. However, the distinction between capitalism and industrial processes was never made clear by Tim either in his book or in the conversations that I had with him during my time in Ireland. He pointed to pollution levels and the rampant misuse of the world’s natural resources as the main indicator of the culpability of the industrial system. An example of this appears in the introduction of his pamphlet under the heading of The Environmental Crisis:

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Food is polluted with pesticides and chemicals. Rivers and lakes are polluted with slurry and fertilisers. The air is polluted with the emissions of motor vehicles and of factories and power stations: the Moneypoint power station is now proceeding to add to the damage. The process becomes threatening where it starts to affect resources. The forests of Europe are a resource which is threatened by acid rain. The seas are a resource for the fisheries industry. The air is a resource necessary for life itself, and yet the depletion of the ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbons contained in aerosols and packaging threatens to cause increased cancer as well as decreased crop yield (ibid: 1).

Here Tim is focussed on what he sees as environmental realities rather than on problems of wealth inequality or alienation. As we shall see, Tim’s ideals of social justice and equality were re-established in an ecological framework once he became convinced that these long held ideological goals could not be achieved through the growth of collective consciousness among the working class in opposition to the processes of industrialisation. Underlying Tim’s criticism of industrialisation, socialism and capitalism, is a question of motives. He contended that both capitalist and socialist societies were dependent upon exponential economic growth in order to maintain their short-term viability (ibid: 14-15). Whether in capitalist societies, where the emphasis is on the individual for his/her own advancement, or in socialist societies, where it is the responsibility of the state to see that the whole society advances uniformly, Tim perceived that the main engine behind this advancement was ‘the profit motive’. This was a phrase much used by the Irish Greens at the time of my research and, as Tim explained, was central to Green ideas on economic and social reform.

The Greens believed that the motive of profit led to economies that encouraged ever increasing levels of consumption in order to maintain economic growth. This, in turn, led to both the vastly irresponsible usage of the world’s resources and the unequal distribution of consumables produced by this process (ibid: 13-14). It was the contradiction between production driven by consumption and the ever decreasing ability of the world’s environmental systems to satisfy rising levels of consumption that led Tim to question his previous position as a socialist. In Tim’s words:

But the continuance of the system is now threatened by ecological breakdown. So we are faced with a broader contradiction - that between the industrial system, both forces and relations of production, and what Rudolf Bahro calls ‘the natural conditions of human existence’, minerals, air, water, climate, fertility, and human resources. The contradiction between the system and the natural conditions does not mean that there is no longer a contradiction between forces and relations of production, it simply means that this contradiction is overshadowed (ibid: 13).

Hence Tim’s main focus became sustainability rather than social equality as he felt that the latter could be achieved only after the realisation of the former. For him, the condition

83 Issues in Environmental Research and continued viability of the environment was now a paramount value, for extinction was a far greater concern than oppression. Tim did not discount his previous stance on social justice, but he now believed that the first step towards social justice was ensuring the well being of the environment. When I asked Tim about this, he said “I feel that if you put the environment at the ground level in some way, you can relate other things to that and create a cohesive Green philosophy”. In his pamphlet, Tim identifies the emergence of new social movements such as feminism, gay rights, and the anti-nuclear and environmental movements as examples of the different ways in which people have expressed their dissatisfaction with the trajectories of modern western societies. Moreover, he makes reference to the ways in which traditional socialism was changed as it tried to incorporate these ideas into its broader theoretical framework (ibid: 12). He questions whether this broader form of socialism, which he has identified as ecosocialism, is significantly different enough from the older socialist thesis to provide a basis from which to address the current ecological crisis. He writes:

But the [socialist] theory assumes the indefinite continuance of the industrial system of which forces of production and relations of production are [a] part. The raw materials come in from a place external to the system, by-products such as pollution go out to a place external to the system, and they do not enter the argument (ibid.)

Tim’s conversion from Red to Green was triggered by a personal realisation that the socialist project did not offer an alternative that contained answers to the environmental crisis created by industrialisation. There is a sense that what Tim refers to as ‘the industrial system’ has promoted a discontinuity between human needs and human wants. A sense that, in a consumption based society, wants – such as mobile phones, computer games, and disposable nappies – rapidly become newly discovered needs which we do not recall how we ever got along without. It is this discontinuity which has, according to Tim, created the conditions that are the present reality of the Third world countries. For him, these symptoms of exponential growth are disturbing. He explains: ‘This presents a problem. The average American uses twenty times more energy than the average Asian. If the world population is stabilised at 11 or 12 billion – and it looks as if anything substantially less can be achieved only through famine or nuclear war – to raise this population even to British living standards would require twelve times the present level of industrial production. There is no way in which the world can provide the resources for everybody to live at the level of the most industrialised countries’ (ibid: 14). So, how did Tim believe that using the environment as the foundation for political thought would help alleviate these glaring inequalities? When I asked him about this he replied:

I think that the idea of nature is important. [The idea] that there is a relationship between human nature and the natural world that isn’t oft clearly expressed. I have found it a helpful concept to ask yourself ‘what is human nature?’, given that 97 percent of the history of the human species was lived in a hunter gatherer society. If there is any such thing as human nature then that’s where it is. I think that there are concepts within that, you know, like altruism. There are still concepts

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there as to the way in which things [happened] like the subordination of women, the territorial division of the Earth and so forth. These are historical events which you can, at any rate, think yourself back to the time before they happened and say ‘Okay, a lot of what appears to be human nature is actually the result of these changes and is not fundamental’. I find that’s helpful in terms of thinking about sexual equality [and] in terms of co-operative structures, in terms of group dynamics. Like, for example, there have been people who’ve studied that and come up with ideas, you know, like a hunter gatherer band consist of thirty to fifty people, which might be twenty to thirty adults, which is about as big a group that you can get that doesn’t impact radically upon the environment.

When I put it to Tim, during this same conversation, that this may be seen as impractical simply because it regresses too far back to be relevant to modern societies, he replied: We can learn something about ourselves [when learning] about human nature. We can’t copy it because we don’t live by hunting and gathering and so forth. So we can’t copy it as such, but we can see where it’s reflected in our present arrangements and see where the difficulties are coming from. I think it’s a help when you think in terms of the urban rural divide or the work leisure divide. These societies don’t have such divides and part of our problems come from the fact that we do. You know, our lifestyles are sort of divided up like that.

Tim reiterated these points in his pamphlet by proposing that human interaction with the environment be tailored to that of other animals as much as is possible. He summed this up by writing, “In the same way as the lion’s attack on the antelope is justified by its need for food, so all our interferences with nature have to be justified by our necessities” (ibid: 16). As Tim came to Green politics ultimately through his involvement with socialism and passion about social justice, I had a sense that being Green was, for him, a continuance of that political struggle in many ways. Indeed, what was crucial for Tim about his involvement with the Party was just that – being involved. He mentioned on a few occasions that the Party’s progress had been impeded by a lack of committed activists within its ranks. For him, it was not enough to profess to being Green or to vote Green. In order to get the Green message through, the Party needed more people who were willing to actively engage the public on behalf of the Green Party and its founding principles. For instance, when I asked why many Party policies remained undeveloped fifteen years after the Party was formed, Tim replied that, “People are wearing too many hats … the activists are doing too many jobs”. He believed that the Party was extremely under-resourced and that those within the Party who were committed to being active had already taken on more than they could feasibly handle. Regarding this problem, Tim remarked:

If we had a bigger base of activists it would be so much easier to implement it [Party policy]. At the moment it’s very difficult to hold people responsible when you know that if they haven’t done something

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it’s probably because they were doing something else just as valuable to the Party.

Significantly, Tim was sure that the only way to overcome this problem was to convince people of the centrality of the environment in their everyday lives. If people could be shown that the state of the environment was important and did impact upon their everyday lives and their children’s future, then the Party would have no problem gaining the numbers of activists it needed to function at its full potential. In his opinion, in order for the Party to evolve it first needed to educate the people about the importance of the environment. Thus, he to saw that performing an educational role was also an important aspect of being Green. Tim believed that the Party was succeeding in its role as educator even while it remained on the margins of Irish political life. Unfortunately, the mainstream parties had tactically exploited the Party’s successes in this area. As he explained:

We have a problem in that we’ve been successful enough to make the other parties think that they have to say something about the environment and that’s removed from us one of our selling points – that we were the only people talking about the environment. We now have to get across that the environment is a central thing in politics, and that’s a more difficult thing to get across.

Tim also felt that being an Irish Green meant struggling against the highly romanticised prevalent attitudes towards the environment in Irish national culture and society. This meant struggling to dispel some of the traditional myths that idealise the simplicity of living and working on the land and attitudes of nostalgia regarding the virtues of a strongly catholic society that is a culturally dominant view of Ireland’s past. When I asked Tim if he thought that the Irish environment had impacted significantly on modern Irish socio-cultural institutions, he replied, We’ve turned our backs on the sea to such an extent that Ireland being an island doesn’t seem to constitute that much. I think the fact that we were an agricultural society until recently has had an impact. I think the Irish language, for example, has had an impact, quite apart from whether or not people actually speak Irish. The way in which Irish has tended to be taught involves using texts from people who lived in Irish speaking areas, [and this] has created a society in which that sort of rural society is the standard taught value and, therefore, its something that your supposed to look to. That’s sort of a national ideal in some way, this rural society, and that’s probably had an impact upon patterns of rural settlement. Like the way in which we have a very large proportion of people living in either very small villages or isolated houses. We have tended not to think in terms of towns or even large villages as having an importance or life of their own, or even an identity which it would be valuable to build upon as a community.

Here we can see that Tim thought that the Irish people identified with the land much more than they did with the sea that surrounds it. They also divided the landscape into rural and urban domains and between these two domains, valued rural communities over urban communities. Tim felt that, on the whole, people believed rural communities to be

86 Issues in Environmental Research more representative of their notion of a pure Irish culture than those communities situated in urban centres. Tim pointed out that this nationalist myth about the pristine rural origins of the nation was further perpetuated by the way the Irish language was taught in schools. Many of the chosen narratives expressed in the texts derived from rural communities and so it was these rural values and ideals that were given national significance. It is important to remember the unusual trajectory followed by the Irish language in modernity. I was often surprised, when listening to Irish speakers conversing, to hear the musical flow of that language broken up by the occasional discordant English noun. When I mentioned this to an Irish speaking friend he explained to me that this was largely because of English colonial rule. Under that rule, any Irish person caught speaking their native language could be jailed or sentenced to transportation so the language had not developed as other European languages had over the last two hundred years. Instead of being able to gradually assimilate new concepts and technological advances as they occurred, the Irish language remained virtually in stasis as long as it remained illegal. When, in the middle to late 1920s, it became the official language of Ireland it was supplemented by English words in the areas that its capacities had not developed. Thus, it remained a language more adapted to the agricultural ways of past centuries than the modern world of late capitalism. In Tim’s eyes this situation hindered realistic discussions of environmental issues. Tim also felt that the tendency towards idealised notions of the rural past marking these Irish texts had also spilled over into the works of many Irish authors who wrote in English. Unfortunately, this bias towards a rural lifestyle did not mean that the Irish people would be more amenable to the Green message about the environment and sustainability. As Tim pointed out, although much of the Irish literary inheritance sanctifies the Irish countryside and imbues it with cultural and spiritual importance, he could see no link between modern Green philosophy and traditional rural dispositions. In making this point, he told me: ‘I mean, something like animal rights. I think its quite an important concept [but] I think it has grown out of international links and the general way in which international societies are developing along parallel lines rather than a specifically Irish sort of agricultural background’.

Tim’s analysis points to the decisively urban origins and influences of the Green Party. Indeed, although the Party had local groups throughout the rural regions of the Republic, these groups were uniformly small and did not generate any significant electoral support. If we recall Strandbu and Krange’s discussion of symbolic fences (2003: 183) we can see that this offers a potential explanation of the failure of the Greens to find support in rural areas in the same way as it helps to partially explain the Green’s poor showing among the urban working class. Similarly, Peace’s research into the three domains of Inveresk explain that, by and large, rural communities are suspicious of the political agendas of the mainstream parties and are prone to seeing politicians as facilitators in a system that often does not operate the way it should for people with little or no representation (2001: 109- 118). For my part, I can not speak with any authority on attitudes towards the Greens in rural areas for, although I travelled extensively throughout Ireland, the majority of my fieldwork was conducted in Dublin. I feel confident in saying, however, that both Strandbu and Krange’s discussion and Peace’s findings shed significant light on the subject. As for Tim, he did not offer any explanation as to why he thought rural Ireland was out of step with ‘international communities’ and was as perplexed as anyone else in

87 Issues in Environmental Research the Party regarding how this situation could be resolved. He felt that the immediate future of the Party lay in the urban areas of Dublin and, as an ex-socialist, had given more thought to the attitudes of the urban working class than rural bourgeoisie. ‘Being Green’ meant being pro-active within his own area while being focussed on the evolution of the Party for him. He was concerned with creating a political space in which social justice issues and the environment could be seen as indivisible from one another and could be subsequently dealt with in a holistic manner rather than as distinct phenomena. Although Tim was no longer a committed socialist he still expressed grave reservations about the combination of industrialism and its motivation for profit, but for him the central contradiction was between economy, society, and culture and the environment.

2.2.5 Fiona (Activist 5)

I first met Fiona at the Green Party national office in the Temple Bar district in Dublin but I came into contact with her most regularly at meetings of the Dublin South Greens of which she was a member. While not active on the national level, Fiona worked throughout the election campaign and had always been very active on the local level. Fiona was a housewife at the time and was married with two children. She lived with her family in the constituency of Dublin South. Fiona joined the Green Party in 1989. She had a university education and had worked in a financial institution before marrying and starting a family. By 1989 Fiona was at home looking after her two small children while her husband continued to work. It was during this period that she became concerned about the ongoing environmental destruction that was then being presented by the media on an almost daily basis. As she related:

I’d two babies at the time and I was sitting at home and obviously watching the news quite a bit. And the Greenhouse effect was a major news item at the time and so was the ozone layer. I was really, really concerned. I was really upset and I just felt I had to do something about it and I thought ‘yeah, ok, I’ll join the Green Party’, and I went along. I wasn’t into politics; I’m not a political animal. I just felt I needed to do something constructive to help the way the world was going on an environmental level and I went along to the first meeting.

Fiona told me on another occasion that she had become more and more effected by the graphic images of environmental destruction and the scientific arguments for the existence of the Greenhouse effect and the depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer that were being regularly shown on the television. She wanted to be an active part of an organisation that might offer a solution to what she saw as a human problem that threatened the entire Earth. She explained:

So maybe I joined the Green Party because of my concern about the environment and I probably would’ve been aware of Earthwatch but I don’t know whether Earthwatch would’ve been in existence at that stage or Greenpeace. I wouldn’t have been too well up on those but I just knew the Green Party. And then I would’ve stayed with them, you

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know, those policies and discussions and everything. You get used to people there and people will come into the group with lots of energy and we get involved in another project, Sellafield or whatever. So it’s just stayed with me and then, at the time it was on [the television] every night. If you want to change the only way to bring about change is maybe through politics. I know you can do it lots of other ways but politics is the most correct way. So that was why I joined the Green Party.

By taking a moment to reflect on Fiona’s position, I wish to point out that there are aspects of it which are representative of the Greens as a whole. I believe that Fiona was trying to articulate a genuine anxiety about the future and concerning the environment that, although easily felt, is frustratingly hard to describe. On one level it is a reaction to the level of destruction being visited on the environmental systems of the world but, on a deeper level, I submit that she and many of her fellow Greens felt that the natural world was lessened by attempts to treat it simply as a multiplicity of resources. I believe that Fiona felt that this particular form of materialism was robbing nature of its mystique and of its majesty. I further suggest that she was concerned that the natural world was being transformed from a place of wonder to a thing of utility. I realise that, in the broader context of political activism, this may not appear to be a significant spur to action. When placed against the need for workers to unionise in South America or, closer to home for Fiona, the intensity of the divisions over Northern Ireland between the Nationalist and Loyalist communities within Ireland and the United Kingdom, it could appear to be nothing more than a side issue but it was much more than that for Fiona. If we consider that Fiona and her fellow Greens come from the first generation to grow up with nature documentaries such as those made famous by National Geographic and David Suzuki, we may begin to understand her position as cultural rather than political in origin.

Taking into account the extraordinary growth of the Green movement worldwide under the auspices of such organisations as Greenpeace, Earthwatch and the Sierra Club and the rapidity in which politically active Green parties have been able to mobilise and achieve significant support from within their various national communities, I feel that it would be unreasonable to dismiss the popularisation of the ‘environment’ through the various forms of modern media as a largely western cultural phenomenon. If this is the case then Eder’s theoretical modelling may be enlightening in the context of this discussion. Eder submits that environmentalism may be understood in terms of “cognitive framing devices” (1996: 171-176). He suggests that there are three framing devices which are useful in understanding the discourse of environmentalism in its different manifestations. The first of these is “Man’s moral responsibility towards nature”, the second is “Empirical objectivity … linked to the mechanistic conception of nature that has caused scientific progress in modern societies” while the third is “The aesthetic of the relationship of man with nature … closely tied to the way modern societies perceive nature as a relevant context of their reproduction” (1996:171). By way of definition, Eder goes on to state:

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The cognitive framing devices can be seen as organizing principles of a modern discourse. Within the discourse on nature these cognitive framing devices conceptualise the ‘problem of nature’ and give it cognitive consistency and coherence. The first framing device generates a form of moral responsibility of man towards nature. The second organizes the empirical observation of nature and the scientific mode by which it is ‘objectified’. The third refers to the qualities inherent in mankind’s expressive relationship with nature (ibid).

Seen in conjunction with Eder’s cognitive framing devices, it may well be that Fiona felt a culturally embedded responsibility to protect ‘nature’ from further destruction at the hands of human activity informed by a scientific ‘objectivity’ which obscured the deeper, non-material, relationship between human beings and the world in which they belong. It is also possible that these cognitive framing devices, if sufficiently descriptive of reality, have been heavily influenced by technological advances such as television, satellite links and the internet that have and continue to have, a pervasive effect on the direction of cultural change the world over. It could well be that Fiona and her fellow Greens were articulating a reconnection with nature myths, or the creation of new nature myths, that are a consequence of the way in which modern societies have used and assimilated some of the technological advances of the late twentieth century. Unfortunately, that question is far beyond the scope of this thesis and I must be content with simply mentioning some of the possibilities that Eder’s cognitive framing devices raised for me in my investigation of ‘Green’ identities.

Returning to the discussion of Fiona’s path towards the Green Party, she confided in me that her first encounter with the Greens at the local branch level was nearly her last. When discussing her motivation for initially joining the Party she felt it was important to mention that she was disappointed that the Party did not discuss what she would term environmental issues. Instead, the meeting was focussed on social and policy issues that were of more immediate concern to the Party at that particular time. As Fiona recalled:

I was sitting there and I was waiting and waiting all night for them to start talking to the environment and it never came up. And then at the very end of the night, when there was ‘Any Other Business’ and people were asked to say what they wanted I immediately cut in and said, you know, ‘I expected much more talk about the environment and much more action and campaigns’, you know. As a result of that they asked me what my concern was and I said ‘Well, at least you could start with recycling’. And then, did you see that leaflet at the Green office, it’s their recycling leaflet? Well that’s what I started in 1989 because of my concerns. And the people at the meeting, they were very interested and very supportive and there was about two or three other girls who got involved in it with me. We went out and we did pub crawls – pub raising – going into different pubs looking for money and we raised a lot of money for that, but that was the first environmental campaign that we did.

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This is important to note because, like Fiona, many active members did not join the Party in order to ‘be political’. She joined because she felt a need to ‘do something’ about the environment. People such as Fiona were important to the life of the Party, because they entered the organisation with a lot of enthusiasm and passion, and for her joining, for instance, was a catalyst for action that culminated in the production of a leaflet about the virtues of recycling. In relation to my experience with the Party, I observed that many new members were beneficial in instigating lively conversation on environmental issues and in bringing fresh perspectives to the Party that often challenged accepted policy. Regarding what kind of people join the Party, Fiona used the German Greens as an example. She felt that the German Green model contained similarities to that of Ireland and that both had memberships which derived from the same kind of socio-economic group. As she explained:

Yes, but even in Germany they say they’re so Green because, at least up to recently before the united Germany thing, economically they were very strong and people suddenly had everything they wanted and they probably saw, well you know, it’s not total happiness. I think that when you reach a certain level, you have the good job you want, you have your house, you have your cars, you realise then that there’s more. And they have the time then, you know. They’ve no other problems. They’ve time to look at the environment and to see the destruction that’s happening and to then be concerned about their children and their grandchildren.

It is interesting to observe here Fiona’s emphasis on economic development and prosperity stimulating the emergence of the Green movement. She points out that in Germany, the EU, and later in Ireland, continuous and positive economic development created the basis for a prosperous middle class to emerge. Conversely, when asked about why the Party had a dearth of members from below a certain level of affluence, she remarked:

The people living in flats in town or where ever, they’ve no work, no money. They’ve got kids and they’re concerned about their kid’s nutrition and food. I mean I wouldn’t be concerned about the environment now if my kids were starving or my husband was unemployed. So, in that sense, it’s so important to get our social policy right and [introduce] basic income, you know. It’s fairness for everybody.

Here we can see that Bourdieu’s notion of ‘social space’ (1998: 5) is applicable. Fiona is definite in her appraisal that her involvement in the Irish Green Party as an activist has a direct relationship with the social space she inhabits as a privileged middle class person who has the time and energy to think beyond immediate survival. Furthermore, she contends that it is from this social space that the majority of Green Party members come from. However, it was not only a feeling of responsibility married to a particular place of

91 Issues in Environmental Research privilege in society that inspired Fiona to become a Green Party member as opposed to simply being a supporter for, like Tim, it was important for Fiona to be actively involved in the life of the Party. During my time with the Dublin South Greens she regularly attended meetings and was very active during the election campaign participating in door knocking, strategy planning, and canvassing in general. Also, part of the attraction that the Party held for her was that she enjoyed being part of the group. This seemed to provide an avenue for socialising as well as being a positive outlet for her concerns about the environment and Irish society. The social aspect of being involved in the Party was quite clearly important to many active members and, as is to be expected when people work closely together in a common cause, there were many strong friendships made between the active members of the Party. While this is by no means unusual in political movements all around the world, I believe that there were some aspects of Irish culture that promoted this level of social interaction within the Party. Take, for instance, the setting of most local branch meetings and even many committee meetings on policy and strategy. The majority of these were held in a local Pub where two, or three, long tables would be set aside for the Party’s use by the Publican. In some cases, when the group was small enough, the meeting would be convened in an enclosed booth that could seat up to eight people and was called a ‘snug’. It is important to note here that the reason for gathering in places such as these was not the consumption of alcohol – of which I saw little at any meeting. I mention this type of setting because it has significance in Irish culture as a meeting place where all are on equal terms. For the active members of the Party, the Pub was a place for conversation and debate – a place where issues that were important to them could be discussed in a relaxed and convivial atmosphere that separated them from the more pressing concerns of their daily lives. While this topic will be discussed in more detail elsewhere in this thesis, I wish to make the point that Fiona, like many others within the Party, enjoyed the atmosphere of these meetings and the social interaction it brought to them. However, unlike Tim, Fiona did not compare the Green message to other rival theories or ideologies. To her ‘being Green’ meant taking a common sense approach to solving problems that were very simple on a fundamental level. Broadly, her approach can expressed thus: all life on Earth was being harmed by humanity’s rapacious need for resources yet humans needed a healthy Earth to survive; therefore, people who can afford to do so have a responsibility to care for the environment so that their children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy it and live within it as they have; finally, caring for the environment means creating societies that would minimise human impact upon the world in general.

For all these reasons Fiona thought that the Green Party was crucial. Being Green meant caring about what kind of a world she would leave her descendants and thus was preferable to engaging in theoretical or ideological arguments. It made common sense to her as did policies built upon these fundamental premises. As she explained: ‘Well, you know I’ve read all our policies. I mean I’m in the Greens because I believe in the policies because mentally it makes so much sense. I think we’re fine where we are and I think we should keep going in that direction’. It is also important to note that Fiona saw being Green as requiring a major focus on social issues because, for her, the problem was one of human making and, thus, could only be solved by finding social solutions. For

92 Issues in Environmental Research example, when I asked Fiona what were the most immediate areas of concern for the Greens in Ireland, she replied: ‘Transport’. Transport would be the main thing and Basic Income would be a very, very big thing. Education – putting more money into primary schools where kids can get a decent foundation course because, you know, if they don’t get it at foundation level it’s not too late but its harder the later it gets. Energy, conservation - see it’s all relevant to our way of life. It’s all relevant to simple development.

Here, Fiona uses the term ‘simple development’ to articulate the Green notion of commonsense and connectivity that was previously mentioned by Neave. This is a major platform of the Party and a major theme in the emerging ideology of the Green movement. Taking the eco-system as their model, the Greens perceive that everything, both social and environmental, is connected within a greater system in which the introduction of change on one level can bring about change on another. That is why, when Fiona started to answer my question on what part of Green policy was most important, she quickly came to the conclusion that all of the policy areas were important as they were all linked to each other. More importantly, she thought that environmental problems had their roots in social systems and, as such, had their solutions in them as well.

2.2.6 Sean (Activist 6):

I first met Sean at a Dublin Regional Council meeting early in 1997. I had seen him before this at the National Council meetings but did not have the opportunity to talk to him on those occasions. Sean was attending the Dublin Regional Council meeting that day in his capacity as a member of the Party’s ‘drugs’ policy committee. I participated in the discussion of the policy and afterwards organised with Sean and Moira, Sean’s partner, to meet the next week for an interview and further discussion about the Party’s attitude towards drug abuse in Ireland. Subsequently, I talked regularly with Sean and made contacts with the Dublin Central Green group. Sean was thirty years of age and had been active within the Party for eight months. However, while this is where Sean’s involvement with my research project starts, it is not the beginning of his personal story nor is it the beginning of his participation in Green politics. Sean left Ireland in his early twenties to find work overseas. His strong accent marks him as a Dubliner from the north side or, in local terminology, simply a ‘Dub’. But, beyond such telltale linguistic evidence of his upbringing, as he talked about ‘tings’ or ordered a ‘point’ it became plain that Sean’s story was, on a deeper level, much the same story as that of millions of other Irish people over the decades. From Donegal to Cork, emigration has been a defining aspect of the Irish experience for those who go, those who stay, and those who return. Indeed, the experience of emigration has been so much a part of Irish history that it has become a culture shaping force. Regarding the impact of emigration on the people of Ireland, O’Toole writes:

The relative stability of the population figures – currently about 3.6 million – conceals a continuing instability of inflows and outflows.

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Emigration has been the single biggest fact in the 75 year history of the Irish state. Only half of those born in Ireland in the 1930s, for instance, were still living there 30 years later. The rate of emigration dropped rapidly in the 1960s, but picked up again in the late 1970s and early 1980s; so that the 1996 census showed that nearly 20 per cent of those born in 1970 were by then living in another country. Some of these people went and stayed gone. Some came back, left again, and returned again. Some of those who went were themselves the children of emigrants who returned in the 1960s. In 1996, too, three quarters of a million Irish residents paid visits to relatives living abroad: home, for the Irish, is not necessarily where the heart is (O’Toole, 1997: xiv).

This is something that I encountered many times when interviewing both those active within the Party and those I met throughout my time in Ireland. Emigration is something that has become so commonplace in Irish society that it is a culturally significant practice. As for Sean, he spent three and a half years in London where he worked as a bar manager for much of that time with England’s second largest brewing company. It was during this period that he became involved in his first serious protest action. The action centred on the British Telecom tower and was a campaign to re-open it as a tourist attraction and shopping centre after its closure some time earlier. The closure of the tower had had such an adverse effect upon the local economy of the surrounding suburb that many smaller businesses had closed and unemployment had risen sharply. In essence, the action was aimed at the regeneration of the local economy that had been maintained, to a great extent, by the tower in an area of London that was “falling into decay”. Sean and his fellow campaigners wanted to bring the issue to public attention, proposing that the authorities re-open the tower for tourism and shopping. In this way they hoped to turn it into a resource for the renewal of the local economy. As the leader of this campaign, Sean recalled:

The idea behind that was that I would set the ball rolling and hope that somebody in a more powerful situation would come behind me and pick up the ball, you know. But it didn’t happen, you know. It was blanked by the politicians and it was blanked by the media although we still had some measure of success, we ran out of money, you know.

Shortly after the campaign, Sean undertook a foundation course in social science in order to gain a better understanding of why the campaign was unsuccessful as well as the forces behind the social inequalities that he had seen on many levels in Irish and English society. It was while completing this course that he came across an article by Lukes which was called ‘The Four Dimensions of Power’. To the best of my knowledge, I believe Sean was referring to Lukes (1974) Power: A Radical Approach but I cannot be certain. In any case, the article Sean was referring to contained a discussion of the issue of agenda setting and its role in effecting long term social change. Sean found particularly inspirational a part of the discussion dealing with the ‘fourth’ dimension of power. According to him:

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The fourth and final dimension was power in the political arena that is so strong that it can control the agenda, which is what happened to me in that campaign. So take, for example, the issue, say, of legalising cannabis. You can’t even get it discussed, you know. You can’t even get it into the public forum. Right, it just won’t happen. You’re not going to get that discussed in the Dáil next week, you know what I mean.

What the article had done was to help Sean make connections between social change and agenda setting. These connections became a significant part of what encouraged him to become part of the party-political process. He felt then that if the agenda could be taken away from the mainstream politicians and the media and placed in the hands of ordinary citizens then issues important “on the ground, at the grass roots” would actually begin to be addressed. As Sean put it: ‘It was about the idea of trying to get on the inside, so I actually made a conscious decision, while I was reading that article, to join a political party’. Upon his return to Ireland, Sean did indeed become involved in party politics. As to his choice of party, he recalled:

I had always had a great deal of interest and sympathy with the Greens because, to me, they were a little bit radical and a little bit rebellious so I could identify with them. And a lot of their policies around the environment, and recycling and stuff, I would have agreed with although I wouldn’t have been very passionate about. So I got the application from the head office.

Throughout my many meetings with Sean over the course of the year, it was clear that he and others like him were attracted to the Party because the Party created a space within which to become ‘active’ on the ‘issues’. Regarding this opportunity to participate, he once told me: Oh yeah, yeah, that’s the great thing about the Greens. If I’d have joined some other party I wouldn’t get a look in. I would not get a look in. I’d be allowed to hand out and things but I’d have zero input. [In other parties] you have to have the connections … unless your father or your grandfather was in the civil war, you know. Yeah, but in a few short months, because I had the drive and I wanted to get involved, I was able to get involved at a fairly high level fairly quickly. That’s what I like about the Greens is the grass roots, you know.

In some ways, being ‘Green’ for Sean was more about being actively engaged in alternative politics than it was about focussing specifically upon more traditional environmental issues such as climate change and ecology. He was convinced that mainstream politics was not capable of providing an acceptable platform for the kinds of social change that he felt were needed to redress the problems he was most concerned about. Sean made these thoughts clearer for me when I attended a meeting of his local branch, the Dublin Central Greens. During a discussion about possible election strategies

95 Issues in Environmental Research that took place before the election date had been announced, he explained to the meeting, I just have this concern around the conflict between pragmatism and idealism, which I’ve noticed at other meetings as well. Which would be around, sort of – get elected and do what we want – which sounds a bit like New Labour, do you know what I mean? I just have a kind of a crisis of conscience with that because I understand the need for pragmatism but I also, like, I think back when I joined the Greens last year and it was around the fact like ‘I want to get involved in politics, what party?’ And for me the Greens shone because of their idealism and the fact that they weren’t tainted with the usual greasy politicians. You know what I mean? The Greens, for Sean, offered a fresh perspective that was not yet compromised by either years in power or political cynicism. In this respect, being a Green meant having ideals and holding on to them even if it meant that political power would not be within their grasp for some time to come. It was about creating a new political force with a new agenda that would not be subsumed by the older mainstream parties. As he said later in that same meeting, ‘I think that [the] philosophy of ‘have to get in’ over ten or fifteen years [means] you end up when you get on TV or something saying nothing. You know what I mean? Then you’re just the same as the rest, you know’.

Here we should note that Sean’s case is not typical within the Party’s membership. While it is easy to place Sean as an intellectual, in the Gramscian sense, within the Party, this is qualified by the fact that Sean’s formal education was commenced after he had become a seasoned campaigner on environmental and social issues. With his working class background, his experience seems to run contrary to Strandbu and Krange’s (2003: 179) notions of abstraction and production-oriented cultures and symbolic fences. Their theoretical model would make Sean an unlikely Green Party member as he would (according to them) lack the right kind of cultural capital or cultural knowledge to fit in easily with other Greens. Indeed, in their model, Sean would think about the environment in a different way to the majority of the other Greens. He would see it as more of a resource for production than as containing inherent aesthetic significance and he would have had to hurdle almost every symbolic fence mentioned by Strandbu and Krange (ibid). By his own account, Sean should have joined a socialist organisation rather than an environmental one as his main focus had always been issues of social justice rather than environmental sustainability. However, Sean found that the organisations devoted to the older political traditions did not offer the opportunities for personal involvement and activism that the Irish Greens could afford him. This is important to note because it is a key attraction to many who join organisations like the Green Party and there was a significant part of the Party’s membership that felt that their inclusion in policy matters had come about much more quickly than it otherwise would have in the mainstream parties. The point being made here is that, while it is obvious that Sean had to hurdle some cultural fences in his quest to become involved significantly within the Party, he was attracted to the Party in a way in which a middle class person may not have been. After experiencing the limitations of the campaign predominantly instigated and acted upon by a small group of the working class in London, he saw his involvement with the Greens as an empowering experience in which he could participate in and contribute to the bringing of social change in a group imbued with a significant amount of cultural capital.

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Indeed, we can find this kind of phenomenon in Peace’s discussions of the campaign against the proposed chemical plant at Killeagh (1997) in East Cork. Peace maintains that the protest movement was successful through its ability to have its discourse perceived as more legitimate than that of its opponents. Furthermore, the residents of the region surrounding Killeagh, in East Cork, were successful in their attempts at discourse legitimation because they had sufficient cultural capital to prevent their objections from being ignored. They were not crazy-eyed hippies or angry students but, rather, respected members of the community who were able to bring significant public pressure to bear on their adversaries. Hence, perceptions of cultural capital are relational in the same way as cultural capital itself is. In this way, Sean could look at the Irish Greens and see them as being a potential force for great change while others could see them and dismiss them as ‘tree-huggers’. It was also clear that Sean saw the Party as being more open ended in its approach to social justice issues than any other in the Irish political milieu at the time. In fact one of the most attractive aspects of being Green for him was the freedom to link social structures to the environment and to provide a new basis for thinking about both. As he stated: What you need is people with the power of conviction in politics, right, because, I mean one quote I gave was my analysis of the last budget. The last budget was described by the Council of the Religious in Ireland as a victory for greed over need, right. I mean you had 635 million in tax breaks, 2% of corporation tax, 40 million for prisons and 14 million for drugs. Now, of course only people with money vote, only the educated vote, so where I see Green policies coming in is that you need radical people in there who are prepared to make changes.

I think the Green Party is learning all the time and it has the potential to make serious changes. I mean quite apart from the fact that we’re destroying the environment, we’re destroying the social structure as well, you know. And that’s where I see Green policies coming in you know. I mean I think … packaging, it’s a simple thing. There’s too much packaging on everything. I mean when I buy something I throw half the thing in the bin and I’m left with something this size instead of this size.

Thus, we could say that Sean associated being Green with being concerned about both people and the environment. In his mind, the negative aspects of the modern state of both the Irish environment and Irish society were the products of a wider systemic problem that was endemic in the first world. He would often talk about what seemed to be a very basic form of alienation and how the divisiveness caused by this phenomenon affected both ecological and social systems at the same time. In his opinion, the social and the environmental were inseparable and addressing problems and imbalances in one necessarily meant addressing them in both. In order to achieve this Sean felt a greater sense of responsibility and community was needed. In other words, the whole community needed to be directly responsible for the actions of each individual. The community should be seen as a social entity rather than a conglomeration of discreet social actors.

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Placing blame upon the individual alone was as ineffective as blaming individual companies for the effects of pollution when the problem is clearly systemic. As he put it:

Now there’s a tear in the social fabric. People are putting walls around estates keeping other people out – the people who have nothing. You know, they don’t like the fact that they have nothing and other people have everything, and it’s a war. People don’t realise that it’s a war. The have-nots are preying on the haves. I used to think that, you know, if a little old lady got beaten up it was terrible, but as far as I’m concerned if your not part of the solution you’re part of the problem. If your not actively doing something to change it then it’s ‘I’m alright Jack, fuck you’ and you deserve what you get. If someone sticks a syringe up at you then it’s your problem because you didn’t do anything about it in the first place. For Sean, this was a principle to live by and not just something to talk about once a week at meetings. He was deeply concerned about the burgeoning social problems arising from drug use, especially heroin addiction, in Irish society and saw it as one of the most obvious symptoms of the social inequity caused by a system motivated by profit rather than community. Only a moderate period of time in Dublin is needed to appreciate Sean’s alarm at the human misery caused by the mass consumption of heroin. In particular it was through his work as a drug/crisis councillor that he had developed a deep personal commitment to the alleviation of this social problem. Sean was a volunteer at the Merchants Quay drug rehabilitation and crisis centre. His interest in this major social problem stemmed from many years of work as a barman in Ireland and England. Sean’s duties at Merchants Quay were directing and overseeing a structured routine for the patients in order to help them overcome their addictions. He also spent time leading group therapy sessions and providing guidance counselling to those that requested it. These activities placed him in a unique position within the Party and gave much weight to his input into the justice committee. One of the main effects that this kind of work had on Sean was that it led him to believe that the causes of social problems were systemic in nature rather than locally fixed aberrations. This meant for him that they could not be analysed in isolation because they were all symptoms of the same malady. When I asked Sean what he thought about capitalism and modern European economies, he replied:

I’m very interested in the idea of global economics and the fact that a small country like Ireland can’t survive in a global market place because they have, like, huge companies now … they have 5 companies controlling the world food supply, and like the budget on one of these companies would be larger than our entire budget. So, like – simply, the example that was given to me was that if Ford in Germany decided to sell under priced parts to Ford in Britain, it would affect the British economy. It would merely be an internal accounting procedure for Ford but it would affect the British economy. So, I’m all for global trading blocs, but the idea of supply management and demand management?

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I mean, one thing that I read which was extremely interesting to me was controlling inflation by having residual levels of unemployment, right. So, I go down the dole office and they say to me ‘Have you been looking for a job recently?’, and I say ‘no’, and they say ‘Well, we’re not giving you any money’ and I say ‘Well, I’m unemployed because of the government’s policy of deliberately having unemployment in order to keep inflation down. That’s what they did in England you know – They kept inflation down but unemployment went up by a million you know. So, I have a very healthy disrespect for it.

Obviously Sean was well aware of how the forces of global capitalism affected national economies and how these effects ultimately filtered down to populations and resulted in phenomena such as systemic unemployment and high levels of dysfunction within the most vulnerable sections of those populations. As to how he linked the causes of socio- political problems with those of the environment, Sean was quite adamant that the distinction between the environmental and the social were artificial in the first place.

2.3 Summary:

Before moving on, I will take time here to recap on the six identities discussed above. At this point we can see a picture about Green identity emerging from the narratives presented about becoming and being Green in Ireland. Each of these narratives contains both similarities and differences in relation to the others and is a testament to the complex nature of identity and politics in modern Ireland. In addition, we can see that, while the Irish culture is strong and unique, a discussion of identity and environmental discourse within the Irish Green Party has implications for other western Green parties. I will begin this discussion with a brief summary of each narrative. Eileen believed that the environmental and social problems impacting upon Ireland stemmed from a global financial and political system that was careering out of control. She cited increasing waste production, pollution emissions, and poor water resource management as evidence that the European experiment of socio-economic and political union had failed to recognise the seriousness of the environmental situation that they would be faced with should current rates of resource consumption continue or increase. She felt that large, centralised, government structures created and consolidated an impersonal regime that was based upon the logic of finance rather than the creation of opportunities for citizens to actively strive to better their situation. There was a sense that Eileen felt that, like the other European nations, Irish citizens had lost touch with each other as a society and had become complacent about the effects of their activities upon the environment. In her opinion, only the Greens had the potential to lead Irish society towards a sustainable and liveable future. As such, the Greens had a responsibility to bring environmental concerns to the fore in public debate and to promote, what she saw as, their three most important platforms – decentralisation, education, and opportunity. Decentralisation would bring about a more democratic society in which people would have a greater input in the decisions that affected their communities. A more flexible and enlightened education system would allow people to find and capitalise on their talents and, thus, escape the cycle of unemployment and welfare benefits. Finally, while Eileen felt that sheer greed

99 Issues in Environmental Research was behind much of the unequal distribution of wealth in Irish society, she believed that, in a Green society, people should be given the opportunity to profit financially from their talents as long as their activities were socially responsible and environmentally sustainable.

For Joe, the environment was the first priority. Although he felt that the Party’s policies on areas such as economics, welfare and childcare were important to its overall agenda, he viewed these as social aspects of a more important message. His focus was on the state of the environment and the curtailing of social activities to allow for an ecological sustainable society. From his involvement in animal rights activism, his role in the Dublin Food Co-op, to his activism within the Party as both spokesperson for the environment and candidate for Dublin South, Joe was, first and foremost, an environmental campaigner. He was committed to ensuring that the Party maintained its image as an environmentally based political movement and was, at times, worried that the organisation was becoming pre-occupied with issues of social justice to such an extent that it was losing its focus on the environment. Additionally, Joe was apprehensive about the Party’s future as he felt that there was a possibility that the lure of political power may eventually tempt the Party’s leadership to compromise fundamental principles in order to participate in a coalition government. He believed that by linking every aspect of social life ultimately to the environment, the Party was, by nature, radical and could only be effective by continuing to be radical. In other words, Joe felt that being Green meant being involved in a process that aimed to radicalise the way in which society thought about and treated the environment.

Neave saw the Party as part of an international movement that contained within it many different ideological stances. Furthermore, she thought that these ideological stances were sometimes in conflict because the label ‘Green’ was an umbrella under which a range of activists from different traditions had been brought together. This was, in her opinion, a consequence of the movement as a whole being still in its infancy in relative terms and would eventually be overcome when the various parties that made up the movement matured and evolved decision making processes that were specifically ‘Green’. Neave placed great importance on the fact that her Party, like the other Green parties of Europe, was still evolving and struggling with the differing ideological traditions that its members had brought to it. She thought that the future strength of the Party would be derived from a meshing of these different traditions into a framework that emphasised the place of humanity and its social structures and institutions within the environment, and the importance of allowing ecological systems to retain the capacity to reproduce themselves. In Tim’s case, his personal realisation of the overarching importance of the environment led him to abandon the more traditional socialism that he had subscribed to for many years and take up the ‘Green’ banner. Although he had not significantly changed his moral or philosophical stance on social justice issues, it was his belief that neither the left nor the right had any serious interest in protecting the rights of the environment from the ravages of industrialisation that led him to become Green. He had lost faith in the dynamics of class struggle as outlined by Marx and had come to believe that the only way to bring about a truly just and equal society was to subliminate the needs of humanity to the realities of the natural world. Accordingly, he believed that social structures needed to

100 Issues in Environmental Research be scaled down to more ‘human’ proportions in order to create communities of individuals that interacted much more along the lines of the traditional village community rather than those of the modern city. Indeed, one of the strengths he saw within the Irish culture was that that tradition was not so far beneath the surface that it could not easily flourish again given a little encouragement, yet he was critical of romanticising this village tradition.

As for Fiona, her commitment to the Party and its aims was borne of anxiety about the degraded state of the environment and a feeling of responsibility towards her children and their children’s children to provide them with a healthy future in a healthy environment. She also felt that she had a responsibility to those not as wealthy as she and her family to campaign against the excesses of modern industrial society. She reasoned that environmental concerns, while paramount to her, would not be the first priority of those in Irish society who were battling daily with poverty and the forms of social dysfunction that come with it. She saw herself as part of a burgeoning middle class that had a responsibility to be active on the environmental front on a level that the working class had not the resources for. Importantly, Fiona did not see herself as being radical or even ideologically driven in any way. She saw herself as a normal person who was concerned about an issue that affected the whole of her society. Interestingly, she first became aware of these issues when she herself had become a mother. Sean was motivated to join the Party by a desire to regain for those in his society the power to control their own destinies as an assembly of communities that were equal and interdependent. From his involvement in the British Telecom Towers campaign to his contributions to the Green Party ‘Drugs’ policy, Sean was inspired by the notion that many of the social problems he encountered were the product of a reality inflicted upon ordinary people from above. He saw the impoverishment of local economies, structural unemployment, and the sense of powerlessness experienced by the lower socio-economic groups in society, which includes the embattled working classes, as causing problems such as the high rates of alcohol and chemical dependence in his society. These causal factors were, in turn, the social products of an impersonal system geared to harvest profits regardless of the cost in human terms. Sean believed that important decisions were made from outside the sphere of ‘the community’s’ control and imposed upon them by successive governments in collaboration with the multinational corporations on whom they depended on for financial solvency. While professing that ecological matters were not his first concern, he believed that the degradation of the environment and the increasing dysfunction apparent in Irish society were symptoms of the same disease. Both Irish society and the environment that it inhabited would be best served by a political and social system that promoted community over competition and local decision making over global financial imperatives.

Among these six narratives of being Green we can find no evidence of a formalised ideological structure in the vein of, for example, socialist or anarchist philosophy. Indeed, we can see that Neave was right when she described the Greens as mixture of many different ideological and philosophical traditions that have not yet had the time to evolve into a recognisable and cohesive political movement. What we can see is a preoccupation with the concept of ‘environment’ and its effects upon the socio-cultural realities of the

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Irish Republic. Whether concerned about the continuing viability of ecological systems or those in the social arena, each narrative shows clearly that the Greens were reacting to events and changes in their social and cultural environment. Nevertheless, there are glimpses of this emergent ideology contained within the above narratives that can tell us much about who these Greens are and how they perceive themselves as being ‘Green’. In the first instance, I believe that it is useful to think about the Green Party in Ireland as a middle class organisation. Even though, as we have seen with Sean, there are some striking exceptions to the rule, the Party’s membership is predominantly from the middle echelons of society and, by and large, can be said to display traits similar to Strandbu and Krange’s notion of an aesthetic-oriented culture within its politics. Their stories demonstrate that they are strategic thinkers who value the aesthetics of the environment and inhabit the kind of social space that Bourdieu would not hesitate to call middle class.

In the second instance, the Party, or at least its active members, can be seen to be intellectuals in the Gramscian sense. They are formally educated professionals involved in the production of knowledge concerning both the environment and the social structures which affect their lives. They are producers, creators and purveyors of knowledge who are at once within the dominant culture and trying to bring change upon it. Naturally, their position is complex as they are bounded by many of the same cultural and social mores against which they are struggling. They are trying to convince their peers, who are economically and socially comfortable, that this comfort is a chimera, as it is predicated on a system of environmental and social exploitation that is unsustainable, but which they themselves are deeply involved in. Furthermore, they can not help but be involved in this exploitative system and the contradictions between their lifestyle and their beliefs may well be the force that spurs them into action. Consequently, they have taken on the role of social and cultural educators in attempt to imbue their philosophical positions with an overriding legitimacy in relation to that of the current mainstream. Hence, it can be said with some certainty that the Irish Green Party constitutes an intellectual community and, as such, is informed by several ‘structures of feeling’. Obviously an adequate description of these structures of feeling is beyond the scope of this work, as each description would require its own period of fieldwork and comprehensive analysis. In addition, it is not my intention here to define but rather to briefly describe the aspects of these structures of feeling that were identifiable within the Green intellectual community because of their prominence. This is done for the purposes of showing some of the more obvious trends in the emergent ideology of the Irish Green Party.

The first and foremost of these philosophical trends is that of environmentalism. Primarily, this means for the Greens that they are defenders of environment in all of its manifestations. They are the ones with a vision that includes the environment as an integral part of any future planning and they have purposefully set out to save it from modern human exploitation and cultivate what remains in a sustainable manner. This is most obvious in Joe’s narrative when he points out that the Greens have a responsibility to see that all life forms are respected, not just for the sake of human reproduction, but for their value in their own right. This means that environmental issues have social implications. When the Greens talk of the environment they include the social environment within that framework and perceive environmental problems to be ones of

102 Issues in Environmental Research structure rather than technology. For them, an environmental approach is one that does not recognise boundaries between the natural and the social. It is a holistic and inclusive approach in which the social and the ecological are linked together in a system of relations and can not be dealt with separately. In this sense they are relational thinkers.

The second influential philosophy informing the Green intellectual community is that of individualism, or alternatively, western liberalism. The Greens were strongly committed to the notion of individual freedom and the right of the individual to exercise choice. They were adamant that power be devolved to the lowest effective level in order to correct what they saw as the depersonalised way in which decisions from above were foisted on the general public. As both Eileen and Tim contended, this devolution of power would involve a decentralisation of government and decision making power from central institutions into the hands of local government and citizenry. This would allow ordinary people to create alternatives in education, economics and employment which would, hopefully, bring about a cultural shift in attitudes from those of the industrial era to those suited to a more flexible, lifestyle driven society. In this, they were advocates of choice on a radical scale. The third is the new age philosophy of deep ecology. There is a perception among the Party’s membership that the concept of nature refers to more than the sum of its physical parts. For instance, both Neave and Fiona talk of having a sense of foreboding in relation to the way in which human beings seem to be progressively distancing themselves from their natural environment. In particular, Neave’s time spent living in a commune and her attempts at connecting with the forces of nature through sailing have allowed her to articulate this deeper sense of spirituality better than most of her peers in the Party. While Neave was more forthright about this spiritual connection with other living things, this perception was not uncommon throughout the Party’s membership and may even have its roots in the alternative culture of the late 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the early 1970s. Within the Party, at all levels, there was a great value placed upon human individuality and, at the same time, a great value placed upon cooperation. Finally, it could be said that the Party’s intellectual community was influenced by socialistic thought. Their oft-stated goal of addressing social justice issues was quite firmly based upon the assumption that this could not be achieved without a fairer redistribution of wealth. Policies such as the Guaranteed Basic Income and use of state control to curb the excesses of private capital speak loudly of a socialist ethic. However, we should not forget that, while this communitarian approach in common with socialist thought is evident, socialist thought is but one influence on the Party’s intellectual life and by no means is it widely acknowledged. For instance, although Sean and Tim found it quite easy to make the connection between the socialist thought and some of the primary aims of the Party, other such as Eileen and Joe were at pains to accentuate the differences between the two approaches. Nevertheless, all expressed profound reservations about the organisation, manifestations and key driving forces of contemporary capitalism. Thus, at this point we can see the Irish Greens emerging as a middle class organisation with an educated membership that can be considered as an intellectual community. Within this intellectual community, an emergent ideology is growing which is specifically Green, but can be seen to be influenced by individualism, deep ecology and socialistic thought as well as the primary influence, environmentalism. In the following chapters we shall also examine the influence of Irish culture on the

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Green experience in Ireland along with the kinds of discourse the Greens use to articulate themselves as a political and social force.

Chapter 3: The Kilmeanagh Landfill Dispute:

3.1 The Dump: A Case Study In this chapter I will present a case study of the fight to stop the upgrading of an existing local dump into a landfill site for toxic waste in Galway. I want to continue the discussion of identity begun in the previous chapters and to explore the ideas important to the Greens as an intellectual community. Primarily, I will concentrate on the discourse used to legitimate the Green position in the context of this dispute and compare the events described below with Peace’s analysis of the environmental dispute at Killeagh in East Cork in the late 1980s (Peace 1997). I have taken Neave’s comments about the possibility of “some kind of dreadful blight or insanity” threatening the world’s future as the point of departure for the following discussion. This comment is an eloquent expression of the concern about the effects of modern industrial society on the environment and provides an insight into the way in which the Greens use language and discourse to achieve their aims. The controversy surrounding the Kilmeanagh landfill and the Green Party’s involvement in it enables a closer investigation of their discourse in a conflict where they were compelled to contest with other social actors employing rural legitimacy discourses. I became aware of this conflict in late January 1997 when I was invited by a friend to travel west to Galway and stay the week. Since Party members in Dublin at that time were still largely inactive after the Christmas holidays I decided to take up this kind offer and unwittingly found myself in the right place at the right time. Not long after arriving in Galway I contacted Eoin, the local Green Party candidate, and asked if I could arrange an interview with him. At the time I was interested in exploring the rural side of the Party as, up until then, I had spent all of my time in Dublin and its surrounding areas. Eoin said that he did not have time for an interview because he was engaged in a campaign to stop the upgrading of a local landfill site into a toxic waste dump. However, if I had a mind to I could come along to the Galway Council chambers for the hearing. The Council hearing was convened, over two days, to enable all parties concerned to state their respective cases in a more or less open forum. As the scene unfolded it became clear that many of the polemics that confronted the Irish Greens were at the heart of this conflict.

The landfill site was once an old peat deposit that had been mined and then abandoned many years ago. Such sites are common throughout Ireland. Situated on a flood plane, the mined peat deposit at Carrowbrowne was also positioned over one of the largest aquifers in County Galway from which the supply of much of the water consumed for domestic purposes by the City of Galway was taken. Prior to 1972 the site had been flooded for many years but in that year the Galway Corporation had altered the watercourse in a planning program related to Galway City’s urban development and, when the flood plain dried, so too did the old peat deposit. As no-one had ever previously laid claim to the land both the Corporation and the local residents were left with a very large pit for which no-one was officially responsible. Before long the local population had taken to using the site as an unofficial garbage dump. Over time this practice became so entrenched that the Galway Corporation eventually recognised it officially as a landfill site and began to use

104 Issues in Environmental Research it accordingly. The conflict at hand arose when the Corporation decided that, due to the increasing pressure placed upon its existing designated toxic waste sites by an upturn in the fortunes of local industry, it would be appropriate to upgrade the site in order to bury industrial grade toxic material. Having decided upon a course of action, they then hired an engineering firm to prepare a report on the suitability of the site and to carry out any construction work required.

Physically the site resembled a medium sized hill made out of all manner of refuse that had compacted into a solid mass over the years. Owing to the different consistency of the landfill to that of the surrounding soil, the water table had risen to incorporate the landfill. This incorporation of the site into the local ground water system, and the heavy year round rainfall, had combined to produce a considerable leachate problem and an offensive smell, which depending upon the direction of the local winds, rarely failed to disturb one section of the local community or another at any given time. All of this was compounded by the fact that the site rested upon a bedrock of limestone which had not been surveyed since the 1920s, and then, only haphazardly. No one knew how thick it was or if there were any major fissures in it but they did know that directly underneath ran one of Galway’s main subterranean waterways. All sides agreed that the leachate was most probably already passing through the limestone barrier into the water system, but estimates on how much of it was getting through and how it could be stopped varied in accordance with respective levels of support for the scheme itself. This point was crucial to the debate as much of the ensuing discussion hinged upon whether or not the site was an appropriate one to have a landfill dump on in the first place, regardless of the proposed upgrade. The first stages of the project proceeded smoothly. The engineering company produced and submitted the initial report to the Galway Corporation which, after a period of deliberation and consultation with other independent ‘experts in the field’ brought in by the Corporation, was duly accepted. The Corporation then made their plans public knowledge and announced a six-week period of grace for the citizens of Galway to raise any concerns they might have about the project and its consequences. Like most councils throughout the western world, the county council in Ireland consists of a chairperson and councillors which are split into committees responsible for performing various necessary functions of administration (Roche 1982:73). In this case study I shall use the term ‘Corporation’ to denote local government institutions in Galway because Corporations in local government “usually function through the agency of Councils” (ibid: 72).

After the period of grace was over the Corporation was forced to call a public meeting, such was the extent of opposition to the proposed upgrading of the site. At the meeting it became clear that there were many elements within the community, including local citizens and even representatives of the Fisheries Board, who were only too ready to air their grievances at being excluded from the decision making processes up to this point. I was also told by Eoin that there was a strong suspicion among all of those in opposition to the development that even then they had not been given access to all of the facts relevant to the case. Consequently, the Corporation was forced to submit to a hearing presided over by the National Planning Board, An Bord Pleanála, in order to determine how to proceed with this controversial matter. The hearing was held over two days in the Galway Council chambers and was attended by representatives of all parties involved in

105 Issues in Environmental Research the dispute. Physically it was held around a large table in the shape of a horseshoe. I mention this because the actual setting of the hearing did have some bearing on the formality of the proceedings. It was mentioned several times by those opposing the landfill site that they found the atmosphere within the council chambers to be quite intimidating and not at all conducive to a frank discussion of the issues. It was equally obvious, as the hearing wore on, that the formal nature of both the hearing and its physical setting worked in favour of the Corporation and the contractors as this was very familiar ground to them.

The particular arrangement of the participants around the table expressed the power relations between them. At the top of the horseshoe sat the An Bord Pleanála inspector and the independent specialist hired by the Board to provide technical advice on the feasibility of the project and the validity of the objections to it. At the top end of the right leg of the horseshoe (immediately left of the inspector) sat five representatives of the corporation and a hydro-geologist employed by the contracting company to provide scientific support for the continuation of the project. Immediately below them were three representatives from the local Planning Authority and, below them, on the right hand curve of the horseshoe, was Eoin from the Galway branch of the Green Party and myself. On the left hand curve of the Horseshoe sat four representatives of the Residents Association and, next to them on the left hand side of the table were two local activists who were representing a large number of concerned citizens who did not live in the immediate area of the landfill site. Finally, on the top left of the horseshoe, immediately right of the specialist, were two representatives from the Fisheries Board. From this it is easy to see why the representatives of the various citizens groups felt intimidated by the formality of the hearing. They were furthest from the head of the table and, thus, had to speak loudest to make themselves heard. Additionally, they were the only ones, with the exception of Eoin and myself, who were not wearing expensive three-piece suits and sporting large folios of mysterious documentation. In fact, one local resident told me during a lull in the proceedings that asking questions in the council chambers felt about as natural to him “as talking in church”. This, in the Irish context, should give the reader some idea of the power relationships at play within the room.

3.2 Day One The first day was occupied by a detailed submission by the hydro-geologist outlining the physical conditions of the site and the various measures proposed by the contractors to alleviate the leachate problem that was the main barrier to the upgrading of the site. The hydro-geologist gave evidence that the main problem was that the ground and rain water had a tendency to run off in one direction and, without provision for adequate drainage; this water would pool on one side of the landfill and leach into the regionally important aquifer that existed immediately below the site. In order to combat this, the contracting company proposed to lay subterranean drains around the area to regulate water run off from the site by capturing most of it within this drainage system. The water would then be pumped out at regular intervals and disposed of elsewhere. The submission contained a great deal of technical jargon and hinged around a series of complicated graphs and diagrams. These were aimed at assuring the Corporation, the Local planning Board, and the two representatives of An Bord Pleanála that all necessary precautions would be

106 Issues in Environmental Research taken to ensure that the leachate would be so significantly reduced that there would be no possible danger of an excessive volume of polluted water reaching either the aquifer or the regional water supply. To this end the hydro-geologist stated that he believed that the proposed drainage system would capture a full ninety five percent of the leachate well before it reached the water system. The submission was presented in a very professional and business-like manner which did not go unnoticed by those presiding over the hearing. The hydro-geologist’s authoritative manner and bearing seemed to sway those present, including myself, towards the conclusion that all possible precautions were being taken to ensure public safety and that, if the company were only given enough latitude in which to work then they could turn what was now a pressing environmental problem into a boon for both the community and the Corporation. In short, upgrading the site would transform a local health hazard into an asset for many years to come. Looking around the room I was struck with the impression that those opposed to the site seemed more certain of the outcome than they had at the start of the proceedings. During the afternoon break I talked to the representatives of the Residents Association and they confirmed my suspicions as to their mood by predicting that, even though they felt the site to be patently unsuitable for the present landfill material, let alone upgrading it to allow toxic material, the presentation by the hydro-geologist was “smooth enough” to sway the opinion of the inspector.

Eoin, however, was not quite so pessimistic. Having a degree in industrial engineering, and therefore familiar with much of the terminology employed by the hydro-geologist in relation to ground water and drainage, he was able to evaluate the evidence contained in the submission with a lot more clarity than the citizens groups. He had found a number of omissions and misrepresentations contained in the substance of the report and, during the afternoon break, outlined these to both the citizens groups and the representatives from the Fisheries Board. Additionally, an ex-Green Party member, Niall, who was attending on behalf of concerned citizens in the region, had identified a number of contradictions in the submission that needed further explanation. This seemed to bolster the flagging spirits of the opposition as a whole and they were able to ask a number of penetrating questions in the final session of the day. When the final session started, Eoin raised the issue of the water table and asked if the level of the water table shown in the series of diagrams was based on recent scientific surveys or was an estimate based on older data. He also asked whether or not the hydro-geologist had any information as to the existence, or not, of any fissures in the limestone bedrock that separated the leachate from the aquifer. His main concern was that, if the data used by the company was not more recent than the diversion of the river system for the purposes of irrigation in the early 1960s, then the water table may well be higher than the maximum depth needed for the operation of the drainage system. If this was the case then the whole proposal was useless as there was no way of stopping the leachate mixing with the groundwater and, thus, polluting the water system. Eoin was also concerned that, should there be any fissures in the limestone bedrock, the leachate would simply bypass the drainage system and enter directly into the aquifer.

Confronted with this, the hydro-geologist was forced to admit that the data used as the foundation for the proposal was based upon a geological survey carried out by the U.C.G in the late 1920s. Additionally, he was obliged to state that neither he nor the university

107 Issues in Environmental Research had any idea of the state of the limestone bedrock as there was no geological data available on that specific area.

At this point the Residents Association presented their misgivings about the soundness of the project. They were firstly concerned that there was no real data on the depth of the old peat deposit around the perimeter of the landfill site. As they explained, no-one knew if there was still peat in the ground bordering the landfill site but, if there was, the leachate would surely seep through the peat and into the water table. They were also very concerned about the nature of the toxic waste that the corporation planned to allow into the landfill site, pointing out that some chemicals common in toxic waste did not have to occur in great concentrations for them to pose a serious health risk to the community at large. If the type and grade of waste was not strictly monitored, and they had seen no evidence thus far that it would be, then pollution from the leachate could prove to be a major cause for concern. In addressing these concerns and queries from the Residents Association, the hydro-geologist’s manner changed quite dramatically from the reassuringly efficient demeanour that he had displayed earlier. Indeed, he became quite agitated at times and it was obvious that he viewed the objections to the proposal as based upon amateur science and ignorance rather than any real danger caused by the site. He cited difficult drilling conditions as the main reason why sufficient data on the limestone bedrock was absent from his submission but seemed totally confident that the proposed drainage system would be adequate.

3.3 Day Two The second day of the hearing started with an airing of grievances by the representatives of the Fisheries Board. The chief cause of their concern was that, should the proposed drainage system allowing the site to be upgraded to take toxic waste fail, the fishing industry in the west and the many communities that depended upon it for their survival would be drastically affected. They also noted that, close by the site, there was a large fishery which would be devastated if pollution levels became any more significant than they currently were. As the fishery was quite a profitable one, they could see no valid reason for endangering either its future or the future of the regional fishing industry in general. They also added that, as tourism in the region was one of the mainstays of the local economy, it would be foolhardy to allow any development that could affect it negatively. At this point the representatives of the Local Planning Authority were invited to state their position on the development for the benefit of the inspector. The representatives responded by declaring that they were not notified of the particulars of the project and, as such, could take no blame for the inconsistencies that had emerged during the hearing. This was greeted with a good deal of scepticism on the part of the citizens groups as the Corporation was bound by law to inform them of any intended development of this nature. However, the representatives from the local planning board seemed determined to distance themselves, as far as possible, from the hydro-geologist’s submission. They also identified the matter as a national issue rather than a local one. In their opinion the objections raised in relation to the upgrading of the landfill site mirrored similar objections to landfill sites all over the Republic. Nobody wanted to live near a dump, but waste was still being produced at an alarming rate and it had to be disposed of somewhere. In their haste to divert any responsibility away from their office they gave

108 Issues in Environmental Research the opposition to the project the foundations of an argument that would eventually sway the outcome of the hearing.

The independent specialist then began to cross-examine the hydro-geologist as to the veracity of the information contained in the diagrams. His first concern was that the water table would, in fact, be higher than the planned drainage system. Once again the hydro- geologist stated that he could not give a definite answer on this matter because he had not been able to obtain any recent data on the level of the water table underneath the site. He was, however, willing to compromise by agreeing to construct a further drainage system underneath the proposed one with the aim to lower the water table to the required level if necessary. The specialist’s second concern was the lack of sufficient data in the submission about the bottom layer of the landfill. This layer had been described by the hydro-geologist as a “one metre layer of sponge-like material” but nobody seemed to know whether this was part of the old peat deposit or the decomposing remains of the initial refuse that had been dumped at the site. The specialist submitted to the hearing that the toxic leachate may well erode this bottom layer and, thus, change the height, mass, and perimeter of the landfill mound. If this were to occur then all of the calculations presented in the submission would be incorrect. The hydro-geologist countered this by drawing the inspector’s attention to the limestone bedrock immediately beneath the landfill mound. This, he said, would ensure that, even if the one metre layer were subject to erosion, the limestone bedrock would prevent the landfill mound from altering its shape to any significant degree.

Niall then took the floor and questioned the wisdom of the site of the landfill in the first place. He cited the requirements for such a site under European law and showed Kilmeanagh to be inadequate on many counts. In his words the site was “classically unsuited for landfill under European law as it sits upon crustified limestone and unstable soil”. The Corporation representatives tried to deflect this criticism by pointing out that the hearing was not about the site selection process but rather the upgrading of the site. To this Niall replied “Is this a suitable site for a landfill?” The response of the Corporation representatives was “Not really”. Niall went on to explain that the site was also situated on a flood plane and that he was worried about what would happen should the beam (that was currently the only protection from flooding) overflow. He felt that the whole project was “a sham” and was visibly frustrated that the Corporation did not seem to be taking his objections seriously. He also asked about the measures to be put in place, if any, to extract the gas that is the inevitable by-product of any landfill site. He made the point that pollution caused by gas from the existing landfill had been complained about by local residents as early as the late 1970s. The Corporation replied that gas extraction on any landfill site was, at best, ineffectual and that the problem was simply unavoidable. Niall then questioned the environmental desirability of any landfill site anywhere and maintained that burying waste would not make the problem of waste production disappear. He argued further that garbage takes decades to decompose and therefore the site would have to be maintained for many years after its usefulness had ceased. This, to him, made no sense as it would be a financial burden on the community for years to come and would not have solved the initial problem. Eoin presented his opinions in the last session of the day and, after Niall’s rather emotional submission, decided to approach the

109 Issues in Environmental Research subject more as an engineer than as an environmental activist. Firstly, he questioned the validity of the figures presented in the submission by the hydro-geologist concerning the volume of water passing through the landfill and its interaction with run-off water from rain. He felt positive that the contents of the landfill could not possibly be of a consistent and uniform nature thus, logically, the flow of water through the landfill would not behave in the highly consistent and predictable manner that the hydro-geologist assumed it would. In order to strengthen his claim, Eoin reiterated that nobody actually knew what went into the dump before it became an official landfill site so there was absolutely no way to gauge its consistency. Consequently, he asked if the Corporation had considered what to do about the leachate created by the landfill site in its present capacity. This seemed to surprise the Corporation representatives and they had to admit that they “hadn’t looked into it as yet”. Eoin proposed that they should consider drilling a series of holes at regular intervals through the landfill down to the bedrock. This would give them an opportunity to pump out the leachate regularly and thoroughly, drastically reducing the amount of pollution that entered into the water system from the site. The Corporation representatives did not seem to accept this alternative as a feasible one but, when questioned by the inspector, appeared to have no salient reason for this opinion. The hearing concluded at that point, but some discussion between the different activists carried on afterwards outside the Council chambers. After the day’s proceedings their mood seemed to have picked up remarkably but they were by no means optimistic about the outcome. There was still quite a good deal of scepticism prevalent within the different groups of activists concerning Board Failte’s motives in setting up this hearing and the ‘independence’ of the independent specialist. However, all parties involved in opposing the upgrading of the landfill site appeared to be happy with the way that the case was presented and that they had done all they could to make the authorities see reason.

3.4 Epilogue and Analysis:

The result of the hearing was not known for some four weeks after the proceedings. By that time, I was long back in Dublin and concentrating on the Party’s preparation for the election campaign that was shortly to begin. I ran into Eoin at a National Council meeting at which he was giving the Party’s national forum an account of the events that took place concerning the landfill site. Eoin was quite pleased with himself when he informed me that they had, in fact, “had a win” over the issue and, although the landfill site was still a major concern environmentally, it would not present anything like the kind of threat to the environment that it would have in the future if the Corporation’s plans to upgrade it had gone ahead. He was also quite excited over the amount of publicity the Greens had managed to focus upon themselves during that period. The publicity was a boon because it would raise the Greens’ profile within the local community and that, Eoin pointed out, would not hurt his chances at the polls.

Clearly there are many similarities between this case study and Peace’s study on the Merrell Dow dispute in 1988-89. Both disputes revolved around industrial developments involving toxic material and in both cases the relevant local and national authorities had sided with the developers and tried to override the concerns of the communities involved. What struck me when I initially read Peace’s account of the Merrell Dow dispute,

110 Issues in Environmental Research published some years after I had first written my case study as a presentation for the Monash School of Political and Social Inquiry, was that Peace’s analysis of the way in which discourse operated in the political arena of the formal hearing in Ireland was directly applicable to my research. As noted in Chapter Two, Peace identifies three central aspects of discourse in his analysis. These are, one, that; “discourse becomes an essential resource in the explanation of relationships, the justification of social actions, and the legitimation of beliefs” (Peace 1997: 8), two, “Discourses are processual rather than pre-ordained” (ibid: 9); and three, “In that the articulation of a major discourse concerns contentious issues within a given political milieu, so the central premises of each discourse are continually being challenged by others” (ibid). For Peace, these three aspects of discourse combine to create a political arena. Furthermore, he states that a political arena then “becomes the terrain upon which agencies and institutions in conflict mobilise the information, knowledge, expertise, and other cultural resources germane to their interests” (ibid). In this context, discourse is employed to legitimise actions and beliefs, it is temporal and, therefore, evolves over time and it is subject to contestation and competition within whatever political arenas it operates in.

Like the Merrell Dow dispute, the political arena in which the relevant discourse contested was the institution of the An Bord Pleanála hearing which was held in the local Council chambers. As such, just as with the Womanagh Valley Protection Association (WVPA), the various residents groups that gathered to oppose the upgrade found that their discourse was deemed inappropriate within the confines of the hearing. Again, like the Merrell Dow dispute, scientific and technical discourse was the terrain over which the proponents and the opponents of the development fought. Indeed, even the physical settings were similar with the power relationships being physically expressed in the positioning of the participants within the chambers. After reading Peace’s analysis, I found that there was a pattern that was followed in each encounter. Both sets of residents’ associations were intimidated by the proceedings and the populist discourse they used was disregarded by the authorities. In both instances there were government agencies involved in the proceedings that were initially strongly opposed to the developments but seemed willing to reach a compromise position in what Peace termed “bureaucratically organised bargaining encounters” (1997: 116). However, the one obvious difference between the two case studies was that the landfill dispute was won by the opposition at the hearing while the Merrell Dow dispute was won at the review by the proponents but discontinued later by the parent company, Dow Chemicals. The reason for this may well be related to Peace’s assertion of the processual nature of discourse. In his analysis of the Merrell Dow dispute he uses this concept to describe how the WVPA evolved a discourse which was inclusive of the disparate groups that were opposed to the development and thus successfully created an opposition movement that was representative of many in the area. Indeed, the discourse in question was so successful that it won great support nationally and was a significant factor in the final outcome. In the case of the landfill site at Killmeanagh, I believe that it was this broader discourse, evolved and disseminated through disputes such as the Merrell Dow dispute, and the one involving Merck, Sharp and Dohme before it, that not only brought the issues into the national consciousness but made authorities such as the IDA and An Bord Pleanála sensitive to the possible political repercussions of environmental disputes.

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I believe that environmental discourse and, more importantly, discourse involving the environment, had evolved significantly over the intervening period from the late 1980s to the late 1990s and that this was a major factor in the result at Killmeanagh. Even taking into account that the two disputes involved different kinds of developments of a different scale and nature, the fact remains that the small opposition alliance in Killmeanagh was successful in the first instance whereas the large and nationally supported opposition front led by the WVPA was not. Furthermore, I believe that this is a more accurate gauge of the success of the Green Party in Ireland than their showing at the polls would seem to suggest. As a point of clarification, I would like to state here that I do not confuse the Irish Green Party with the environmental movement in Ireland as a whole, but I would argue that they are the public face of it. While it is certainly the case that they did not instigate or lead the opposition to the Merrell Dow or Merck, Sharp and Dohme disputes, my point is that they have played a role in the environmental movement in Ireland that is beyond the capacity of the rest of the movement which is not involved in formal politics. They have kept environmental issues on the national agenda since their inception in 1981 and they have evolved a discourse which, over time, gains more and more political legitimacy. It was this legitimacy, as much as engineering qualifications and obvious fluency with scientific and technical discourse that allowed Eoin to present an argument powerful enough to persuade the An Bord Pleanála inspectors to retract their initial support for the upgrading of the landfill.

Chapter 4: The Party at Work: 4.1 Organisational Structure

In the following chapters I shall discuss the Party’s trajectory through the national elections of 1997. This will provide us with a picture of how the Irish Greens organised and represented themselves during the very political contest for which they were formed. Personally, I found this to be the most exciting period of my fieldwork and was able, through it, to gain a better understanding of the Green’s sense of identity, and their emergent ideology, than I had in the previous months of my stay in Ireland. I felt extremely fortunate to be with the Greens at that time as it afforded me a unique opportunity to see, among other things, how they created and used the discourse that they would employ to try to gain the support of their fellow Irish men and women. From an anthropological point of view, the election campaign, from its start in the preceding months to its culmination on election night, contained all of the basic elements of a good ethnography. From culture, identity, ideology and organisation to discourse, politics and history – the reality of the Green Party and its members was revealed in great detail. My only complaint about this period of fieldwork was that its pace was so frantic that I surely missed far more detail than I grasped. Firstly, I must explain the organisational structure of the Party in order to prepare the reader for the forthcoming discussion of the election. In many ways, the organisational structure of the Greens is an expression of its core values. Furthermore, discussion concerned with it is relevant to notions of identity, and even emergent ideology, within the Party. As the Party’s most obvious group expression of identity, it should not be forgotten that the Greens’ organisation is a living expression which is, like their discourse, processual in its own right. It is within this organisational

112 Issues in Environmental Research structure that the Greens engage in the ongoing processes of self-definition in relation to themselves and the Irish public. The ensuing discussion will also help to illuminate the differences between the Greens in Ireland and the mainstream political parties born, by and large, out of the republican movement which has dominated much of Ireland’s political and social history since the early 1920s. I should note here that the level at which I engaged with the Party as an organisation limited my observations. In the main, interaction with Party members occurred in the context of participation in Party activities. While there were some notable exceptions, most of the members saw me as being related to their roles in the Party rather than the social routines of their daily lives outside of the organisation. Indeed, their association with each other was often seen through such participation.

4.1.1 Local Groups

If we consider the circumstances of a typical local group meeting we can see the contextual nature of the relationship between the Party’s members. Once the participant’s stepped into the immediate surrounds of the meeting they were stepping out of the more mundane circumstances of their lives and entering a specific arena of thought and action. It is also crucial to understand that, to a large extent, they also consciously perceived this to be the case. They took on roles appropriate to the situation in which they had placed themselves in. They did not shed the beliefs of their everyday lives but rather focussed them on a range of issues that concerned a particular aspect of their social existence. In other words, they imbued this facet of their social lives with profound personal, social, and cultural significance (Goodin 1992: 178, Lash & Urry 1987: 15). They volunteered their time and effort in order to engage with the issues that concern them most but their expression of this concern was not without its own socio-economic context.

Membership was possible on a national basis if a local group was not accessible but, in the vast majority of cases, members and probationary members were assigned a local group through which they could participate in the activities of the Party on the national, regional, and local levels. A rigorous set of constitutional guidelines applied to the membership at the level of local groups. These groups were the foundation upon which the other, more nationally potent, Party institutions were built and from which members originate. In line with constitutional requirements, local Groups consisted of at least five financial members but numbers varied dramatically with respect to different socio- economic and geographical areas. During the election campaign it became obvious that some groups in constituencies apathetic to the Party consisted of only two or three active members upon whose shoulders fell the responsibility of representing their local candidate and the Party in general throughout the campaign. Conversely, candidates in other areas more receptive to the Greens often found that previously inactive members and supporters swelled their ranks significantly. Although this situation was somewhat artificial when compared with the active membership of non-election years, the average active membership within the various local groups ranged between two and thirteen. In

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1997 there were twenty-six local groups spread throughout the Republic of Ireland both in urban and rural locations but, given the urban middle class nature of the Party, it was not surprising to find that great majority of these local groups are situated in urban centres. Indeed, eleven of them were situated in Dublin alone. This is of significance as it underlines the Dublin-centric nature of the Party. In the main, local groups organised their schedules around regular fortnightly meetings at which Party issues, both local and national, were discussed. These meetings were usually held in the nearest, most central, venue to all members. They were semi-formal occasions held in an atmosphere conducive to frank and lively discussion. Owing to the relatively small numbers of even the largest groups, there was a lack of the angst and animosity usually associated with such political gatherings and they were marked by an open exchange of ideas that would be the envy of many of the Irish Green Party’s more established political opponents. Local groups were well equipped to enter into broad ranging discussions of issues of local, regional, national, and international moment with equal authority and fervour despite being quite small. This can be attributed, in the main, to two significant factors in the make-up of groups such as these. The first of these factors is inherent in the size of the groups. Apart from groups with very few active members, the small scale of local Green groups led to an atmosphere in which members felt relaxed and confident enough to engage in debates about issues without fear of scorn or ridicule. On the few occasions that new members did become openly aggressive and antagonistic towards the views presented by their fellow local Greens, the other members present moved quickly to disarm the situation by reminding the transgressor of the rules of courtesy that govern all Green Party gatherings.

The level of education among the membership in general was also a significant factor in this. As an intellectual community, the Greens were conversant with many of the intellectual trends of their day and were often disposed to argue the merits of these quite energetically. As we have seen in the six individual case studies, each member brought the experiences of their own journey to the Green Party and this imbued these meetings with a theoretical depth that could spring up whenever significant points of contention emerged. Debates encountered at the Green Party local group meetings were, in the main, debates between well-educated and highly motivated people that centred on issues about which they felt passionately. Seen in this context, it is not surprising that the dialogue at these meetings evinced a high level of general knowledge and philosophical scope. While such close-knit local groups had significant strengths, they were not without their weaknesses. Firstly, the negative aspect of the diminutive size of the majority of local groups led to a level of local autonomy that hindered the solidarity of the national organisation. For instance, it was not uncommon for the aims and consensual platforms of various local groups to be in opposition to the Party’s official position. This can be seen in the debate over whether or not the Party would agree to join in a coalition government with any of their political opponents. It became apparent at both the election task force meeting and the Party election conference (both in early February) that many local groups had quite distinct stances upon what the national organisation should do if this became a reality. During the following weeks, after much discussion and consultation between the local groups and the Party leadership, opinion coalesced into three general positions. The first determined that any formal cooperation with the larger parties would

114 Issues in Environmental Research be tantamount to a betrayal of their supporters. They had campaigned consistently on their pledge to bring a new, independent perspective to Irish politics and to remain aloof from the double dealing that has been a feature of politics in the Republic for many years and could not move away from this position.

The second general position maintained that the Party should entertain propositions for coalition, but only with the opposition Parties that were at least compatible with the Greens and, even then, not before strict assurances were given that the Greens independence and autonomy would not be compromised in the future. Underlying this more moderate position was, I believe, a balance of ideology and pragmatism that was born out of a necessity to reconcile the Greens desire to be effective in the political arena with their fear of being overwhelmed or duped by the major Parties. The third position held that, for the foreseeable future, the Party was simply too small to attain any measure of effective power in its own right. Thus, any direct involvement in government meant necessarily a coalition or alliance with one or more of their political competitors. While recognising the dangers of this course, with regard to assimilation, they felt that their main objective was to be ‘in’ government. Those members adhering to this view felt that the Greens could never hope to implement or influence policy in line with ecologically sustainable guidelines without attaining some degree of power. This conflict was not resolved during my time in the field as the expected result of ten to fifteen percent of the national vote was not realised. However, we can see that the same philosophy of local autonomy that fostered a lively and broad ranging engagement with environmental issues also conspired to frustrate the formulation of a cohesive national solidarity with which to present Green Party objectives to the public on a national level. A further aspect of this struggle between autonomy and solidarity within the Party relates to planning of activities and events leading up to the press conference for the presentation of the Green Party’s health policy. It had been decided that the Green Party would launch its health policy on a certain day during the election campaign and, accordingly, invitations were sent out during the weeks leading up to the event by the press officer. Obviously the choice of this date and the early alert given to the media was done in order to ensure maximum attendance by the media and, thus, maximum exposure to the public. The venue for the policy launch was a conference room in one of the main hotels in Dublin that the Party had rented for the afternoon at a considerable cost taking into account their limited finances. As the time for the start of the launch came and went, the anticipation of those from the Party present turned to dismay as it became clear that only one freelance journalist had arrived. Upon questioning him, it was established that the bulk of the absent journalists had not appeared because the launch had been upstaged by a publicity stunt arranged by Patrick, one of the Party’s own candidates.

Consequently, the Party’s policy on health received no coverage at all while Patrick appeared in the nightly news and in the all the main papers the next day. He had staged a publicity stunt in which he had put an asthma inhaler on the statue of Daniel O’Connell in O’Connell Street in protest of the high levels of pollution in the inner city caused by its inefficient public transport system and too many privately owned vehicles. Undoubtedly this was a snubbing of the authority of the Green Party leaders as the timing of the health policy launch was well known within the Party and Patrick, as a fully endorsed Green

115 Issues in Environmental Research candidate, would have known about it far earlier than most others in the organisation. Additionally, his own activities concerning the media would have to have been planned in full knowledge of the Election Task Force’s (ETF) intentions. Clearly, despite the leadership’s struggles to foster democratic process throughout all levels of the Party, there were some tensions. This sequence of events was set against a backdrop of rivalry between the established leaders and the newly emergent figures in the Green Party leadership which became more apparent as time wore on. As a small political party with a short history, the leaders of the Irish Greens had evolved into a close knit group that had definite feelings of care towards the Party in general. Indeed, many of them were founding members of the organisation and had invested a great deal of their own identities in the life and progress of the Party. Unfortunately, these feelings of care often made it difficult for newer members to engage in the higher levels of the Party’s leadership structure and left them feeling hostile towards the existing leaders for shutting them out of any position of real power in the Party. Therefore, Patrick’s decision to proceed with the publicity stunt regardless of the health policy launch was not just a public show of independence from the greater structure of the Party. It was also an opportunity to present himself as a leading figure in the Party to the media, the public within his constituency, and the established Party leadership itself. This is important because it highlights the differing opinions held by Party members regarding access to positions of responsibility within the Party. For instance, Patrick’s position differed from Sean’s on this matter as the Party, for him, presented opportunities for real input that were not offered in any other political party. Patrick, on the other hand, felt stifled by the Party’s leadership and deemed it necessary to make a show of independence. That these two members worked closely with each other during the campaign, with Sean being the secretary of the Dublin Central Greens and Patrick being the candidate for that constituency speaks eloquently of the complexities of internal politics within the Party at that time. Another aspect of the Green Party’s dependence upon the local group unit becomes apparent when we consider the Party’s inability to make inroads into working class dominated areas. As previously discussed, there were many possible contributing factors to this failure of communication but, from the perspective of those trying to organise groups in these areas, the small size of the groups seemed to be self- perpetuating. One of the most common complaints of group secretaries from these communities was that they could not hold on to potential new members past their initial flush of enthusiasm. These potentially active new members soon realised that active participation in a group of such a small size effectively meant an enormous additional workload married to a minimal chance of real success. Therefore the local group (as the fundamental unit of the Irish Green Party) had decided and discernible effects upon its organisational structure. The inherent strengths of the local unit were apparent within groups large enough to utilise their potential. These units generated healthy discussions that were broad enough in their scope and deep enough in their analysis to potentially cover all aspects of the Party’s trajectory. Additionally, the level of autonomy practised by these units invariably led to the creation of close knit groups capable of acting to further advance the Green cause within their communities without draining the resources of the Party on a national level. Conversely, this same spirit of autonomy caused conflict in relation to the structural aspects of national co-ordination and solidarity. Local groups clashed over the prioritisation of goals and aspirations which led to difficulties when

116 Issues in Environmental Research attempting to reach consensus on important national issues and even outright defiance concerning the planned co-ordination of Party related actions. Additionally, among local groups with exceptionally low membership levels, the local group as a fundamental unit lost its inherent positive qualities and, without proper support from the rest of the organisational structure, became a virtually unworkable proposition from the point of view of effective politics. Nevertheless, there was a mechanism within the constitution that countered these problems. A discussion of this structural institution will help to reveal, not only the way in which these negatives were addressed, but also the regional context in which all local groups were situated.

4.1.2 Regional Groups:

Regional groups were conglomerations of local groups banded together under a regional banner and presided over by a council elected from the members of the various local groups involved. Interestingly, the geographical boundaries covered by these regional groups follows the boundaries of the five ancient Celtic kingdoms of Connaught, Leinster, Meath, Munster, and Ulster. Without entering into a detailed historical discussion of ancient Irish politics, it is important to recognise, at least to some extent, the influence that these ancient regional boundaries have on the modern state. Indeed, the Irish national leagues of Gaelic Football and Hurling are still separated into regional categories based upon these ancient regional boundaries and many modern day citizens of Ireland, including the six northern counties under British rule, strongly identify themselves in terms of these distinctions. Yet, owing to the Party’s small membership in relation to the overall population, strict regional definition along the lines of the ancient regional borders was not quite feasible for the structural organisation of the Party at the time of my research. Furthermore, the distribution of the membership was such that two of the five Regional Councils would not have been a workable concern had these definitions been adhered to. Leinster and Meath were under the auspices of the Dublin Regional Council while Connaught and Ulster had amalgamated to form the Connaught- Ulster Federation. While the Munster Regional Council was still largely inactive, it was considered to stand-alone. As structural institutions, Regional Councils were answerable to the National Council as well as the Co-ordinating Committee but, other than that, largely independent of each other in relation to the matters that they addressed and their meeting timetables. They were not part of the official law making structure of the Party and the constitution in operation at the time allowed them no discretionary powers. They were used as a sort of ‘think tank’ rather than a mechanism for regional policy production. I was informed by one member that the main purpose of Regional Councils was to formulate and endorse resolutions to be proposed at the next session of the National Council meeting. Each Council’s meetings were called according to the needs and wishes of their constituent local groups. Although the original spirit of the constitution was for these Regional Councils to be regular events in the Green calendar, the meeting times were unpredictable and took a great deal of organising to initiate. As I was based in Dublin for the entirety of the research period, the councils of the regions outside Dublin were, for the most part, beyond my reach owing to either travel considerations or prior commitments. However, I was in attendance at one of only two Dublin Regional councils held during 1997 and, furthermore, was able to follow the

117 Issues in Environmental Research progression and content of the other regional councils via information received through word of mouth and email from informants throughout the other regional areas.

Dublin Regional Council meetings were held in a hall situated in the central part of Dublin. At the meeting that I observed there were approximately 20 people in attendance representing all of the 11 local groups in the region. Presiding over this was a convening council that was chosen from the ranks of those present at the onset of the meeting. The convening council was responsible for the co-ordination of speakers and questions from the floor and directing discussion to address the items on the agenda. The agenda consisted of a number of key speakers who would each present an analysis of an issue that was deemed important to both the Party and the region in the forthcoming general election. It had been determined that after each speaker there would be time for questions from the floor to be put to the forum as a whole in order to generate a broad general discussion pursuant to the issue at hand. As previously discussed, the institution acted as an intermediate stage between the local groups and the National Council. Even so, it was the least significant institution within the Party structure and was evidently used more as an overall policy discussion group than a decision making body within the Party’s structure. There was some evidence that the Connaught/Ulster Federation (CUF) was starting to evolve into a more regionally centred decision making body but even that was still in its formative stages in 1997. The most important function that the regional meetings played at that time was to clarify policy positions for the upcoming election and to create a feeling of solidarity between the respective local groups and candidates.

4.1.3 The Co-ordinating Committee and the National Council:

The Co-ordinating Committee played a key role in the Party’s organisational structure. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend its meetings while in the field as they were closed to general members unless specifically invited on urgent business. The main function of the Co-ordinating Committee was to facilitate the weekly administration of the Party on a national level. Tasks performed by the Committee on behalf of the Party included:

• The general operational life of the National Office.

• Reviewing and co-ordinating the various Standing Committees on policy within the Party.

• Reviewing the activities of the various Regional Councils and Local Groups (Dáil Constituency Groups).

• Assessing the Party’s representation in, and cultivation of, the Irish media.

• Co-ordinating the Party’s various fundraising events on a national basis.

• Reviewing the Party’s finances and the compilation of draft budget documents for the approval of the N.C.

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• Overseeing the content and production of the Party’s national newsletter.

• Liaising with the Party’s MEPs on a regular basis and keeping the Party informed about events in the European political sphere.

The Co-ordinating Committee met on a weekly basis and, in fulfilling these functions, was the most significant controlling body within the Party on a daily basis. It was from the Committee that the Party’s National Secretary was elected annually in order to act as a full-time director of Party activities and oversee the Party’s progress. During the election campaign, the Committee was also expected to co-ordinate the allocation of resources and overall election strategy in conjunction with the Election Taskforce Committee. The most senior decision making body within the Party’s structure was the National Council. As the name would suggest, the National Council consisted of delegates from every local group in the Republic and was the ultimate decision making power in the Party. Meetings were held on a monthly basis in Dublin and provided the Party with an opportunity to discuss and decide upon a wide range of issues including constitutional reform, Party finances, legal issues, policy direction, and the formation of new local groups. It was also the forum at which the various ongoing sub-committees that were created to investigate important issues presented their progress reports and findings to the Party. National Council meetings offered local groups an opportunity to contribute to the national direction of the Party and to introduce pertinent issues for debate within the Party’s national membership. They were designed to foster a democratic solidarity to the Party on a national level but this was hampered by the autonomous nature of the local groups. Often debates entered into at National Council meetings would have to be revisited at successive meetings in order for the Party to find consensus on the issues raised. Indeed, many times the consensus was that there would not be agreement on a certain subject in the foreseeable future and that the issue should be shelved until further facts came to light. Although this is not unique to Green political organisations, I would like to reiterate that these meetings, because of their highly democratic nature, made swift action in the real political arena of Irish politics almost impossible. The Party’s commitment to decentralisation and autonomy, while a positive force for its overall integrity, acted as a hindrance to political efficacy on a national level. The effect of the Party’s structure on the success of the Party will become clearer as we continue with a discussion of the processes of policy formation within the Party.

4.2 Policy Formation:

An examination of policy formation within the Party reveals the tensions between the Greens strivings to form a collective identity on the one hand, and the great value they placed upon individuality and personal autonomy on the other. Each person brought to the Party their own personal experiences and the Party’s democratic culture fostered recognition of this individual diversity. Yet there was the need to find common ground amongst the members in order to be able to present a united front to the voting public. From time to time, these different kinds of pressures on the members generated conflicts between them. As we have seen, the Irish Green Party was not a monolithic entity; rather it was a group of people perhaps best described as an intellectual community. Although

119 Issues in Environmental Research the Greens were quite individualistic in personality and conduct, they did feel that they were joined in a single purpose. A further complicating factor was that the Party’s emphasis on the importance of local policies meant that each group focussed upon the issues directly affecting their own local communities. In many instances, when forming policy, the members were compelled to navigate a course between their valuing of social justice and their valuing of ecological sustainability. This created such discord that at times consensus seemed impossible. While a complete analysis of all the Party’s wide ranging policies is beyond the scope of this thesis, a discussion of their environmental and ‘drugs’ policies provides an understanding of the issues the members faced when determining their collective policy directions. A conversation at a Dublin South local group meeting provides a point of departure. During this meeting the group was discussing a strike by local waste collectors in the constituency over pay and conditions. The dispute had not been particularly protracted but garbage and refuse had started to pile up on the roadsides and, at that point, it seemed that no end was in sight. When asked by the group what he knew about it, Joe reported:

I don’t know much about it but it’s to do with new technology. With wheelie bins being introduced … Anyway it’s a Union problem, its not a Green Party problem but as it’s involved with the whole waste issue and, like, it’s in our constituency, I’m just wondering should we be doing something on it [and] if we should be, what should we be doing. We could use it in the same way that I’ve been using the water thing in the last couple of days – to issue a statement about the need to conserve water. We can use it to state that this is an opportunity to reduce waste, but is there anything else we can do on it? were underpaid and had pursued all other negotiation options with their employer to no avail, the group felt that the issue of wages was secondary to the production of waste in the Dublin South. As Joe said Although all present recognised the fact that the workers involved: ‘I don’t think we should get involved in that side of it, I do think that we should issue a statement on the whole waste issue … Like, here we have this issue and its pointing to the fact that we are creating so much waste’. Here we see the difference in perceptions of social justice at work in Green thinking. The dispute, for the workers involved, is one stemming from concerns about receiving adequate remuneration for performing a task for their employers and the community. In a situation common to wage based disputes all over the world, the workers were seeking to protect their standard of living from being undermined by the financial imperatives of business which sought to minimise labour costs while maximising profits. For them, this was a dispute concerning the principle of social justice in relation to the fair distribution of wealth within society. They performed labour intensive tasks, that were viewed by the general public as unhygienic, at inconvenient hours and in return they felt that they had a right to receive a wage sufficient enough to provide financial stability for themselves and their families. In contrast, the Dublin South group focussed upon a different aspect of the dispute for a number of reasons. In the first instance, as the majority of members were employed in well paid, non-labour intensive occupations, they were somewhat removed from the financial realities of the striking workers. Hence, they felt that the matter may have been

120 Issues in Environmental Research more appropriately dealt with through further arbitration as opposed to direct action. In the second instance, the Party had passionately opposed the creation of new landfill sites and incineration plants throughout the Republic. They felt that it would be hypocritical to support the workers in their struggle to increase wage levels while openly calling for a course of action that would ultimately reduce employment in that industry. In the third instance, the group saw the dispute as an opportunity to bring to the attention of the public the vast amounts of waste created by Irish society every day. All in all, they were anxious to be seen as a political party that was developing strategies to reduce to a sustainable level the amount of waste. Naturally, the other parties would be seen to be still fixated on hiding the problem. In their eyes, the central social justice issue lay in the excessive production of waste and in its irresponsible disposal. Just as the workers involved demanded the right to have a living wage for a dirty job, the Dublin South group believed that the community as a whole had an absolute right to a sustainable environment that was not being seriously damaged by the activities of modern industry. They saw the primary struggle in this case as one involving, not access to equal wealth distribution, but access to a clean and liveable environment for the whole of society in perpetuity. Moreover, rather than categorising their environment as a narrowly conceived economic resource that should be used appropriately, the Greens saw it as a fundamental necessity in danger of being destroyed by over utilisation. Hence, it could be argued that a commitment to, or sense of responsibility for the environment (and by extension humanity) overrode the chance to support a group of workers.

If we recall the case studies presented earlier in this work, it is easy to identify many similar views regarding the primacy given to environmental and ecological matters by Party members when considering broader issues. As the central purpose for the Party’s existence, it was no surprise that the membership was united on the need to highlight the ecological realities that were often lost in the debates and discussions consuming Irish politics. However, I was confounded for much of my stay in the field by the Party’s lack of comprehensive environmental policies. After thoroughly going over the Party’s minimal literature on the subject and receiving no firm replies from the policy convenors that I questioned, I came to the conclusion that the Party was waiting for the start of the election campaign to release its policy. It was not until Fianna Fáil released a sixty-page document, entitled Our Environment, Our Future (1997), which outlined its environmental policy, that I realised that the Greens simply had nothing to match it. The most tenable reason for this apparent oversight was supplied by Tim in a post-election interview I conducted with him one afternoon. He felt that the Party had neglected to define its policy stance on the environment simply because most members thought that it was self-evident. In his words:

It’s about the worst area in terms of lack of policy and the reason is that we’re all agreed about the environment and, therefore, nobody has had to sit down and say ‘Can we agree on this or can we agree on that?’ Whereas, in something like foreign affairs or women’s rights, or whatever, people might have come to the Party from differing backgrounds and would retain a lot of the views that they picked up in those organisations, or news media, or wherever they get them. Those

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views have had to be brought together and those are areas that people have thought about.

Thus, it was not that the Greens did not have an environmental policy, other than the two- page article in their manifesto (1997:6-8), but rather that their perspective on the environment was evident in every policy that they produced. Indeed, the Party's overall stance on social justice matters was entwined within its environmental values to such an extent that they were inseparable from one another.

Chapter 5: The 1997 Election: 5.1 Initial Difficulties

When first attempting to write these next set of chapters, I intended to give an outline of the events during the election that I had personally attended. My plan was to present a chronological report of the Party’s progress through this period starting with the build up before the announcement of the election date by the Rainbow Coalition, then in government, and ending a week after the election results became known in mid June. This was to include nine Local Group meetings, one Regional Council meeting, one National Council meeting, an Election Task Force meeting, a Candidates Conference, a National Party Convention, a Manifesto Committee meeting, two policy meetings, four policy launches, two fundraising events, and door to door canvassing on eight different occasions in three separate constituencies. In describing the progression of these events I hoped to describe the intricacies and the difficulties involved in organising a concerted effort such as this within a political party with so few members and resources. I had also hoped to describe the tactics, methods, and structures used by the Party to achieve this goal while portraying the conflicts and tensions that arose between those actively involved in the campaign. This was a remarkable period for both myself and for the Party membership and I was able to view first hand the Party evolving structurally, philosophically, and politically at an astonishing rate.

To this end I collated my field notes on all of these events and launched into the narrative of the campaign. However, after a few days of writing I encountered a serious ethical dilemma. If I continued I would run the risk of compromising the Irish Greens as a political organisation by revealing flaws and tensions within their organisation that they would most probably rather keep to themselves. Here I am not talking about the differences of opinion that take place at the level of the local group as these are openly held in public and anyone is welcome to join in the debate. Additionally, I am not concerned about revealing how those in the Party felt about the issues specifically concerned with events of that period as the debate has moved on since 1997 and no one reading this text could gain a tactical advantage from that information. My concern was that I may inadvertently give the political opponents of the Irish Greens ammunition with which to discredit them. After all, the Irish Greens are a political party and that means

122 Issues in Environmental Research that any document written about them can quite possibly be used against them in future political tussles by those they are directly contending against. Let me emphasise that I am not alluding to any improprieties or irregularities within the Party, as I observed nothing but the highest levels of honest commitment to a shared cause during my time with the Irish Greens. What I am referring to are the changing attitudes and ideals that can be quite fluid within any evolving political party given the shifting nature of political debate. I would not wish for views and attitudes given by informants in confidence to be used against them at a later date. For these reason I had to rethink my original plan and devise an alternative method; one that would allow me to bring the aspects of the narrative pertinent to this work to the fore while not betraying the trust of those informants (without whose help this research could not have been conducted). In order to do this I decided to treat the three local group campaigns that I was involved with as discrete narratives. Where these narratives intertwine at the level of policy launches and conventions, I chose to simply describe the event as fully as possible and have left any analysis for my conclusion. In this way I hope to provide the reader with an overview of the election while creating sufficient space within the text to explore the dynamics of the campaign relevant to the research.

5.1.1 The Other Parties:

Let us first consider the main political parties with which the Greens competed for votes with during the election of 1997. These were Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Labour Party, the Progressive Democrats, the Democratic Left Party, and Sinn Fein. Unlike many other western states, Irish politics has not been dominated by either a class struggle involving disputes between workers and employers or a schism between the mechanism of the state and the power of the church (Garvin 1981:215). Owing to the reality of partition in Ireland in its post-colonial era, the main focus of Irish political life has been the fate of the six counties in Ulster known as Northern Ireland. While a discussion of the history of the Irish Republican movement in the early twentieth century is beyond the scope of this work, it should be noted that the major modern political parties of the Republic have their beginnings in that era. The modern political parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are the products of this historical schism in the Irish Republican movement. Fianna Fáil has its roots as a political party in the anti-treaty movement led by Eamon De Valera. Formed in 1926, it was then a political party which had sprung out of movements such as the I.R.A. and Sinn Fein which saw the acceptance of the treaty of partition, proposed by Westminster and signed by Michael Collins, as a form of capitulation by the pro-treaty movement with Ireland’s old colonial masters before full emancipation was reached. On the other hand, Fine Gael has its roots in the older mainstream republican organisations such as the I.R.B. (Garvin 1981:216). It was seen initially as the party which pragmatically accepted the reality of the situation and was willing to renounce the militarisation of Irish politics in order to govern for the good of those in the 26 counties under home rule. Traditionally Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been seen as occupying the centre left and centre right of the political spectrum respectively. Fianna Fail’s association with moderate leftist politics is seen to stem from the subsumation of class politics under the banner of republicanism in the years leading up to the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Indeed, the pervasiveness of this view was attested to by a senior member of the

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Greens who went so far as to claim that the leaders of the pre-treaty republican movement formally requested that the embryonic organised labour movement in Ireland make class politics a secondary issue until the military struggle was resolved.

One of the consequences of this policy was that many of the organised labour leaders emerged as Sinn Fein leaders after the signing of the treaty in 1922 and went on to fight with the anti-treaty forces in the Irish Civil War. Hence, when Fianna Fail emerged from Sinn Fein as a parliamentary republican party under De Valera, it was commonly perceived to have integrated, to an extent, the agenda of the more moderate wing of the organised labour movement. Conversely, and possibly because of their willingness to participate in the parliamentary process under the restrictions of home rule, Fine Gael gained the backing of business interests, both commercial and agricultural, throughout the 26 counties after the war had subsided. While this does not represent a hard and fast rule in pro-treaty Irish politics, Fine Gael had more middle class urban and large landholding rural support at a time when Fianna Fail’s base resided in the poorer rural western counties and the smaller industrial working class of Dublin.

Whatever their past differences, the main cleavages between the two main parties of the modern Republic have not been translated into an ideological divide between left and right in the modern era. Indeed, it has been a feature of Irish politics over the last 30 years that many of the more radical elements of both sides of the ideological divide have been forced to form smaller splinter parties in order to present their ideological views to the public. The Progressive Democrats, who are a splinter group from Fianna Fáil, represent the most deeply conservative faction within modern Irish politics. As the newest party represented in the Dáil, the Progressive Democrats have enjoyed a rapid rise to prominence by attracting the neo-liberal vote within the Irish political system. The Progressive Democrats emerged from that democratic contest with enough members to enter into coalition with Fianna Fáil as the minor partner in a government cemented by the support of two sympathetic independent candidates. The Irish Labour Party is the oldest parliamentary party in Ireland and, as the third largest in the modern Irish political milieu, can be seen to be the largest non-‘civil war’ party in Ireland. Originally founded upon classic class politics, the Labour Party was unable to amass sufficient support to enable it to be seen as a contender for a coalition government partnership by either of the main parties until quite recently. It appears that its disassociation from the nationalist question in the minds of Ireland’s voting population served to make it a secondary party as long as the politics of class and of organised labour were themselves of secondary importance to the perceived aims of the Republic. However, in recent times the Labour Party has enjoyed an increase in support that has almost mirrored the upturn in Ireland’s economy, which has seen it progress from virtual Third World status in the 1950s to the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy of the 1990s. In recent years the Labour Party has shown itself to be a pragmatic force in Irish politics by forming coalition government with first Fianna Fail and then Fine Gael. While maintaining itself in the role of a moderating force upon both the ‘Civil War’ parties, the Labour Party leadership had also earned for themselves the title of ‘Smoked Salmon Socialists’. This is because of the public’s perception that they are less concerned with representing the interests of organised labour as they once were. I encountered much scepticism concerning the Irish Labour Party and its political

124 Issues in Environmental Research agenda and there was much speculation that it had, under the leadership of Dick Spring, allowed itself to become seduced by the trappings of power in coalition and had abandoned its more traditional leftist aims.

This move towards the centre of the political spectrum by the Labour Party caused a split within its ranks and led to the founding of a new leftist party called the Democratic Labour Party by a break away group of traditionalists within the Labour Party’s leadership. While not perceiving itself to be strictly incompatible with the Labour Party’s centre left platform, the Democratic Left Party has been seen to act as an independent voice both for the organised labour movement and those concerned about social justice issues in Ireland since its conception. This has been especially true in their role as minor coalition partners in the ‘Rainbow Coalition’ of 1994 – 1997 although their effectiveness in achieving their goals has been severely hampered by lack of representation in the Dáil. The final political party that make up the modern Irish political scene in which the Greens contend for power is Sinn Fein. As discussed above, Sinn Fein arose out of the struggle for independence from British rule and was the original pre-treaty political wing of the Irish forces. After De Valera split from Sinn Fein in 1926 the majority of its support base was taken along with him into mainstream democratic politics under Ireland’s brief period of self-governance while constitutionally linked to the United Kingdom (otherwise known as ‘Home Rule’). Sinn Fein then struggled to survive with its minority support base because of its refusal to occupy the seats it had won in the Dáil while the oath of loyalty to the Queen of England remained a mandatory condition of entrance. Its policy of non-participation in the Dáil before independence was fully gained and its continuing concentration on the fate of the six counties still under British rule marks it out as the one true remaining ‘Civil War” party in the Republic of today. While showing no signs of reaching the level of popularity it enjoyed before, or immediately after, the Civil War, during the election of 1997 Sinn Fein enjoyed a resurgence in popularity at the polls and gained its only seat in the Dáil. If, at first glance, this seems unimportant it should be noted that this was achieved in an election that saw the support bases of most minor parties eroded due to a polarisation of the vote between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

5.2 The Campaign:

There was much speculation about the date of the election from the time the Dáil resumed in January of 1997. The Party started the year in earnest believing that an election could be called as early as April but, as the weeks wore on, this estimate was put back first to sometime in May and then as late as the beginning of November. It was a time of uncertainty for the candidates and the leadership of the Party, as no one knew when to start or even how long the campaign would be when it was announced. When the date was finally set for the sixth of June, there were only six weeks for the Party to organise and run its national campaign and for the local candidates and secretaries to get their groups organised into effective and cohesive units. Nevertheless, a mood of optimism prevailed within the Party because the polls had been predicting that support for the Greens was around four to five percent (The Irish Times 4/4/1997) and this would be enough to give them a chance of electing four or five of their candidates. They had

125 Issues in Environmental Research polled around two and a half percent consistently for the last two elections and this was only sufficient to elect one candidate each time. If their representation in the Dáil increased to four or five, this would be enough to make them a significant force in Irish politics, and furthermore would give them access to a level of funding comparable to the Progressive Democrats and the Democratic Labour Party. Party members hoped that, with increased funding, they would be able to gain additional support within the community and, thus, wield more political influence. Understandably, the Irish Greens faced the elections with a great deal of excitement but also with trepidation about the job ahead of them. The majority of local group meetings that I attended were in the Dublin South and Dublin Central constituencies and these meetings focussed upon election issues and local strategies. There were no Dublin South West local group meetings as the group was not well attended and had only five official members – three of these had not renewed their membership the previous year. By necessity the campaign was run by the candidate, Eileen, and her husband, Kris, with the help of various other Green Party members and myself when time was available. This shall, however, be discussed in greater detail at a latter stage of this section.

5.2.1 The Dublin South Campaign:

The five seat electoral constituency of Dublin South was a firmly middle class area and one in which the benefits of Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy could be plainly seen. A large part of it was covered with neat, well appointed housing estates and much of the remaining area boasted fine old houses of historical significance. There was one council tenancy in the constituency, but it was not large enough to change the overall demographic in any meaningful way. The area also boasted several shopping centres, a large cinema complex, extensive parks and gardens and was close to both the Dublin College University (DCU) and the University College of Dublin (UCD). The incumbent politicians were two representatives from Fianna Fail, one from Fine Gael, one from Labour, and one from the Progressive Democrats. I came to know the constituency quite well during my time in Ireland as I lived there in a rental property with five other students for seven months during my research. The Dublin South local group was one of the most numerous in the Green Party and had been active on many fronts during its short lifetime of fifteen years. The group had approximately twenty members with a regular attendance of between eight and twelve members for most of the fortnightly general meetings. During the election campaign the attendance was usually between twelve to fifteen members. Also, planning and strategy was often organised over the phone or at planning meetings held at members houses when time constraints made group authorisation impossible. However, since the constitutional and structural aspects of local groups have been discussed in detail earlier in this work, I will concentrate on the group’s campaign rather than its various functions within the Party.

5.2.1a 3/2/1997 – Election Strategy Meeting:

On the third of February I attended the first election strategy meeting of the Dublin South Greens. It was held at the same place that all the Dublin South Green meetings were held – the Eagle Hotel in Dundrum. The main focus of the meeting was how the candidate,

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Joe, should present himself to the public and whether or not the traditional method of door to door canvassing was appropriate for the type of campaign Joe wanted to run. The Dublin South constituency was thought to offer the Party a good chance of success because it had elected the Greens’ first representative to the Dáil in 1988, and was considered to be one of the most progressive constituencies in the Republic. If the media polls were correct then five percent of the national vote would see a Green TD in Dublin South once more. Thus, the local Green campaign in Dublin South was crucial to the Greens national performance. At that time, Joe was not at all keen to canvass in public places such as shopping centres and at meetings of residential groups. He felt that this was more the domain of mainstream politicians and that the Greens would be seen to be trying to emulate the established parties if they too attempted this approach. His logic was that, if he wanted to be seen as different, he should act differently to the other candidates. He was able to persuade the rest of the group that he was right with regards to canvassing in public places, but the group was firmly resolved that Joe should participate in the door to door canvassing. They had planned to canvass extensively as soon as the election date was announced. Joe also made it clear that he wanted to present himself to the public as “the only caring candidate” and that he did not want to “alienate the man in the street” by appearing to be too radical. Consequently, he wanted to steer away from the more controversial aspects of the Green Party’s policy platform, such as transport and economics, and to make it known that he would try to represent all of the people in the constituency, not just those who voted for him.

5.2.1b 17/02/1997 – General Meeting:

The next meeting was held on the seventeenth of February, by which time ideas about the issues involved in the campaign had solidified to a greater extent. There was a feeling among the members (and the general public) that the date for the election would be announced in the very near future and that the Party would have to anticipate the expectations of the public with firm policy platforms and sound campaign strategies. Hence, it was decided that the first part of all of Dublin South’s group meetings would be given over to discussion of strategies and positions that would enable it to maximise its potential vote. One of my strongest impressions of this meeting was that public opinion had taken on a new importance for the group in the run up to the election. Although consideration of public opinion was always seen as an important part of the Party’s strategy, the group had devoted most of its time to internal Party issues such as the new constitution and the creation of the new Party manifesto in the time that I had been attending its meetings. With the exception of a few longer standing members, most of the group found the prospect of having to explain themselves, while convincing the public of the veracity of their ideas, as somewhat daunting. Indeed, none more so than the group’s candidate, Joe, who was after all not a career politician but a deeply concerned citizen who was drawn into politics by his convictions. I felt that his hesitation to ‘press the flesh’, expressed in the previous meeting, was clear evidence of this apprehension. The next item, concerning the Party’s waste tax scheme, was brought up by Fergus. There was agreement at the meeting that there should be an additional tax or charge for citizens who use the city dumps to dispose of quantities of waste over and above what is allowed for by the council in their normal waste bin allotment. Mark noted that recycling in

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Ireland was far behind Germany and France and that people were still largely uninformed about the need for separating waste into different categories. Joe pointed out that it takes a long time to change people’s attitudes about recycling and Ireland’s public was only now coming to terms with the need for waste reduction. At that stage the group had no concrete ideas as to how they were going to convince voters of the validity of this stance, but they were in strong agreement that issues such as this were fundamental to the Green Party platform.

A discussion of the Green employment policy followed. It centred on finding ways of implementing the rather radical approaches to labour and production held by the Party. The Greens’ approach to work arose from a position that valued individual freedom as the utmost expression of a ‘civilised’ society. They classified work as being fulfilling, that is, work engaged in to further enhance the personal development of both the individual and the community, and as unfulfilling, work forced upon citizens by strictly economic imperatives. The Greens saw unfulfilling work as largely unnecessary at the end of the twentieth century because much of the functions that it had historically performed could now be more easily served by harnessing the dramatic technological advances that had emerged over the last fifty or sixty years. Among the many social implications that arose from this line of reasoning, the Greens identified the need for a more equal distribution of wealth as crucial for the efficacy of their work policy. Consequently, they made the notion of a Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) a cornerstone of their policy on taxation. The GBI would ensure that every Irish citizen received enough money to be able to support themselves without having to engage in unfulfilling work for the sake of survival. The Greens believed that this, in turn, would have the effect of allowing citizens the opportunity to engage in fulfilling work if and when they had sufficient motivation. In this way people would still be able to benefit from their labours but would not be forced to labour for economic survival. During the discussion, the canvassing of possible solutions to the problems of implementing these sweeping social reforms raised some interesting challenges for the members of the Dublin South group. Kevin presented job sharing, reducing the working week, and creating more part- time work as realistic first steps in achieving the broader aims of the Party. Mark disagreed and claimed that “cutting back the working week and sharing work was tried in France years ago and it didn’t work”. Joe also thought that it was impractical but didn’t explain the reasons behind his opinion. Instead he asked the group, “In what kind of circumstances can job sharing work?” Mark replied, “It can’t work in any circumstances!” I asked the group what they thought was the first step that the Party needed to take in order to implement its employment objectives. Liam thought that GBI would be the key issue. He said “if we got basic income in then unemployment would cease to exist, simple as that. It’s gone, no longer a problem”. I then asked what the Party would need to do to implement the GBI policy. Liam replied:

Well, that’s another question. It’s my view that what’s needed to get basic income in is that we need to, one - realise that basic income is a worthy goal to achieve, two - we have to look at where the current system doesn’t work. Let’s take child benefit, upping that quite substantially. For a start, that has to be upped. There has to be some

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recognition of women in the home. As in, I believe there has to be some sort of payment for women in the home. Basically, there’s this question about being revenue neutral, which is a phrase I hear Kathleen using a lot. This means that basic income just means that we shuffle things around but it’s not going to cost us any more than the money that’s already going around. Now that is, to some extent, true. There are a lot of anomalies there. For example, at present non-working women students would get nothing, not a penny. So I mean they are going to have to get a sum of money which brings them up to the basic income, and the principle will have to be brought in. Also students are going to have to get some sort of allowance. The grant system is going to have to be restructured. And then we’re going to have to work on income tax to bring it into some sort of structure. To phase out the allowances that people get at present. Then the picture is starting to look something like basic income. When it starts looking like basic income, it’s a lot easier to convince people to go the whole hog because, at present, we’re so far away from basic income that it’s just inconceivable. Joe was on a radio interview and somebody threw out the figure of eighty percent tax and under certain circumstances eighty percent would be appropriate if we need it to pay for basic income. But there’s one essential point that nobody ever seems to make and that is that basically of course we can afford basic income but at what level. For example, if we were to give everybody in the country five pounds a week, we could afford that, but if we were to give them eighty pounds a week, we couldn’t really. But there is a figure somewhere along the line which equals the total revenue for the community.

Joe replied that if the figure was not above a certain level then it would not be effective in countering unemployment. Liam answered: ‘It has to be a certain level but there is a level which we can afford. I mean it’s a question of how high the tax rate [is] and if we increase the tax rate to bring up the basic income then it’s just taking money and giving it back again. So, the point is that if we get basic income then you’re scrapping unemployment. Unemployment is being institutionally scrapped. It doesn’t matter what level it’s at because you’re basically saying that there’s no such thing as unemployment. The key thing in my view is that you’re saying that there is nobody anymore that is going to be classed as unemployed, and that’s it’.

At this point, Joe commented that this approach was “just semantics for most people because they still won’t be working. There’ll be three hundred thousand people that will be getting their eighty pounds a week but they still won’t be working”. To this, Liam replied: ‘No, I don’t think so because the point is this. In this society at large there is a lot of stigma relating to unemployed people and, at present there is this concept that people have to be available for work. A lot of people will be free, in that case, and they won’t feel that they have to work. And therefore they will do less work. And therefore the point

129 Issues in Environmental Research of job sharing will naturally rise to certain extent. For example, I would reign back on the work I do if there was basic income. If somebody worked very hard now, they could work less’. Joe then brought the perspective of the employer into the debate. He recounted:

Like, for instance, when I was running my business, there were a number of employees. There were a couple of key positions and if one of them … if basic income had been introduced into the business and if one of those people had said ‘right, I’m cutting the number of hours I’m coming in here’ it would have been total chaos because the business wouldn’t have been able to function without that person being there and being able to give it a commitment over summertime of fifty or sixty hours a week. And that job would have been almost impossible to split into two.

Liam agreed that this would be a cause for concern in the case of those working in the service and production industries but the concept was still a sound one for the rest of the Irish economy. Joe, however, was not convinced. He believed that the service industry was most likely the biggest employer of people in the country. Owing to time constraints, the meeting ended at that point but there was an interesting post-meeting discussion that raised the issue of explaining complex issues such as the GBI and the Green Party work policy to a public that was used to media sound bytes and personality politics. As this discussion developed it was clear that Joe did not disagree with Liam in any major philosophical sense. Rather, he saw the issue as a dead one in relation to the election as he thought it would be impossible to explain to the public during the campaign either on the doorstep or via the media. When Fiona agreed and added that explaining the Party’s policy on GBI would be not only difficult but also “boring”, Joe confessed, “Well that, to be honest, is one reason why I think that basic income shouldn’t be something that I talk about in this campaign. I think it should be left for the policy groups to do”.

5.2.1c 3/3/1997 – Election Strategy and General Meeting:

The next meeting was held on the third of March and started with a discussion about what kind of issues Joe should pursue as the Party’s candidate within the electorate. Cathal raised the issue of social welfare and wondered if Joe was interested in getting involved in debates that concerned housing and community centres. Liam was against this as he thought that Joe should present himself first and foremost as an environmental candidate rather than a campaigner for social justice. As he told Joe, “I think you should concentrate on Green issues as opposed to social welfare issues”. Joe replied, “Yeah, well I would imagine that I would get a higher percentage of those [the environmental vote] than any of the other parties, but it’s something to think about”. Liam pointed out that James, the Green TD who had lost his seat in the Dublin South electorate during a previous election, had been extremely vocal on social justice issues but had failed to win the people over for a second term. This caused Joe to recall: What James did was that he was the TD who spoke most in the Dáil but [he] spoke to empty chambers at ten o’clock at night time. He worked

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incredibly hard in a very narrow area and got no coverage for it. People probably wondered what he was up to. Brendan [on the other hand] is doing a little bit of everything. You know, trying to keep in touch with a lot of different issues, trying to do national stuff, doing a huge amount of local constituency work but, if it doesn’t work for him, if Brendan doesn’t get elected and I do, well then I would say that it’s a toss of a coin and we’d need a big discussion afterwards. We’d need to decide what we should do because I suppose there is an argument for using it [the issue of social welfare] to push the Green boat out and to raise issues. Obviously the more time you spend on local issues, the less time you’re going to have to spend on national issues.

When asked by Liam which issues he would more like to pursue if he was elected, Joe was firmly in favour of concentrating on national rather than local issues. He reasoned that this approach would be far more effecting in “helping to change the trend, helping to change the direction, helping to influence people and trying to use the position as a Green TD to push the boat out in a lot of different policy areas”. Liam agreed with Joe’s stance on the matter and added that, “As far as social welfare issues go, I don’t think TDs are there to do that. I think the people who are there to do that are social welfare people really”. The discussion then shifted to the leaflets that the group was producing for Joe’s election campaign. There was a lot of contention within the Party about the form the leaflets should take and, although this appears at first not to be an issue of great note, it does provide us with an insight into the trepidation with which the Party viewed its coming encounter with both the media and the public. It should not be forgotten that the Green Party did not contain ‘professional politicians’ in the sense that the mainstream parties did and most of the candidates had never run for public office before. Therefore, there was much debate about the way the Party should present its candidates to the public and this could often range from light-hearted commentary to heated encounters between candidates and the Election Task Force (ETF). On this occasion the picture of Joe that appeared on the leaflet caused much hilarity within the group upon seeing it for the first time. The person responsible for the production of the leaflets had somehow cut off a significant part of Joe’s hair and this had the effect of making Joe appear as though he had a lopsided head. When I pointed out to him that the photo hadn’t done his haircut much justice, those present, including myself, lapsed into an extended period of laughter that wasn’t helped when Joe informed us that this was better than the last one which made him look like a “pointy eared leprechaun”. To our further amusement, Joe went on to explain: ‘You see that was one of the colour photographs that they scanned, you know. Unfortunately you see the background of Kris Park so they had to chop that out. So you’re not really looking at my hair there. That bit at the top is actually a tree from Kris Park’. To which Liam replied: ‘That’s really very good. It’s very Green’.

Discussion then turned to strategy and Joe described to the group how he thought the campaign should start. He planned to start canvassing two mornings a week with Fiona sometime in the near future, and he had also made up a list of potential canvassers from among the local group members and from family and friends. With the addition of anyone else the other members could add to the list, Joe hoped to have “between sixty

131 Issues in Environmental Research and eighty potential canvassers on the list”. Joe’s plan was to organise these supporters on a roster that would see at least ten of them a night canvassing in shifts. Each of these shifts would be led by a group member who would be given the responsibility of assisting them until they were confident enough to canvass on their own. Joe hoped to increase the number of nightly canvassers to between fifteen and twenty during the week prior to the election. This led into a further discussion of how the Party would present its aims to the public through the media. Kevin thought that, while a concept like GBI was an exciting component of the overall Green message, he as a councillor could hardly present it as a practical solution to unemployment given the current state of politics in Ireland. He thought the Party would be much better off concentrating on presenting Green solutions to problems that were realistic in light of Ireland’s current situation. As he put it, “I think the Green Party should have leaders with at least enough integrity to present possible solutions to the public”. Joe responded to this by saying that, while he recognised the point that Kevin was making, the Party had a responsibility to work to address the long- term environmental and social issues that instigated its creation. As he put it, ‘if I go for soft solutions like a more efficient type of incinerator for waste disposal to push the vote out, what have I done in the long term to alleviate air pollution?’ This was to become a recurring theme in discussions at all levels of the organisation for the duration of the election campaign. Indeed, the friction caused by the tension between praxis and ideology is a constant in the reality of any political party but is never more apparent than when a minority party contests a general election. The pitfalls of going too far down either track are readily apparent when one considers that ideological leanings in a democratic arena can not become politically influential unless they have the support of a substantial number of people. Among some of the active membership of the Green Party there was a concern that if the candidates were perceived by the public as being too radical to participate in a coalition government with the established mainstream parties then this would mean that they would be excluded from political power for the foreseeable future. Conversely, there were many other active members that were afraid that the Party would leave itself vulnerable to manipulation by the mainstream parties in a coalition situation if it compromised its foundation principles in order to get elected. The specifics of this ongoing crisis of conscience in the Party will become clearer as this section progresses. It is enough at this point to bear in mind that this was a major undercurrent of tension running through the Party in the time leading up to and during the election campaign.

5.2.1d 7/4/1997 – Election Strategy and General Meeting:

The next meeting was held on the seventh of April. The first item on the agenda was Joe’s upcoming public meetings on vegetarian lifestyles that he was holding to both increase his profile in the community and to introduce people to the concept of vegetarianism. As mentioned previously in the case study concerning Joe, it was his stance on animal rights and vegetarianism that initially brought him to the Party and he confided in me that vegetarianism was, for him, a crucial aspect of a Green lifestyle. Apart from his belief in non-violence concerning both humans and animals, Joe saw vegetarianism as an opportunity to engage people in contemplating the environmental benefits of consuming organically grown vegetable crops produced by local agriculture. He believed that this was a far better option than continuing to support the sale and

132 Issues in Environmental Research consumption of genetically engineered high yield crop varieties pushed onto the market by companies such as Monsanto. There were to be three meetings and these were to be held at the Fir House, a local community centre in the constituency, on the eighteenth of April, the twenty second of April and the twelfth of May. The group’s discussion focussed on publicity for the meeting and several options were raised. Fiona had informed several newspapers and the group hoped that at least one of them would send a reporter to interview Joe about the meetings and their role in his election campaign. Liam had also designed and produced a few hundred posters and it was decided that members of the group would each take a number of posters and put them up in appropriate places in their neighbourhoods. Joe’s main concern was that a poor attendance at the meetings would reflect badly on him as a local candidate. Ideally, he was hoping for at least thirty or forty people in the audience at each meeting. This would give the local print media sufficient reason to cover the meetings and consider him a serious contender for a seat in the election. Talk then turned to the election posters. Joe told the group that he and Fiona, the group’s campaign manager, had decided to order three hundred of them as a first batch. The group reviewed the way in which the picture for the poster was chosen from the five photographs that the Party had taken of him by a professional photographer. Those involved had made their preferences but Joe finally settled on the one in which he seemed the most relaxed. I mention this because, at that time, he was far from relaxed about the campaign and his role as Party candidate. Like many others in the Party, he wanted to present himself as a capable and professional option to the voting public but was unsure how to achieve this owing to his lack of experience.

After the logistics of transporting and putting up the posters was discussed, the group speculated on the date that would be chosen by the government for the election. While the media and the main opposition parties such as Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats had mentioned dates ranging from late May to early November, the general uncertainty had created a mood of anticipation within the Party. Those active within the group felt that it was imperative that they have their campaign strategies in place as soon as possible to avoid being caught unprepared by an announcement of a date far earlier than they expected. It was clear that Joe at least wanted the group to be on an election footing from that moment until the date was officially announced. At this point the subject of funds and fund raising was broached and it became clear that the group’s campaign would not be sufficient if it relied on the minimal funds that the Party could supply its local groups. Apart from a small donation from a former member, the group’s financial resources were extremely limited and suggestions were put to the meeting to alleviate this shortage. The most popular option with the other Dublin groups had been to hold a quiz night at a local pub or community hall and charge an entrance fee. This would provide supporters with a good night out and, more importantly, would provide the group with a platform from which to ask for donations and strengthen its support base. When I mentioned the success that the Dublin Central group had enjoyed from their quiz night, Kevin pointed out that the Dublin Central group had probably spent a lot of time organising the event. He doubted if the Dublin South group could donate as much time to the project as they had. He also pointed out that Fiona, as campaign manager, would most likely be burdened with the greater share of the work and she already had her hands full.

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The group did toy with the idea briefly but the matter was decided when Fergus pointed out that: I think that if you’re looking at an election that might be called in two weeks time, then there isn’t time. You’ve got to give people two weeks notice at least for these things. If we knew definitely that the election would be called in June, then we’d have time to deal with it. I just don’t know about now, with everything so tight. Obviously constraints of time and money played a crucial part in the way in which the campaign was ultimately run.

As we shall see in the following pages, this was a reality for the organisation as a whole and clearly emphasised a major difference between the Irish Green Party and it’s more established mainstream competitors. Without the financial backing and public support of any significant players in the business sector, the Party would always struggle to gain the recognition it needed to successfully contest a national election. Conversely, with the policies and principles that the Party held dear, it was unlikely that they would find allies in the mainstream business community. As it was, the Party was supplying each local group with four to five hundred pounds and paying for the production of one hundred posters. The campaign would run on a shoestring budget at best.

5.2.1e 21/4/1997 – Election Strategy and General Meeting:

The next meeting was held on the twenty first of April and started with an announcement by Joe that the leaflets and posters were now ready and that the group would start distributing them in the coming week. There was still some dissatisfaction among the members about the final poster format but the matter was not pursued as it was now a moot point. What mattered then was the group was now at an appropriate stage of readiness should the election be called earlier than anticipated by the Party’s leadership. There followed a discussion about the pros and cons of the Party being part of a coalition government, should they be in a position to hold the balance of power in the Dáil after the election. This was, at that time, fast becoming the cause of a great deal of speculation within the party as many of the opinion polls produced by the media were gauging support for the Party among the voting public to be somewhere around five percent. As previously mentioned, this would be enough for them to gain another two or three seats and so make them a force, albeit a small one, in the next Dáil of the Irish Republic. While all of the Party’s members were happy with this prospect, it posed certain questions about the Party’s future that they had not had to consider before. In other words, the Party was faced with the real possibility of electoral power for the first time since its inception.

5.2.1f. The Question of Coalition:

At this point allow me to briefly outline this issue that was the cause of some tension within the Party in the lead up to the election. I was introduced to the debate surrounding this possibility at the Candidates Convention held in Wicklow in early February. There were two evenly matched groups among the members and candidates present at the convention along with a significant minority that were not yet committed to a course of

134 Issues in Environmental Research action. The first group believed that, should the Party find itself in a position to hold the balance of power in the next Dáil, they had a duty to both their supporters and the Republic at large to enter into coalition with the other involved parties in order to form a government. They thought that this kind of inclusion at a governing level could only be good for the Party and was, after all, the very thing that they had been working towards all these years. Holding the balance of power would allow them to press their partners for control of the environmental portfolio and to influence the direction of policies in other areas towards a greener approach. The other side of the debate maintained that entering into any form of coalition with one or more of the mainstream parties would, ultimately, set the Party back ten years. They believed that their coalition partners would use the image of the Green Party to appear more environmentally conscious themselves while, in reality, carrying on in the exact same manner as they had in previous governments. They were also convinced that, as there was no real chance of the Greens being given any position of power within the new Dáil, voters would come to perceive the Green Party as just another minority party out to snatch whatever crumbs it was handed down by the mainstream parties. For them there was no point in joining a coalition unless they were in a position to wield real power. There was a great fear among these members that the Party could end up like the Democratic Left Party (DLP). The DLP had joined the current coalition government in blaze of publicity but had not been able to get a single one of there bills through the legislature as its coalition partners would not support it. They were widely expected to perform poorly at the polls because many people believed that the party had shown itself to be ineffective in government. These were the main currents of debate during the Dublin South group meeting and, at first, division between the two main points of view was more or less even. However, discussion seemed to slide more towards rejecting any future offer of participation in a coalition when Joe expressed doubts in the Party’s ability to hold its own against the more professional and politically savvy mainstream parties. He stated that there was ‘no way the Green Party would have the muscle not to get swamped like the DLs’.

Stewart agreed with Joe and added that he thought the Greens, depending on how many seats they managed to win, would still be able to have bargaining power if they remained in opposition. This would make them, if anything, more relevant to the closely contested debates within the Dáil because the government would have a slim majority at best and might be willing to move towards a stance more acceptable to the Greens in order to win their support. Fintan made it clear that any compromise by the Party, whether it was in the form of accepting a place in a coalition government or dealing with a new government from the opposition benches, would be a subversion of the Party’s principles. In his view, the Party was ‘not about compromise’, it was about building on any future success in order to be in position to take power in its own right and form a government of its own. This was the only chance Fintan thought the Party had of realising its goals and implementing Green policies. On the other hand, Liam thought that the Party was not in position to pass up any offer of a coalition partnership. He felt that, if they did, voters would take this to mean that they were not ready for the responsibility of actively working towards the aims that they professed to have. He was concerned that this would lead to the public perception of the Party as a protest movement rather than a serious player on the Irish political scene. For

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Liam, the best way forward was to accept the offer of coalition partnership, should it occur, but refuse any offer of a ministerial portfolio. He reasoned that, in this way, the Party would be taking responsibility for the representation of its supporters but would avoid any hint of collusion or compromise with the mainstream parties. The Party would, in effect, be gaining the maximum amount of leverage given its position while remaining, by and large, a free agent.

There was also another reason that Liam, while supporting a possible move into a coalition government, was opposed to Green Party elected representatives in the Dáil taking ministerial positions. He was worried that, should the TDs gain too much power in the next Dáil, there was a possibility that they would separate from the Party and form their own group. This was a serious consideration among the other members of the group and it serves to highlight the lack of confidence within the Party, at that time, about the strength of its organisational structure and its ability to influence its candidates once they were elected. Indeed, these fears were not wholly unfounded, as the Party had experienced something like this before. When the first Green Party TD, James, was elected in 1988, the Party was overjoyed with its success until he decided that he was the official spokesperson for the Greens by dint of the fact that he was the only one who had been elected to the Dáil. After many attempts by the National Council and the Co- ordinating Committee to bring him back under the control of the organisation’s decision making processes, it was finally decided that James had to be expelled from the Party owing to his persistent refusal to conform to the Party’s structures. Thus, the first Green Party representative ever to be elected to the Dáil ended in his only term in office as an independent rather than as a Party member. As James was elected in the constituency of Dublin South, the spectre of the Party once again having to face the situation of dealing with rogue members or parliament of teachtaí dailí (TD’s) was particularly disturbing to the group.

5.2.1g Campaign Donations:

These fears were heightened by the next topic on the meeting’s agenda. The Party’s two MEPs had decided to contribute a substantial amount of money to the election campaign fund. Sinead and Neave had each donated six thousand pounds to the Party. Problems arose when both Sinead and Neave found out that the Party had used half the money for the production of the new Green Party manifesto and had then split the remaining funds evenly between each of the candidates. Apparently they had handed the money over to the Party for the express purposes of targeting candidates in constituencies that were most likely to win. In an email from Sinead to the Election Task Force (ETF), she had stated that there was no point wasting the money on the campaigns of candidates in constituencies that had proven to be unfriendly to the Green Party message. This did not mean that she and Neave did not fully support the efforts of all Green Party candidates in their quests to win office. Rather, the reality of the situation dictated that those candidates with a real chance of success should be given the best chance at succeeding for the good of the Party as a whole. The arguments for and against this line of reasoning ran thus. Firstly, the ETF saw nothing wrong with their actions as the money was handed over to the Party for use in the election campaign and that was exactly what it had been used for.

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The fact that Sinead and Neave had preferences as to how the money should be used had no bearing because the Party’s constitution stated that all Party funds were under the direct control of the Co-ordinating Committee and the National Council. As such, those institutional bodies had ultimate control over the disposition of the Party’s resources. In the second instance, many members within the Party, especially the candidates not specified by Sinead and Neave, felt that any form of preferential treatment within the Party amounted to a betrayal of the principles upon which the Party was founded. If the Party was truly an egalitarian organisation committed to a fair and democratic decision making process then all campaign donations should be distributed equally between the candidates to ensure that they all had an equal chance of success. In the third instance, many in the Dublin branches of the Party believed that the best chances of success for the Party lay in the Dublin constituencies. Owing to this, Sinead and Neave were quite right to earmark certain constituency campaigns for extra funding as the money would be wasted in the rural electorates which had historically proven themselves to be staunchly conservative. In any case, it was their money and they had a right to see that it was used in the way that they thought was most effective. These debates were reflected in the group’s discussion that night. While Joe felt that it was inappropriate for him to comment on the matter as he was one of the candidates who had been specified by Sinead, other members of the group were under no such constraint. Joe’s position was that, since Sinead was the MEP for Dublin, “she had a perfect right to earmark her donations specifically for the Dublin candidates”. This line of reasoning did not impress Cathal. He was of the opinion that all donations should go directly to the Co-ordinating Council “to be dispersed wherever they saw fit”. Furthermore, he stated that “all donations to the election campaign should be given in equal amounts to all candidates in order to show no favouritism to any group”. This issue was eventually resolved when it was ruled by the National Council that the money was to be distributed evenly among all candidates.

5.2.1h 6/5/1997 – Election Strategy and General Meeting:

The last meeting of the Dublin South group that I attended was held on the sixth of May. Discussion initially focused on marshalling enough help from Party members and supporters to effectively canvass the majority of the electorate during the campaign. Cathal raised the point that, if the group was relying only on the support shown so far, the election would be very difficult to win as there were very few people who had made a definite commitment to the campaign outside the group. Joe suggested a more aggressive approach to recruiting canvassers. He felt that a lot of inactive and former members would initially baulk at the prospect of giving up their time for the campaign but would eventually agree to help if the group was persistent. It was decided that there would have to be one member in each ward of the constituency responsible for recruiting and organising canvassers for the campaign. These ward convenors would make all necessary calls and arrangements and then co-ordinate their efforts through Fiona, the campaign manager. Lists of names and numbers would be compiled and central meeting points would be designated within the wards to further help co-ordinate the group’s efforts. It seemed at this stage that the greatest problem faced by the Party would be the lack of time available to the active members to participate in the campaign given their other

137 Issues in Environmental Research commitments such as work and family. Concerning technical capabilities, the group decided that Joe would need access to a fax machine and a mobile phone. The National Office in Fownes Street would be used for contributing to the national campaign and Joe expected to have to rely on Lara, the National Press Officer, to keep him informed of pertinent developments on the national stage as well as any combined media efforts devised by the ETF. Obviously, the Party as a whole was trying to develop an effective campaign organisation given the constraints on time and money that they faced. This lack was underlined more and more every day as the campaigns of the major parties got into full swing with billboards, posters, full page newspaper advertisements, and television and radio time. The next topic to be raised was the Green Party Spring Convention that had been held recently at Malahide. The convention caused much contention within the organisation as it differed in one great respect to the conventions of previous years and campaigns. With the appointment of a National Press Officer, the Party was able to generate more media attention than ever before and this, in turn, made the leadership determined to present the Party as a professional and efficient political organisation. They wanted the Party to be seen to be prepared for the coming elections and ready to step in and take charge of ensuing success from the election, be it an increased presence in the Dáil or even ministerial portfolios. This led to a convention that was much more formalised than in previous years with the candidates seated on a raised stage and members and press placed at tables in the area below them. According to many members that I spoke with after the event, this was upsetting to them because, in previous years, the convention had always been a largely informal event where all members were seated on the same level in order to avoid the appearance of an unequal relationship between ordinary members and those in leadership positions. Consequently, many members felt that they had been shut out of the convention processes. They felt the Party’s leadership was more concerned with mimicking mainstream parties for the benefit of the media than concentrating on the purposes for which the convention was annually called.

Joe’s comments on the format of the convention summed up the feelings of many of those who were uncomfortable with the Party’s new professionalism. He remarked to the group that: There was no discussion during the day. There was all this kind of Polit Bureau arrangement where like there was people seated at the top speaking to a passive audience the whole day and I was making the point that we shouldn’t lose sight of organising things in the most mutual, circular, consensual way. It leads to the trap of being media driven in the way we organise events and of being driven by other political parties and the way they organise events. We’re a distinctly different party in the way we organise our policies and we should be a distinctly different party in the way we organise to do our business. I think if we do believe in consensus, and all that kind of stuff, we should really be doing more of our business in that kind of way. The final point I’ll make is that this shouldn’t be seen from a negative point of view by the media. I actually think that the media should pick up on that and I think it should be seen as quite a positive thing. A lot of people are just going to see something very briefly on television of an

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event and they mightn’t hear very much about what’s going on, but they’ll see an image on the television screen. If that image is one of a group of people sitting around in a circle with Brendan sitting in the middle of that group, I think that would be quite effective and wouldn’t necessarily lose us any brownie points with the media. I was just concerned that the Party is going down that road and I’ll also make a point of saying that I think we managed to get through the day without one minute’s silence.

Fiach agreed whole-heartedly with Joe and added that “It was supposed to be consensus decision making but it failed on many fronts”. Kathleen felt strongly about the removal of the standard one-minute silence before the start of the meeting and suggested, “It would be worth having a mild row about because we should be making the one minute silence one of our trade marks”. Eoin reiterated that “the pity of all this is that a lot of people, especially newcomers to the Party, are not experiencing the value of consensus decision making and, where this becomes an issue again and again, they’re going to be inclined to do away with consensus decision making in general”. This led Joe to ask Fergus if decisions were made by reaching consensus during his time on the Co-ordinating Committee. Fergus recalled: In general they were, yeah. Even to the point where there were a few issues where one person would be totally at odds with everybody else and a decision would not be made until there had been some attempt at reaching consensus. In the end a vote would be taken but it would be after a very long time, it would be the last resort for a vote to be taken. It does operate, but I think … The one thing I have to say about consensus is that in actual fact we have so much more in common than we have differences. We actually agree on ninety percent of stuff, I think, in reality. So it’s actually a very small number of decisions where it’s ever a problem, I feel anyway.

Clearly there was conflict within the Party over its future direction as a political organisation. The Co-ordinating Committee and the Election Task Force were anxious for the Party to be seen by the public as disciplined and effective. They were equally anxious to distance the Party from claims by their political opponents that they were ‘a bunch of tree huggers’ who were not capable of creating realistic and responsible policies for the Republic. Caught up, as they were, in the excitement of the general campaign, the leadership of the Party were more and more inclined to display impatience towards the consensus based decision making processes that were fundamental to the Party’s emphasis upon the democratic sharing of power. In non-election years these processes had proved to be a source of cohesion as they had allowed the Party to postpone controversial decisions and engage in lengthy debates aimed at achieving consensus positions. Unfortunately, this also meant that the Party had been able to avoid coming to grips with many of these issues and so found itself unable to match the speed and efficiency with which the major parties directed their campaigns. Subsequently, those in leadership positions felt increasing pressure to simply announce their decisions in order to circumvent the slow process of ground level debate by which consensus was

139 Issues in Environmental Research traditionally reached. Conversely, those who were not so empowered felt increasingly marginalised by their elected leaders and were concerned that the Party was in danger of becoming the kind of political organisation that they had joined the Greens to oppose. The meeting moved on to a report by Fergus on the timing of the general election. There had been much speculation as to the timing of the election and, over the last five weeks, suggested dates had ranged between late April and early November. As Fergus reported, this speculation had not yet been confirmed or denied but the government had announced that they would make their decision public in the next week. He went on to say: ‘Supposedly it’s going to be called next Thursday for the date of June sixth. That’s what the general consensus at the moment is. Now, again that can all change … but I think they really need to have it before the summer, which means basically before the twenty fourth or fifth of June. So they’re running out of options at this stage’.

With that the meeting ended and it was to be the last meeting of the Dublin South Greens that I attended until after the election was held. As Fergus predicted, the Rainbow Coalition did announce the date of the election the next Thursday and it was the sixth of June. Although I would have liked to have been able to attend further meetings of the group during the campaign, I was also focussing upon occurrences in the National Office. Additionally, I had to maintain my research of the Dublin Central campaign and was interested in following Eileen in her campaign in Dublin South West. Unexpectedly, after concentrating so hard on becoming involved with the life of the Party, I found myself unable to predict where that involvement would lead me. However, I did keep in contact with the group throughout the ensuing four weeks and saw Joe often at the various Party functions associated with the campaign. The group held only one more meeting before the election and spent much of its time canvassing the public for support. As candidate for the constituency, Joe’s time was at a premium and he was constantly moving from one media appointment to another in his capacity as the Green Party spokesperson for the environment. Like the rest of the Party organisation, the Dublin South Greens had little time left at that stage for debating issues of policy and intent. Their time was consumed by getting the Green message out to as many people within their constituency as possible, even if they were divided in their opinion as to what that message was. Fortunately, I was able to canvass with them on a number of occasions and gained a degree of insight into both the Greens and the voting public of Ireland that I would not have had access to any other way. I intend to discuss my canvassing experiences in the three different constituencies at a later stage in this chapter. For now, I will move on to the Dublin Central Greens and my impressions of their campaign.

5.2.2 The Dublin Central Campaign:

The constituency of Dublin Central was situated just north of the Liffey, starting at the Quay and continuing on through to Stonybatter. At its southern boundary it included significant parts of Dublin’s central business district and was becoming increasingly popular with the young, upwardly mobile middle class who were the beneficiaries of Ireland’s focus on information technology as its future basis for economic prosperity. In its more northerly areas, the constituency contained many council tenancies and traditionally working class neighbourhoods. As the movement of young urban

140 Issues in Environmental Research professionals into the constituency was still a new phenomenon, the area was still overwhelmingly working class in 1997. Unemployment within the electorate was high and the problems of drug abuse and crime were of daily concern to residents throughout the constituency. Only ten or so kilometres away from the constituency of Dublin South, the nature of the population and its concerns dictated that the Dublin Central group would have to run a very different campaign if it was to have any impact on the outcome of the elections. The Dublin Central group, unlike their counterparts in Dublin South, did not feel that they would be better served by avoiding the detail of social justice issues wherever possible and concentrating upon educating the public about their environmental policies. This was largely due to the differences in the demographic composition of the two areas. The urban working class in Ireland at the time were not the beneficiaries of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy and, as such, had different concerns and priorities to their neighbours over the river. Lower levels of education had left them unable to access the expanding number of jobs in data processing and the information technology sector in general. Whereas Ireland’s middle class population had become increasingly prosperous as a consequence of the bid by consecutive governments to woo investment from major multinational corporations away from traditional technological hubs, these developments had seen the urban working class of Ireland further marginalised and disabused by the system.

As previously mentioned, because of its colonial history, the Irish manufacturing industry had historically never been strong owing to the country’s overwhelming economic dependence upon its agricultural resources. Despite the moves towards rapid industrialisation through the Irish Development Authority, and the inclusion of the Republic in the European Union, the industrial base in Ireland was still small in comparison with its neighbours. Nevertheless, in 1997, there were still significant numbers of people within Irish cities who had traditionally depended for their livelihoods on the various businesses involved with the industrial sector. As investment was focussed on information technology industries, work in the manufacturing sector decreased. For the constituency of Dublin Central this meant that unemployment was disproportionately high in relation to the more middle class suburbs and was also, in many cases, generational. Both crime and poverty were on the rise and many people were dependent upon government benefits for the little money that they did receive. Naturally, the greatest concerns for those living in this electorate were issues directly related to their standard of living. They wanted secure employment, decent wages for their labour, a chance to better their current circumstances and a better standard of education for their children. Issues of social justice were, for them, far more pressing than the concerns of environmental movements. Many times, while canvassing for the Dublin Central Green campaign, people informed me that they would vote for any candidate who promised to focus on addressing their needs exclusively. In other words, just as with the people of Inveresk in Peace’s ethnography (2001), they seemed more concerned with the efficacy of the individual candidates than with the messages of the political parties that they represented. More so than the Dublin South group, the Dublin Central Greens were dealing with an electorate that had, in many ways, become quite cynical about the political process. I had a strong impression from my involvement in the campaign that they had no real expectation that their circumstances would change significantly

141 Issues in Environmental Research regardless of how the next Dáil was constituted. In fact, in many instances the Greens were obliged to convince the residents that it would be worthwhile voting in the first place as many of them had never registered to vote and did not believe that their choice of candidate would have any bearing on the final outcome. These were the circumstances in which the Dublin Central Greens ran their campaign.

This meant that my time the group itself was quite large, although not as large as the Dublin South group. Its active members numbered around twelve and meetings would usually draw between seven and ten people. The active membership represented both the newer urban professional and the older working class aspects of the population. This gave the group an interesting dynamic and led to it being one of the most innovative groups in the Party. Its members were extremely active in various policy development committees and, as we shall see, were sometimes controversial in their suggestions for the Party’s future direction. Regarding the campaign, the Dublin Central group proved to be one of the most cohesive and resourceful groups in the Party. They managed to mobilise a large contingent of helpers and supporters and often their meetings during the election period numbered up to thirty people. They organised two very successful fundraisers and orchestrated two publicity events, one of which managed to make the front pages of the local print media and gain the ire of the Co-ordinating Committee, while thoroughly canvassing their constituency. Sean, the same person who is the subject of one of the six case studies discussed previously in this thesis, introduced me to the group just before the start of the election campaign and kept me informed of the group’s progress by giving me the minutes of the meetings I could not attend. Unfortunately, I was also involved in the Dublin South and Dublin South West campaigns as well as working with the Press was restricted and I could only attend three of the group’s meetings during that period. I did, however, manage to attend both the fundraising events and canvassed with the group on several occasions. The following is an account of the meetings at which I was present.

5.2.2a 12/03/1997 – Election Strategy and General Meeting:

The first meeting that I attended was held on the twelfth of March. It was some weeks before the election date was announced but already the group was preparing for the coming campaign. The meeting was held in Ballinger’s Hotel in Stonybatter and was attended by eight members. The group’s secretary was Sean and Patrick was the candidate for the coming election in the constituency. The first discussion was about Mathew, Patrick’s brother, and his appropriateness for the position as campaign manager. The group was generally very pleased to have Mathew as campaign manager because they felt that he would be able to use the skills that he had acquired as a businessman to promote Patrick and the Greens as a viable alternative to the mainstream parties throughout the constituency. However, Sean was worried that Mathew’s wish to keep himself separate from the Party in order to better run the campaign for his brother might result in him abandoning the Party line while campaigning in order to gain more popular support. In an attempt to explain his position he said:

I found him very impressive. He’s very task orientated, which I can really relate to, so I’ve no doubt he’s the best person for the job. I think

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it would be great if we could all get involved to some degree so we can learn for the future. You know, for the next election or whatever so the group can have some experience. Just the way Mathew was talking … The way we were talking about the pragmatic element to getting elected, which I think is right and it’s very important, I just have this concern about the conflict between pragmatism and idealism which I have noticed at other meetings as well. It’s around the [attitude of] ‘get elected and then we can do what we want’ which sounds a bit like (UK) New Labour, you know what I mean. I just have a kind of crisis of conscience with that because I understand the need for pragmatism but I also … Like I think back and I joined the Greens last year and it was because of the fact that I wanted to get involved in politics and, for me, the Greens shone in terms of their idealism and the fact that they weren’t tainted by the usual politics and the usual greasy politicians. I worry about, you know, ‘don’t tell them you’re liberal on drugs . or you won’t get elected’. I can understand the need [for it] but I worry about it as well. Do you know what I mean?

Patrick recognised that this could be an issue and suggested that Sean and the others in the group should work closely with Mathew to ensure that he did not overstep the boundaries of Party policy when speaking or acting on the group’s behalf. Donal then asked if Sean was making a general comment about the Party or if he was just referring to their situation in Dublin Central specifically. Sean replied:

It’s a general point that came into my head and I just wanted to get of my chest, in relation to the election. I just wanted to see where Patrick was at with that, which is that you have to be pragmatic to get in but I don’t think we should get in if it means selling our integrity. There’s a conflict there and it’s dangerous if the balance tips too much one way or too much the other way. Does anybody want to say anything about this?

Luke pointed out that nothing could be done if the Party didn’t get in. This prompted Sean to qualify his remarks by stating that: In the long term, that philosophy of ‘have to get in’ over ten or fifteen years … You end up, like when you’re on TV for instance, saying nothing like all the other politicians and then you’re just the same as the rest, you know. So that’s just what I think. For me it’s like, you know, we’re working on a drugs policy which we hope will be a pragmatic policy but will have some integrity. It will be the right thing to do. We’re trying to arrive at a policy which is good for the country, you know what I mean? What if we have to play that down in order to get elected?

He did, after saying this, agree with both Patrick and Moira that often the general public were sometimes suspicious of environmental politics and this could lead to voters misconstruing statements about the Party’s objectives. They were also making the point

143 Issues in Environmental Research that, if heard out of context, much of the Green policy platform could seem frightening and radical to the general public and would certainly do them no favours at the polling booth. Patrick was very aware of this and went on to say:

Last night I was revising the transport policy and I was sitting down with Ray Ryan from Dublin North and I was trying to reword it and out it into the same English throughout the whole document. But one thing he said was ‘A tax on petrol to rise to one hundred percent of the cost on petrol at the moment, within ten years’. I think if you put that into a transport policy, and put that as a bullet point, I think it’s political suicide to frame something in that way. The re-jigging that I put on it was ‘A penny per litre clean air tax to be used for supporting public transport and to help relieve transport related health problems such as respiratory complaints’ and so on. To me that sums up the way in which you have to sell policies in different ways.

The problem that Sean presented to the group was that, if the Party managed to gain six or seven seats in the next Dáil by appearing to be more conservative than they actually were, they would soon lose those seats in the following election. On the one hand, many of their existing supporters would feel that the Party had ‘sold out’ by paying more attention to public opinion than to the founding principles of the Party. On the other hand, any new supporters that the Party had managed to woo would not be happy if the Party’s representatives in the Dáil made moves to act on the more radical aspects of the Party’s policy platform once they were in office. Rose considered this and remarked:

It does seem to make more sense alright to go for the longer term [option] but I don’t know whether it works like that. Do you know what I mean? In trying to clarify his position, Sean linked this issue with his experience on the policy committee dealing with the Green Party’s position on the Republic’s drug problem. He felt that: We’re scared of putting in a policy because it’s too far ahead of its time maybe. But then there’s a danger that, you know, the way everybody else is taking on those issues now, that you get left behind. [Then] you’re implementing policies after everybody else.

Luke suggested that after the election the Party might put in place a permanent forum to discuss these issues and make sure that their elected representatives did not shy away from the more unconventional, and potentially unpopular, aspects of Green policy. However, it was Patrick that had the final word on the topic when he said: I think it’s all about realism. I mean if we are in there with a few seats, or even if we’re in government, three quarters of what we’d like to achieve we wouldn’t be able to achieve. It’s the Democratic Left scenario to an extent. From there the discussion moved on to Larry’s report on the progress of the Election Task Force. He informed the group that: ‘The direction that things are taking is to draw up a list of policy topics on the leaflet consistent with the ones that are highlighted in the manifesto. We’ll be looking at things that are sufficiently radical that it would be very difficult for any party to concede our

144 Issues in Environmental Research shopping list’. Sean found that very interesting and asked Larry how the ETF would define ‘radical’. Larry replied:

Well, it should be different. Where this is coming from is the whole debate about whether we should enter coalition or not. There was a strong feeling at the recent Avondale meeting, where there were nine candidates present, that we shouldn’t. The decision was particularly influenced by Brendan’s concerns that we would be wiped out in any coalition arrangement due to lack of experience. And then others were saying that it was crazy to put ourselves before the electorate and say that we want to go into opposition. So an intermediate position has emerged, if you like. It’s to develop a platform which is full of radically Green demands that would be extremely difficult for another Party to concede. If they did, they’d be giving us so much that we’d have a substantial influence in any government.

After this there was a further discussion of Mathew’s role as campaign manager but this quickly turned into a discussion of the group’s role within the campaign. There was some trepidation within the group that events during the campaign could become so fluid that there would not be time for them to be consulted on snap decisions that had to be made by Mathew in the interests of the campaign. The group, as a whole, seemed to fear being left out of the decision making process in the flurry of activity that would surely overtake Patrick and Mathew during the campaign. In order to combat this, they eventually decided that it would be prudent to appoint an official go-between to liaise between the group and the manager. It was agreed that this responsibility would be shared between the members of the group. It was also agreed that the campaign should have a ‘base’ from which to organise its campaign activities. In this way the group would never be far away from the decision making process and would be available to counsel Mathew and Patrick about different aspects of the campaign in relation to Party policy if, and when, the need arose. Nearly all of the members present thought that it would be a good idea but Patrick pointed out that it would substantially increase the cost of the campaign. He did, however, also point out that he thought that his chances of being elected would increase with the renting of a campaign headquarters as it would give him a more public face within the community and ensure that members of the electorate could find him if they needed to. At that point Sean and Larry started to weigh the merits of nominating members from within the group who could act as a liaison between the group and Mathew and then moving ahead with the campaign instead of waiting for the incumbent government’s official announcement of the election campaign. Patrick broke into this conversation by saying: I think there’s a problem here that is symptomatic of the Green Party. Where thinking about what might happen-were something to happen. We know damn well exactly what is going to happen sometime either in the next week, month, or six months and I think it’s a crisis of our own decision making capabilities. And I think we have got to cross the bridge between what we’d love to see happen in an ideal world and what we’re going to do in the morning. We’ve spent the last twenty

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minutes discussing pertinent issues in detail without any real specifics of what a problem issue might be. Without anybody saying ‘I’d like to be up there, involved. I can make a commitment of two, three, or four evenings a week and I’m prepared to represent the Green Party in that. That worries me a bit. I think we’ve got to push ourselves forward.

This prompted two or three members of the group to put themselves forward for the role and they proceeded to try to pin down exactly who could be available at what times during the period of the campaign. Just as with the Green Party members in the Dublin South Group, the Dublin Central membership were constrained by the amount of time they could devote to campaign activities. When the group nominated Andrea as someone able to fulfil this duty, her reply was indicative of many members asked to play a greater role in Party activities. As a medical practitioner and the mother of two, her time was limited and she was also involved with the policy committee on health issues as well as being an active member in the group. She answered: ‘Oh, I’ve a full time job and a couple of children. I mean my work doesn’t often lend itself to this kind of thing. Often enough I’m in the middle of a clinic and I could be on the other end of the phone but I might not be able to talk, and that could be very awkward. So, I’d love to do it but really I couldn’t cope with it’. Being a small political group with extremely limited resources, it was often the case that those active within the Party were asked to take on more tasks than they could reasonably accomplish, given the other responsibilities and commitments that they had outside of their involvement with the Greens. This meant that progress concerning policy, direction, organisation was often frustratingly slow due to a sheer lack of human resources when compared to the scope of the goals that the Party wished to achieve. An example of this issue in relation to the coming election campaign arose when Luke advised Patrick to spend as much time as possible meeting the constituents. He remarked, “the more people you actually see and the more people who actually see you, the better. A lot of people like to see the person they’re going to vote for, don’t they?” To this, Patrick replied:

Well, hopefully they’ll get a chance Peter when the campaign comes, you know? At the moment I can’t afford the time. Between work and between the commitments I have. I’m giving a paper tomorrow at the transport conference and I was finishing off a report today. I was at a drugs meeting the night before and a city council meeting the night before that. I mean, my time is very limited and I don’t have the time to be canvassing at the moment.

It was clear that the Dublin Central group would have to marshal its resources quite carefully in order to mount a successful election campaign. The meeting turned to a discussion of the group’s financial resources and the logistics of running the campaign on a limited budget. Sean pointed out that many of the suggestions made by the members, such as poster and pamphlet drives, fundraising events, publicity photos, and the rental of a campaign headquarters, would only be feasible if the group could find sufficient funds to enable these projects to proceed. As he put it:

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I personally don’t have the slightest idea of how much it costs to fund half of what Patrick has told me. So, I don’t know if anybody else does. Can we sit down as a group and say ‘well we need a thousand pounds for this or five hundred pounds for that’, you know. I personally don’t actually know. Patrick replied:

Off the top of my head, we’d be spending it on leaflets that will go out in the post … that’s a once off. We’d need twelve hundred quid to get every single voter an A4 leaflet printed on both sides. Photographs, I haven’t got photographs done. That will be at least a hundred quid if not a hundred and fifty quid to get good colour and black and white photographs. And design would be a hundred quid or two hundred quid to have somebody put together what the leaflet would look like. I mean …

Here Moira broke into the conversation and suggested that, as Patrick had a preliminary costing of the groups expected minimal expenditure, he should give the group a copy of it and then the group could discuss it. She wanted to focus more on “what roles we’re going to take on, or what roles we’re willing to take on”. In answer to this, Patrick posed a number of different options relevant to the campaign. He said: I think, as a group, we should be trying to tease out whether or not we want a strong poster campaign? Do we want to rent a photocopier and try and get a leaflet up for each ward as we go? Is somebody prepared to spend a couple of hours going around, finding out what the issues are and saying what the Green Party’s response is, and rattling off five hundred leaflets that we use that night to go into the area around one place and say ‘We want to put a recycling station here, we want to re-open Rathsdowne railway, we want to deal with the derelict building on such and such a street’. Do we want to do that kind of a campaign or do we … Like, it becomes very abstracted during an election campaign these days, particularly this idea of a poster. You just write it up, put it all together and give it to a printer, and everybody’s got a leaflet. Then what do you do? You’re going around knocking on doors, and how do you work on that? Do we simply say ‘Oh, lets get as many people as we can out knocking on loads of doorsteps or do we say we need to have so many people knocking on so many doors each day? And how does that happen? Will there be someone on the phone spending two hours a day calling up the people who went out the previous night saying it would great to have you back this evening and could you bring along a friend? That’s the level of activity that I see; a fully- fledged campaign. And I think that there’s all kinds of decisions there that one might agree with, disagree with, but I would hope that the group would be more than a sounding board that will be responding and saying yea, nay, good, bad, yes, no. Once again, Patrick was making the point that the group would have to actively involve itself in the campaign if it was to have a greater say in the decision making process. Having been involved in the election process before, Patrick was well aware of the speed at which events could progress when an election campaign was underway. It was also clear that he wanted the group to take as much responsibility upon itself as it could in order to relieve him of the day-to-day decisions of the campaign. What was interesting about this was that it was a real test for the group’s ability to make good decisions quickly. The group would have to function independently of the Party and act as an effective political unit in the local arena.

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This would mean that it may not have the luxury of consensus decision making on every level as the group would be called upon to act and react quickly in order to remain visible against the campaigns of the better funded and more experienced mainstream parties.

This also raised the issue of the group’s awareness of the Party’s activities and plans on a national basis. When talk turned to a discussion of the Party’s national preparations Larry outlined the decisions made in the last ETF meeting. Each policy group would be responsible for producing policy profiles on their own area of expertise and presenting it to the ETF for integration into the Party’s policy platform. Larry showed that he was well aware of this issue when he announced that: I think we’ve done a very good night’s work tonight in terms of the integration of the group and the candidate but how does the group integrate into the larger anatomy of the scene. It’s as if we’re indifferent to what happens in the Party nationally. This was a recurrent theme in the various local Green groups to various extents, but it would prove to be a point of some contention between the Dublin Central group and the ETF. While not wishing to pre-empt the chronology of events that occurred after this meeting, there were repercussions that stemmed from the Dublin Central group’s decision to make a non-Party member the manager for their election campaign. This meant that they were to be the only group within the Party whose manager’s first campaign priority was to get their candidate elected rather than to further the aims of the organisation. With Mathew largely in control of the day-to-day organisation of Patrick’s itinerary, conflict between the ETF and the Dublin Central group was likely, if not inevitable. The next item on the agenda was a report by Sean on the progress of the ‘Drugs’ policy discussed earlier in the thesis. Larry as a psychologist, Andrea as a medical doctor, and Sean as a drug abuse counsellor, individually and jointly had a professional interest in trying to formulate a viable policy enabling long term solutions to the problem regardless of their association with the Party. Sean was reporting on the latest draft ‘drugs’ policy that he, Larry, and Andrea were in the process of the presenting to the Party for ratification. At that point the draft had been circulated to the policy committees on health and justice. The feedback from those groups had been so minimal that Sean had no way of gauging the Party’s reaction to the policy. Of the twenty-three members on the Justice committee there had only been three replies and only one person from the health committee had offered comment on the document. The two comments that were noted at the meeting involved minor adjustments to the documents such as spelling, punctuation, and use of language. The main topic of the discussion involved the difficulty Sean was having actually getting the issue listed on the agenda of the National Council and the Co- ordinating Committee before the election campaign started in earnest. Sean then talked about one of the most controversial aspects of the draft policy which involved making facilities available to recreational drug users for the purposes of testing the strength and purity of the drugs they were using. In his opinion: ‘In the same way that there was a prohibition of alcohol in the states and it led to bath tub gin and the mafia, prohibition doesn’t actually work because anybody can get any drug they want if they try hard enough. Also, the quality of it [the drugs] is very suspect. For example, I was speaking to somebody yesterday who said that, in their opinion, the ecstasy in Dublin was mostly heroin. So, if just for one weekend you could have testing facilities for ecstasy, the kids

148 Issues in Environmental Research would stop taking it because they’d realise just what it was’. Patrick contributed to this discussion by trying to determine what the Party’s response to this issue should be given that it was indeed one concerning social justice. He commented that:

I wonder, if we’re saying that it is a social justice issue, should we go a bit further in stating that massive resources need to be invested in the areas … of multiple disadvantage in Dublin. And that goes beyond the issue of health, it goes beyond. It goes certainly into the issue of education. It goes into sports facilities, cultural facilities, having a library where a kid who’s in a tough family background can go after school and do their homework.

Sean agreed with this approach and made the group aware of just how little money was being put into this area by the government. As he informed the group: I’ll simplify the figures from the budget just a little bit. I think, just falling off the top of my head, it was six hundred and thirty five million in tax breaks, two percent off corporation tax, forty million for new prison, and [only] fourteen million for a drugs response. It dropped down from six hundred and thirty five million to fourteen million, so the government is clearly stating where its priorities are. It’s not with social justice.

At this point Rose remarked: ‘Well the other thing is that there’s not enough money going into processing people. I mean people are out on bail, see what I mean? So there needs to be more money in that’. At the time the Irish Justice system was operating so far above its capacity that many people remained out on bail for extended periods before their case could be heard in the courts. Rose was expressing a concern about the justice system that was shared among many people in the Republic. The courts simply did not have enough resources to cope with the increasing number of cases brought before it as a consequence of Dublin’s rising crime rate. The issue was quite topical at that time as the Progressive Democrat’s had also waded into the debate by calling for a New York style ‘Zero Tolerance’ approach to crime in Dublin. In response to Sally’s concerns, Sean noted that:

Governor [John] Lonegran of Mountjoy, says that ‘sanctions do not cure drug addicts’. That the jails are full of people and we have to let them out. We could build ten more jails and they’d just fill them. But all you’re doing is creating a cycle. Rehabilitation breaks the cycle and it’s cheaper than locking people up. And there’s the whole question of the ‘Zero Tolerance’ thing coming in now, which has just further marginalised people. I mean there’s no millionaires in Mountjoy. People are not there because they were genetically corrupt and they just couldn’t stay on the straight and narrow. I think social deprivation has a lot to do with it. So I would agree with you one hundred percent Patrick.

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Here, Larry noted that: It [Sean’s approach] dovetails very well with the opening statements of the [Party] manifesto, which are about the gap between those who are affluent and are comfortable in our society and those who are not is continuing to increase to an exceptional degree. I don’t know our economics policy very well but I don’t know if that kind of angle is in it. We’re very weak in the whole area of inequality and justice and discussing poverty and disadvantage in our policies. So I would try to support the idea to elaborate this.

Finally, Patrick made mention to the group of a recent poll in a national business news publication that estimated support for the Greens in Ireland at around nine percent. While he thought this was encouraging, he felt that the group would still have a hard time gaining the thirteen percent of the vote needed to gain a seat in the constituency. This level of difficulty was compounded by the fact that the constituency had been, for many years, a stronghold for Fianna Fáil, the largest single political party in the Republic. Patrick’s nearest political rival was an incumbent Fianna Fail TD who could rely on one of the most professional and well established party organisations throughout every step of the campaign.

5.2.2b 07/05/1997 – Election Strategy Meeting:

As I have mentioned previously, my activities at the main office and involvement in the campaigns of Dublin South and Dublin South West denied me the opportunity to attend the Dublin Central group meetings as often as I had hoped. As a consequence, it was not until the seventh of May that I again was able to be present at a meeting. However, I had kept in touch with the group through both Patrick and Sean and had, by this time, accompanied members of the group on several outings for the purposes of door to door canvassing. By this time, the group had rented a headquarters in the centre of the constituency and had been very active in advertising Patrick’s candidacy through press releases, leaflets, and posters throughout the local electorate. The earlier issues they had had to deal with concerning Mathew’s nomination had been resolved and the group was now working quite effectively towards their goal. Patrick had taken a month’s leave from his work as an architect and was devoting all of his time towards the election campaign. They had also incorporated a large number of non-member supporters into their campaign organisation and were regularly sending out teams of canvassers in an attempt to reach as many people in the electorate as possible. The meeting opened with Mathew presenting a report of the group’s recent canvassing activities. He briefly mentioned the seven different areas that the group’s various canvassing teams had covered in the last two weeks and added that he felt that the response from the people in those areas had been quite good as people of all ages had shown a willingness to listen to the Green message. As the election date had not yet been announced at this time, the initial canvassing by the group had been focussed on establishing which issues were of the highest priority in the opinion of the residents. According to Matthew:

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What comes clear from the canvass, even in this week’s canvassing, is basically the issue … the main issue out there is drugs. And there’s a lot of local issues that have been taken. You know, the walkie talkies and the marches on the houses and things like that. And what’s clear about it basically is if you’ve mentioned Patrick or mentioned that Patrick is on the Fatima and Dolphins taskforce, that has a hell of an impact. It gives immediate credibility and, I mean, to give one quote ‘What we need is people who are on the taskforce, they wouldn’t be on it unless they knew what they were talking about, and we need people to keep the push on the drugs’. My own experience was that there was rarely a house that was ‘not’ going to give a vote to the Greens. It was more like they weren’t going to vote at all. If they were going to vote it would be a Green vote there somewhere and our biggest challenge is to get that [vote] upgraded to a number one.

At that time the local residents of many inner city suburbs had become so alarmed at the growing number of drug related crimes and deaths within their neighbourhoods that they had organised themselves into groups and had created a number of grassroots strategies for dealing with the problem. One these was to patrol areas suspected of being frequented by drug dealers with the aim of finding them and chasing them off. The residents would each be equipped with a two way radio which they would use to contact each other in order to assemble in a large group around the suspected drug dealers and so chase them off. Another such strategy was for residents to gather at a pre-arranged meeting place and march, en masse, to the house or houses of suspected drug dealers in order to send a clear message that they were no longer welcome in the area. These were the initiatives that Mathew was referring to. The Fatima taskforce was part of an initiative to deal with the problems caused by drug abuse established by CORI – The Council of the Religious in Ireland. The Dolphin taskforce was a similar initiative established by the Dublin council. Apart from confirming that dealing with the problem of drug addiction in the community was as high a priority for many of the residents as it was for the Dublin Central group, Mathew referred to the substantial amount of constituents that had not enrolled to vote in the election. As voting was not compulsory in the Republic, there were many citizens who chose not to participate in the electoral process. Although the reasons behind this growing trend of non-participation were varied it was my experience that, when asked at their doorstep, many replied that they felt that nothing would change for them regardless of which party or coalition was elected. Overwhelmingly, these people were the most disaffected in the community and had become, over time, fatalistic about their chances of gaining a better standard of living through the processes of democracy in the Republic. Many, living in Council tenancies and subject to generational unemployment, felt so alienated from the burgeoning middle class on the south side of the Liffey that they refused to participate in a system they saw as clearly hostile to those without access to wealth. This was of great concern to the group as it appeared that there seemed to be widespread support for them within this section of the community because of Patrick’s participation in drug abuse taskforces. However, this would come to nothing at the ballot box if these potential Green Party voters were not enrolled.

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Aware of this fact, Sean speculated that there was “a huge protest vote out there” with many people being dissatisfied by the conservatism usually shown by the mainstream parties when in government. He hoped that, as well as presenting a new political philosophy to the people of the constituency, a vote for the Green Party would also be seen as an effective way of protesting against the growing socio-economic inequalities within Irish society. In response to this, Mathew replied:

I don’t know how big the protest vote is, you know. I think people on the doors were quite honest. I don’t think we were led astray by people, but some people were just quite cynical about the whole thing and we were able to say “Well, look if you’re cynical why don’t you try and get someone new in there and, you know, use your vote”. And that worked.

The next item on the agenda was a brief description, by Patrick, of the activities of the Dolphin taskforce. He told the group that the taskforce: … brings together the local community and the Gardai and the public rep’s to sit around the table and work out, practically, what needs to be done in an area. Often issues of housing maintenance or issues of concern are talked about with the Gardai, as to what their presence has been like in the previous month. And it’s a good point of contact, for me, to get to know each other. That would have led, for instance, today I was on the phone for twenty minutes to a representative of the South Inner Treatment City Services group. They’re trying to get premises so we were discussing where they might get premises. So it’s a good gathering point for people involved in the area of drug treatment.

This type of personal involvement was to be typical of Patrick’s approach throughout the election campaign. Indeed, among the Green Party there were many members who could boast personal histories of extensive involvement in community projects and citizens initiatives. Apart from Patrick’s involvement in the drug taskforces and Joe’s role in the Dublin Food Co-op, participation in community organisations among the active membership was extremely high. After this brief report, the meeting moved on to a discussion of the Dublin Central Greens leaflet that was soon to be distributed to every household in the constituency. The leaflet was, as yet, still in the draft stage and the group was trying to decide what main points about Green Party policy would be most likely to elicit support from local constituents. While these main points were not decided at the meeting, the ensuing discussion did centre on what kind of language would be used to convey the ‘Green’ message. Mathew outlined his views by telling the group:

Instead of saying ‘clever public transport’ or ‘access to public transport’, we should say ‘better public transport for easier travel’. Now, that doesn’t alienate the car drivers. It makes it easier to travel for everybody. The guy in the car can consider using the bus and vice versa, you know.

Moira agreed with this and added:

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It’s got to be very short sentences in simplified language which comes across with the point. I mean I took a load of election leaflets into school today (Moira was a teacher) and gave them to a bunch of eighteen and nineteen year olds, they couldn’t understand the messages coming out of the leaflets. They switched and they didn’t want to read on any further, but very succinct sentences, like, that make sense. Just short points.

The Dublin Central group felt that the right choice of language in the leaflet was crucial for the campaign. The leaflet would reach far more people than the group and its supporters could ever hope to by canvassing from door to door. There was also a feeling within the group that the Party leadership often presented itself as being ‘of’ the intelligentsia, as opposed to being ‘of’ the people, by using a mixture of theoretical and scientific jargon when attempting to explain its position on different issues. This is of particular interest as it an unexpectedly critical self-characterisation by Party members of the organisation as an intellectual community. The fact that this was quite a common complaint among the membership suggests that, while many in the Party are eager to assume intellectual duties such as leadership and education, they are reticent to be seen as intellectually aloof by the public. Indeed, many believed that the main obstacle to greater support for the Green Party was not the content of the Party’s message but merely the way the message was presented. Members who shared Moira’s concern felt generally that, once Green politics were made accessible to the community, then people could not help but be persuaded by the logic it contained. Similarly, the last item on the agenda was a discussion of the logistics of an upcoming quiz night at Manton House that the group had organised. Between fifty and sixty people were expected to attend the event and participate in the quiz. Participants would pay a ten-pound entrance fee and then be organised into groups of up to ten for the purposes of competing for first, second, and third place prizes that had been donated by Party members and supporters. Also the group would make available refreshments for those who attended the function that had been donated by local businesses. In this way the group would be able to raise additional funds for their campaign.

5.2.3 Dublin South West Campaign:

As previously mentioned, the campaign in Dublin South West differed greatly from the other two campaigns discussed owing to the extremely small size of the group. Eileen’s decision to run in the election was more informed by her dedication to the ideals of the Party than any sense of personal political ambition. Also, she felt that a Green Party representative in the constituency would be able to represent the interests of the people in the area far more effectively than the incumbent mainstream politicians had in the past. While there were a few smaller urban centres and farming communities within its boundaries, most of the constituency’s population resided in the suburb of Tallaght. Eileen believed the constituency’s previous and incumbent politicians had not made serious attempts to deal with the entrenched unemployment and poverty that plagued Tallaght’s inhabitants because they had been confident that the voting public would

153 Issues in Environmental Research continue to vote along civil war party lines as they had done in the past. Some of the reasons behind this voting behaviour can be seen in the unique history of Tallaght’s population. To recap, Dublin South West was an unusual constituency as its demographic nature had been irreversibly changed by government policies in the sixties and seventies supposedly implemented in order to relieve population pressure on Dublin’s inner city districts. Before this period, Tallaght was a village in the middle of a farming district on the outskirts of Dublin. Its small population of predominantly farmers and rural workers was quite conservative and the constituency had been a stronghold of Fine Gael since the founding of the Republic. When the gentrification of Dublin’s inner city commenced, much of the city’s inner suburban poor were removed from the tenements that surrounded areas, such as the famous Four Courts and Temple Bar precincts, and relocated in the new council tenancies that had been built in Tallaght by the planning authorities. The buildings that had been their homes were then demolished in order to utilise the prime real estate upon which they stood for the commercial developments that dominate Dublin’s central business district today. Consequently, Tallaght in 1997 was home to a large population of welfare recipients living in Council housing with little or no industry or resources to provide employment.

Positioned on the southern outskirts of Dublin, it was seen by the other residents of Dublin’s south side as one of the most undesirable areas in the city. As Eileen explained to me, Tallaght’s reputation was such that its residents were often discriminated against when applying for employment because they were perceived as uneducated ‘welfare cases’. The local people in these areas would often keep them as pets but the population had been allowed to grow to such proportions that they were often a hazard to traffic and were largely considered a nuisance by the authorities. On more than one occasion a car I was travelling in nearly collided with a horse while driving around Tallaght early in the morning. They would appear out of the mist in the middle of an otherwise normal suburban street and seemed totally unfazed by oncoming traffic. Obviously, given that Eileen’s campaign team consisted of herself, her husband Kris, and a campaign manager called Patricia who had been seconded from another group, Eileen was never considered a serious contender to win one of the five seats available. While she understood this from the onset, it did not stop her from mounting the best campaign that she could with an eye to achieving the impossible and winning a seat in the Dáil. Without a local group to support her Eileen organised some of her friends in the Party from other areas of Dublin and the few ex-Green Party members within the constituency to distribute pamphlets and canvass in the sections of the constituency she thought might be more amenable to the Green message. Her main aim throughout the campaign was to make the people aware of the Party and to convince them that a Green TD could be more effective than those of the mainstream parties in addressing the needs of the local community. She felt that her main strength as a candidate lay in the fact that she was one of only two candidates that lived locally and she had an excellent knowledge of local affairs. Eileen believed that, as a representative of the Green Party, she would be able to present herself to the people as someone devoted to local autonomy and decentralised government.

A firm adherent to the Party’s policy of devolving power to the smallest functioning political institutions, one of Eileen’s main campaign platforms was that she was free of

154 Issues in Environmental Research the intrigues of mainstream party politics and devoted to the needs of the local community. In a constituency with very little local industry and no defining environmental ‘issue’, Eileen stressed the Green Party’s policy of decision making at the local level and its much publicised push for a Guaranteed Basic Income as the main benefits that would come from having a Green TD in Dublin South West. Unfortunately, during the duration of the campaign there were no real opportunities for Eileen to express her views other than canvassing on doorsteps and at shopping centres. While she did manage to get one or two letters into the local paper, her campaign was so under funded that she could barely afford the running fee and had to rely solely on the Party for her leaflets and posters. The real political struggle within the constituency was between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael and, owing to their impressive media blitzes throughout the campaign Eileen became one of the most low profile candidates in the entire Republic. What interested me about Eileen’s campaign in Dublin South West was that the problems she struggled with were, to greater or lesser extents, indicative of the Party’s struggle throughout the Republic. The lack of funds had forced her to campaign almost exclusively on a personal level and had made it impossible for her to obtain any serious or effective media coverage. This meant that, while most people in the electorate were aware of the Party, very few of them had any real idea of what it actually stood for. The lack of human resources meant that Eileen could not effectively make her presence felt within the electorate by canvassing and many parts of the constituency remained uncanvassed when the day of the election came. Patricia remarked to me that the result in Dublin South West could well mirror the Party’s fortunes in the rest of the Republic as the ‘David and Goliath’ battle between Eileen and her mainstream rivals was synonymous with the Party’s situation nationally. On the day of the election Eileen could only hope that her campaign had been successful enough for her nomination to progress through the initial stages of the vote count where she might gain the last seat on the strength of preferences.

5.3 Canvassing:

For each of the three local groups discussed above, canvassing the policies and ideas of the Party in the electorate was of vital concern. I was able to accompany each of the groups on a number of occasions when they canvassed for support within their respective constituencies and found the experience enlightening on a number of levels. Apart from gaining first hand experience of the various localities from which the Party was trying to garner support, I was interested in seeing how Party members and supporters presented their views to the voting public and how these views were received. Also, listening to conversations held on residential doorsteps between the canvassers and voters gave me an indication of what issues were important to the residents of the different areas canvassed by the Party. This allowed me to gain perspective on the way the Irish Greens were seen in the larger economic and socio-cultural context. Through my inclusion in these activities I was struck by the importance of local issues in the general electorate. Although the different areas that I went to with the Greens covered a broad spectrum of neighbourhoods in Dublin, from Council tenancies to the homes of bankers, local issues were placed on a par with issues of national significance. People held their TDs responsible for everything that occurred in the constituency, and expected them to

155 Issues in Environmental Research become personally involved in all facets of local politics. A fine example of this occurred in Tallaght when residents became angry that the streetlights in their area had stopped working and the neighbourhood had been thrown into darkness every night. The residents had complained to the local council and maintenance teams started work on the necessary repairs. Sometime during that period someone had also complained to one of the local TDs about the situation, and he had made a point of following the repair crews on their journeys through the area. He would wait until the crew had stopped and then tell the local residents that he personally had organised for the council to fix the streetlights. Consequently, when Eileen canvassed the area in the election campaign of 1997 she was often informed by residents that their vote would be going to ‘the man who fixed the streetlights’. On another occasion, in the constituency of Dublin South, residents of an area that contained a lane that was being used by local children as a bicycle route were campaigning to have the lane closed. The lane had been the focus of a long running dispute between neighbours who each claimed that they had title to the land but neither side could prove conclusively that they were entitled to it. The local residents became alarmed when their children started using the lane as a short cut on their way home from school. As one woman put it, they would “fly out from the lane on their bikes you can’t see them until you’ve almost run them over”. After several near misses, the residents became so concerned that, when Joe canvassed the area, they told him that they would vote for anyone who would promise to either close the lane for good or settle the dispute between the feuding neighbours. Once again, this was obviously a matter for the council but the residents felt that they had every right to appeal to a higher authority when local government did not respond fast enough. In responding to this kind of local issue, the Party canvassers in most cases could only sympathise with the residents and re-iterate the Greens commitment to devolving power to the lowest practical level. As the Party had had success previously in the local council elections throughout Dublin, they were able to present themselves as being committed to local government reform. Nevertheless, they had to admit that they were unable to call upon long-standing local power bases such as those enjoyed by the mainstream parties.

Issues of a more national nature that were raised by residents on the ‘doorstep’ varied throughout the three constituencies. In Dublin South West, the main issues were unemployment and social security. Most of the people canvassed in that constituency were adamant that the area needed some kind of large scale local industry that could provide residents with stable employment and an income sufficient to allow them to escape the cycle of casual work and social welfare. Many people were also extremely concerned that, should the more conservative parties gain power, their current welfare benefits would be reduced to such a degree as to become grossly insufficient. These concerns had arisen because of an election promise by Mary Harney, the leader of the right wing Progressive Democrat Party, to terminate all benefits for under age single mothers who were not living at home with their parents. She had also campaigned vigorously for the government to decrease the overall expenditure by the state on welfare and unemployment benefits of all descriptions and had promised to make this a priority should her party come into power after the election. Many people within the constituency were apprehensive about this prospect as the Progressive Democrats had made common cause with Fianna Fáil and were likely to gain power as a coalition government. In

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Dublin Central the two main issues were transport and drug abuse. Concerns about the public transport system focussed upon the high volumes of traffic that flowed through the constituency everyday. The residents were willing to support any initiative that would reduce traffic levels in the area and many felt that the best solution would be to expand and upgrade public transport to enable more frequent and convenient access to the city district via trains and busses. There was even a push to introduce light rail throughout the central business district although it was not popular with those living outside the inner suburban areas, and there were serious concerns that Dublin’s thousand year old streets were simply not wide enough to accommodate both light rail and motor vehicles together. With regard to the issue of drug abuse, the Dublin Central constituency was daily inundated by people from all over Dublin looking to either purchase or sell heroin. Local residents were alarmed by the rising level of drug related crime within their area and felt that some areas of their neighbourhood were no longer safe to frequent. This issue was quickly taken up by the mainstream parties who promptly declared that they would, if elected, introduce a policy of zero tolerance, much the same strategy that had been introduced a year earlier in New York. The Greens and the Democratic Socialists had both opted for another solution whereby more methadone clinics and treatment centres would be made available to addicts in the inner city. This approach, they reasoned, would serve to minimise the harm done to the community by addicts desperate to appease their addiction, stabilise their addiction so that further rehabilitation could be attempted, and ease the burden of Ireland’s vastly overpopulated prison system. These proposed initiatives served to split the voting public into two more or less even groups. The hard line approaches of the mainstream parties found much sympathy with a population already fed up with being abused by addicts and accosted by beggars on a daily basis. Many had given up any hope of a solution to the problem being found and simply wanted it to be removed from their streets. They saw calls for more methadone clinics and treatment centres as a waste of public funds and were convinced that these places would be a blight on the communities which housed them because they would become a beacon for addicts all over the city. Even among people who agreed in principle, there were very few who would welcome the establishment of one of these facilities in their neighbourhood.

In Dublin South, the main issues at the time of the campaign tended to be much more nationally oriented due to the absence of any single pressing local issue with the ability to galvanise public opinion. While people were willing to listen to Green Party policy platforms such as energy conservation, waste recycling, greater support for home education, and halting the practice of adding fluoride to the city’s water supply, they seemed sceptical of the Party’s ability to manage the economy responsibly should it somehow come to power. One resident summed up the main concern within the community admirably when asked by Joe on his doorstep what he regarded as the most important issue in the election. He replied “I’m worried about what everyone else is worried about around here – taxes”. As the main beneficiaries of the much-improved Irish economy, residents of Dublin South were happy enough to vote for the mainstream parties as long as they could feel secure that their standard of living would, at the very least, remain the same. While canvassing with the Dublin South group, I gained the impression that the residents were willing to consider the local Green candidate for

157 Issues in Environmental Research second and third preferences but would rather give their first preference to a candidate from one of the more established parties. Throughout all of these three constituencies, local group members were generally well received by people on their doorsteps and there was a high level of genuine interest shown in the policies and principles of the Party. I was particularly surprised to find that the Party was quite well received in many of the less affluent neighbourhoods that were canvassed. I had suspected that the Party’s environmental stance might be viewed as largely irrelevant by people whose first concern was purported to be employment for themselves and education for their children. However, the Party’s platform on social justice, including the Guaranteed Basic Income and support for locally owned small industry, made them relevant to many of the concerns held by those in Dublin’s poorer areas. By the end of the campaign, many within the Party were so buoyed by the apparent support for the Greens that they were predicting an unparalleled success at the polling booths.

5.4 Election Day:

On the day of the election I took a bus into Tallaght and met with Eileen, Mary, Larry, and Claire (an ex-Party member who lived in the area). We arrived as a group just before the tallying got underway at a local sports centre that was being used as a counting room. Within the counting room the atmosphere was highly charged as representatives from the different parties organised themselves into groups of designated officials who were to oversee the various tasks necessary to facilitate the counting of the votes. Ballot boxes were opened and the ballot papers were smoothed out and put into bundles of one hundred. In order to ensure an even representation of the tally throughout the counting process, all of the bundles were mixed together and then taken out at random to be counted. I was told by one of the officials that this practice was necessary as each neighbourhood had a tendency to vote as a bloc for one party or another. If the bundles were not mixed, the delegates and officials would have no idea of who was likely to prevail until all of the votes had been scrutinised and counted. Not surprisingly, as the results came in it was clear that many neighbourhoods within the constituency had voted according to their respective socio-economic positions. Ballot boxes from the poorer areas showed a high count for Sinn Fein, the Socialist Party, and the Democratic Left Party. Sinn Fein had campaigned energetically throughout the area well before the election was announced. While they had always been relatively strong within the constituency, their role in the peace process at that time had given their candidate firm ground upon which to promote the party’s policies. The candidate for the Socialist Party was a well-known local activist and had strong support in the various local Council tenancies. He had long been outspoken about the various inequalities suffered by people in his area and was even liked by many that did not adhere to his political stance. As for the Democratic Left, its candidate held a ministry position in the Rainbow Coalition and was accredited with moderating the more conservative policy proposals that had been put forward by Fine Gael over the last three years. In the more affluent areas of the electorate the vote seemed to be evenly divided between Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, with Fine Gael running a close third. As the major partner in the Rainbow Coalition government, Fine Gael were not receiving the support from the electorate that

158 Issues in Environmental Research they had counted on due to the success of the joint Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrat campaign mounted against them in the previous weeks. Unfortunately for Eileen, early results showed that she had only managed to capture three percent of the vote where she had hoped to achieve at least five. While she still held, at that time, some hope of succeeding on second and third preferences, she was disappointed that her reception while canvassing in the constituency had not translated into first preference votes at the polling booths.

Early reports on the radio that day suggested that the rest of the Green Party had fared no better than Eileen. It was becoming apparent that the vote had polarised between the two major political coalitions and this had left the smaller parties, such as the Greens, largely on the margins. The Greens were particularly disappointed, as this was the first time that they had fielded a candidate in each of the twenty-six counties of the Republic. Obviously, many of them were running simply to improve the Party’s profile in their areas and had no real expectations of success. However, as the campaign intensified, Party members had become progressively more optimistic. Opinion polls had consistently shown them at four percent in rural areas and five percent within the Dublin constituencies. If this had proved accurate then the Party would have been likely to win three to four seats within Dublin alone and this had forced the local groups and candidates in marginal seats to take the campaign very seriously indeed. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Throughout the day Patricia and Eileen were in constant touch with the other candidates and, as the news of the Party’s performance in the election filtered in from around the Republic, their mood went from disappointment to disbelief. It became apparent that the Greens had only achieved three percent in the Dublin region and slightly under that in the rural constituencies. When the Party faithful met at Devitt’s Hotel later that evening to watch the final round of preference counting, the Party had clearly failed to take three of the five seats in which they felt certain of victory and had only narrowly managed to retain the one seat that they already had in the Dáil. There was, however, some cause for optimism as Paul from Dublin South East had won a seat from the Progressive Democrat incumbent in that constituency. The Party would have to wait until a recount was completed before the seat could be officially claimed, but it was only a formality by the end of the night. As mentioned above, Eileen had only managed to garner three percent of the vote in Dublin South West. She had decided not to attend the watching of the final count that night as the campaign had been a tiring and stressful time for her and all she wanted to do was to go home and sleep for a couple of days. When I talked to her a week later, she had recovered to a great extent and was philosophical about the result of the election. She felt that she had run the best campaign she was able to given the resources at her disposal and the time available. According to her, it had all been a success anyway as the electorate in the area had been introduced to the Party for the first time. Whoever the local Green candidate was in the next election, he or she would be able to build upon the ground that Eileen had prepared that year and would have a better chance of success because of it. Patrick, although disappointed at not gaining a seat in the Dáil, was happy that he and his group had run an excellent campaign and had done the best that they could. He had proceeded quite well through the first four rounds of counting, but had lost his race in the fifth when he failed to achieve the minimum amount of preference votes needed to see him through to the next round. While

159 Issues in Environmental Research his share of primary votes was well above the national average for the Party, it appears that he also polled quite well in the lower preference votes. After he exited the contest, his preferences were crucial to the other candidates for seats in his constituency and he honestly felt that, had he made the next round, he would have succeeded in his bid for a seat in the Dáil. His one complaint was that the section of the community that he had appealed to most did not vote at all. Here he was referring to the younger voters and the wide spread support within the constituency that he had received from them. Unfortunately, as mentioned previously, many people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five had become so disillusioned with the political process within the Republic that they had not even bothered to enrol themselves in the electoral lists. Not surprisingly, he was convinced that this had seriously affected his chances of success as he had always felt that that age group was most likely to be open-minded about the Green agenda.

Joe was the most disappointed of the three but also felt that he and the Dublin South group had done the best they could. With his regular appearances in the Dublin media throughout the campaign, and the level of speculation about his chances in both the media and the constituency, Joe’s candidacy had seemed nearly certain of success. Added to this was the volatile nature of his constituency and the fact that they had previously voted in the first Green candidate to have reached the Dáil. Unfortunately, the mainstream party candidates in the constituency had managed to brand Joe as an animal rights activist and this had not been received well by the general public. While the Green message was well received throughout the electorate, many within it seemed to remain sceptical of Joe and this was confirmed when he only managed to achieve six percent of the primary vote. Thus, the day of the election had come and gone and the Greens, although having achieved the most successful election result in their short history as political party, went home disappointed. During the following three months that I stayed in Ireland, the Party engaged in much self-examination about the successes and failures of the campaign. The issues raised by their experiences of the election were analysed openly and honestly in an attempt to build upon the Party’s strengths and improve upon its weaknesses. In the meantime, the Party emerged from its sense of depression about the opportunities lost in the campaign and started to realise that it now had twice the level of representation in the Dáil than it had ever had in the past. As time went on they began to see themselves not just as a group of concerned citizens fighting an uphill battle against overwhelming odds, but as an emerging force on the Irish political scene with the potential to bring about real social change. By the time that I left Ireland, the Party was already in the throws of renewing itself and had just adopted a new constitution that rationalised its decision making processes, allowing it to become more unified in its approach to policy development and the recruitment of new members.

Conclusion:

Throughout the account I have based my discussion and analysis on several simple questions concerning the active membership of the Party. The first and most obvious question to be asked is who are the Irish Greens? As a starting point, we may see the Greens as people expressing their concerns about the world in which they live through environmentalism. In this historical context, environmentalism has become the paradigm

160 Issues in Environmental Research through which they have been able to give voice to their hopes for, and fears about, the future while creating a framework in which to address the problems they see to be undermining their society. The purpose of this process is to translate the hopes that they hold into feasible ideas for a future direction. Brosius declares that environmentalism is “a rich site of cultural production” (1999: 277), and so we may see the Irish Greens as producers of a new kind of cultural knowledge that strives to go beyond the established models of left and right mainstream politics, models which the Greens assert are deeply rooted in the destructiveness of industrialism and utilitarianism. Instead the Greens propagate a view of the world in which a ‘healthy physical environment’ is a prerequisite for the overall health of the society which lives within its bounds. The twin notions of a ‘healthy’ environment and a ‘healthy’ society are critical to the Greens thinking. I believe that the best way to understand the Greens in their role as knowledge producers is to perceive them as an intellectual community formed around the concept and values of environmentalism. It is for this reason that I have made the discussion of the place of intellectuals in society, and the various functions they perform within it, a theme running throughout the thesis. The reason for my choice of Holub’s Gramscian based discussion of the traditional and organic intellectual was two-fold. Obviously, one of the hazards of introducing a broad category such as that of the intellectual into an ethnographically based dissertation such as this is the sheer scope of the concept. Therefore I searched for a discussion of the intellectual that best suited the context of my research. I was attracted to Holub’s thoughts in this area because, being grounded in Gramsci’s theory, her discussion was class based and enabled me to understand the Greens as a middle class movement creating its theory and practice in the context of late capitalism. In addition, it also allowed me to discuss them as a community of individuals, each becoming Green in their own way and with their own relationship with the other intellectual communities that they were in contact with. In this way I have tried to portray them as complex individuals who often played several different roles as intellectuals simultaneously in their private and Party lives. Thus, I approached the Greens as a group not in isolation but in full participation with the other intellectual communities of the day. As I have explained in Chapter Two, the notion of the intellectual employed in this dissertation is that of the cultural and ideological producer and, as such, the Greens participated in intellectual communities concerned with many different kinds of knowledge production. For example, the focus of these communities ranged from science to holistic medicine and from political theory to the local council. Individual members could be engaged in such varying issues as animal rights, vegetarianism, anti-discrimination legislation, anti- pollution campaigns, campaigns against specific developments and reformation of town planning laws all at the same time. With each of these groups generating their own form of intellectual community with links to others and the many questions of national politics still to be taken into consideration, it would indeed be misleading to consider the Irish Greens as anything other than energetic participants in Ireland’s intellectual life.

The Greens’ notion of what constitutes an environment and society which will ensure the continuance of life in a viable form is complex. Given the material presented in this thesis, I believe that the Greens have not yet themselves reached a consensus on this and perhaps they never will. But it is possible to gain an insight into their thinking by recalling what they do not want in a Green society. At the risk of painting with too broad

161 Issues in Environmental Research a brush, the Greens do not want unthinking industrial development and the attendant problems of pollution and toxicity that come with it. They do not want an ethic of accumulation for the sake of accumulation, which they see as pitting each group within their society against the others and fuelling the excessive competition which undermines communal activity. Finally, while they wish to applaud and reward personal initiative, they do not want a society in which those in need go wanting for the most basic necessities while those who can, spend their wealth in pursuit of an ever increasing array of commodities that they do not need and whose production brings harm to the physical world upon which they depend. They desire a form of production and consumption which will ensure the continuity of life on Earth itself, a form of human existence rich in personal and communal/collective meaning, and a form of political life which is profoundly democratic. Hence they desire a different kind of human economy and a different kind of political culture to that which currently prevails. Some may paint them as impractical utopians but the Greens themselves assert that they are the realists in terms of diagnosis and in terms of solutions to pressing and dangerous dilemmas.

The Greens are in search of a better way to live and a better way to organise Irish society. They wish to transcend the current economic and political arguments and practices, which they see as being dependent on industrial and consumerist explanations of environmental and social problems. They want to introduce a new logic contained within the discourse of environmentalism. For them, this represents a ‘common sense’ approach in which a sustainable environment must underpin any new direction in social and economic development. In relation to this idea of ‘common sense’, I have striven to understand it in the way in which it is seen by the Greens themselves. I have tried to convey to the reader the Greens’ own sense of urgency and passion about the way they feel the world is heading and the many different ways in which this direction could be changed for the better. For the Greens, it is only common sense that it is a bad thing to pollute the environment which we depend upon for our present and continued existence. The Green notion of common sense also firmly links the inability to properly manage environmental affairs with the inability to solve social and economic problems. Therefore, it can not be stated strongly enough that the Greens approach to, and notion of what makes common sense is one that is holistic and systemic. They see the social and the environmental as interlinked in a series of interchanges in which one has a direct bearing on the wellbeing of the other. They have extended the ‘eco-system’ concept to include social dimensions of human activity.

The way they have done this is apparent in their policies ranging from child-care to education, employment to social security and from health to the environment. In this context, ‘a healthy environment’ means far more than the current state of the physical surrounds. The Greens are profoundly concerned with established social and economic arrangements in Ireland, but their angle of vision is from the vantage point of the environment. It is this which separates them from the established labour movement/working class movement. The Greens campaign for a balance between the environmental and the social in which people are to be educated to value environmental stability as much as they now value economic growth. They state that they are not opposed to the market economy but Green thinking does imply a different kind of

162 Issues in Environmental Research economy. Although much of their energies are spent educating the public about the dangers of seeing the environment as merely a set of resources for the economy, they are equally concerned with educating the public about the importance of community and commonality. This is where, as I see it, the emergent ideology of environmentalism takes on its true significance. To be more specific, I feel that there are central elements of this emergent ideology. The Greens see industrialism as a toxic process and, as such, are concerned to redress its harmful effects. They place great emphasis on expanding and deepening existing democratic processes and they hope to achieve this to some extent by a radical decentralisation of power. They also champion the importance of education and see themselves largely as educators. Hence, education is a primary Party activity and one which they hope to engage in on a national level. In addition, communality and collective purpose are highly valued by the Greens and this is, in turn, informed by their foundation belief in the importance of environmental stability. Thus, they are strongly opposed to rampant consumerism and unbridled economic growth. The Greens believe that the threat posed by modern socio-economic structures and industrialism constitute a common danger to all people in all places, whether they realise it or not. That is why much of their literature and their public speeches can be interpreted as an invitation to join an increasingly numerous community of citizens concerned with finding ways to deal with this threat before it is beyond human control. It is also the reason why the Irish Greens had reached only partial agreement on many important issues at the time of my research. The level and frequency of debate within the Party on many issues did not affect its overall integrity because there was consensus on the need to act and the reasons informing this need.

The ability of the Party to maintain its integrity while not smothering internal debate is aided by the decentralised nature of its organisational structure. At the heart of this structure lie the local groups and it is within these local groups that the essence of the Party can be found. Local group meetings are informal affairs that are, more often than not, held in a corner of a local pub with the hubbub of the other patrons constantly in the background. It is at these meetings that the members of the Irish Greens engage in lively and informed debate about the world in which they live. Questions of science, technology, social theory, national events and local council matters are all raised and argued with equal vigour in this setting. It is in the local group that the basic commitment to the Party is fostered along side a commitment to each other. The efficacy of this institution within the Party was revealed during the election campaign when local groups went out night after night armed with leaflets, good intentions and much determination in the attempt to win over more votes for their cause. Although there was some degree of central planning, especially during the election campaign, each local group worked its own constituency utilising all the resources they could muster. It is important to note again that the Irish Greens were and are not professional politicians and enjoy none of the advantages of the other older parties that have strong roots in pre-Civil War and Civil War politics. This meant that, especially on the campaign trail, they lacked the tradition and pedigree of their main competitors. In the context of Irish political culture this was more of a disadvantage than it would seem, primarily because traditional family ties to political parties in Ireland run very deep indeed. Thus, regardless of only attracting around three and a half percent of the vote, the electoral success of the local groups in

163 Issues in Environmental Research their various constituencies was remarkable. They achieved previously unheard of publicity during the campaign and there was even serious speculation, right up until the eve of the election, that they would gain enough seats throughout the Republic to enter into a coalition with one of the mainstream parties and, so, form a government. Thus, on the one hand a gain of a single seat in the Dáil seems a poor reward for the effort taken to mount a national election campaign but, on the other hand, the inclusion of the Green Party as a serious contender in Irish politics is certainly a remarkable achievement. It is one that will bear fruit in years to come.

In this respect, they have proven themselves successful in their role as educators and they have done this through the use of an environmental discourse which, while borrowing much from the general discourse of western environmental movements, is becoming more specific to the Irish context over time. As Peace notes in his 1993 article, the environmental movement in Ireland was moulded to a large extent by the need to counter the policies of the Industrial Development Authority and the tacit approval of these policies by both successive governments of the day and the Irish Planning Board (An Bord Pleanála). Thus the environmental movement in Ireland has developed a discourse which emphasises the need for community and individual choice in opposition to the seductive reassurances of multinational companies engaged in profit making with the full and open support of the government of the day. As we have seen in what I described as ‘the Kilmeanagh landfill dispute’, the Green Party has shown itself to be the only party with the political will to champion the rights of local people and the environment against the ethos of industrial progress endemic in the government bureaucracy at all but the lowest levels. That they have been able to do this with some measure of success is a testament of their capacity to understand the discourse of science and technology used by their adversaries and to utilise it within their own discourse in defence of the environment. However, even withstanding the successes of the environmental movement in general and the Green Party in particular; the majority of people in the Republic remain less concerned about environmental advocacy than they are about matters relating to employment, welfare and taxation which they consider are more immediately pressing. Hence, perceptions were mixed regarding the way in which the Party was seen by the general public. While there were small pockets of strong support in some urban areas, mostly in central and southern Dublin, many who would otherwise have supported them gave their vote to one or another mainstream party as they believed the Greens to be too small a party to effect national political trends. Similarly, Irish politics has such a strong local emphasis that many people were keen to elect the candidate with the most political clout in their constituency.

As discussed within the study, in a political and cultural climate where politicians are seen primarily in the role of facilitators and intermediaries between the people and the bureaucracy, constituencies electing a member of the Green Party to represent them were likely to be putting themselves at a disadvantage regarding the allocation of government resources to their area. This is particularly true of rural areas in which there was much scepticism about the ability of the Greens to address rural problems. Of the two seats the Greens held after the 1997 elections, none of them were in rural areas and there was no serious threat mounted by any rural local group to the established mainstream parties.

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Rural Ireland remained, at that time, firmly in the grip of the Civil War parties even though the divisions between them have long since ceased to be ideological. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the single seat gained in the elections of that year was the most affluent constituency in the Republic. Those who live there have enough political and economic strength of their own to ensure that their rights are upheld, so perhaps they are willing to take a chance on a candidate from a party dedicated to pursuing environmental issues. Since my fieldwork was undertaken in 1997, the Irish Green Party has had further success at the polls. In 2002 national elections were once again held and the Green Party gained four seats for a total of six in the Dáil. The constituencies they now represent in the Dáil are Dublin North, Dublin South East (which were previously held by the Party), Dublin South, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin Mid West and Cork South Central. These electoral gains are no small achievement and attest to the growing popularity of the Green message in Ireland. They also represent a political coming of age for the Irish Green Party as any Party with six seats in the Dáil, from a possible one hundred and sixty-six, is a significant force in Irish politics.

I have no first hand knowledge to relate regarding the changes within the Party itself since 1997. However, I do know that the constitution that was still being debated after the elections in 1997 was accepted by the Party later that year and this has had significant effects upon the Party’s structure. The Party now has an official Party Leader and Deputy Leader. Also, in addition to the structures discussed in this thesis, the Party has also brought into being Dáil Constituency Groups (DCGs) whose function is to meet four times a years to discuss and adopt policy. Clearly, any discussion of the effects of these new Party institutions here would be speculation on my part, but I do feel it is reasonable to say that the Party seems to have restructured itself in a way that is more recognisably in keeping with the mainstream parties of Irish politics. This suggests an interesting direction for further research on the Irish Greens. In addition, an investigation of the Party’s trajectory from having a single elected representative from 1989-1997 to holding six seats in 2002 would provide an opportunity to further develop many of the themes discussed in this study. I would be particularly interested to investigate whether or not what I have described as an emergent ideology within the Greens has become more solidified, or recognisable, during the years after my fieldwork was completed. Also, I submit that a further study of the way in which the discourse of the Irish Greens had evolved from that of the pre-Green environmental movement to that of a significant force in mainstream Irish politics would be of interest to any scholar interested in the study of western Green movements. Lastly, new research on the Irish Greens would be invaluable for a greater understanding of the way in which environmentalists create and maintain identity. In any further research concerning the Irish Greens it may be necessary not only to ask ‘who are the Greens?’ but also ‘what are they becoming’?

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Goodin, R. (1992) Green Political Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Goodwillie, J. (1988) Colours in the Rainbow: Ecology, Socialism and Ireland. Dublin: Green Party/Comhaontas Glas Green Party (1997) Manifesto: Green Party/Comhaontas Glas. Dublin: Green Party/Comhaontas Glas. Harre, R., Brockmeier, J. & Mulhausler, P. (1999) Greenspeak: A Study of Environmental Discourse. London: Sage Publications. Holub, R. (1992) Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Hornborg, A. (1998b) ‘Towards an Ecological Theory of Unequal Exchange: Articulating World-System Theory and Ecological Economics’. Ecological Economics 25: 127- 36 (1999) ‘Money and the Semiotics of Ecosystem Dissolution’. Journal of Material Culture 4(2). [AH] Ingold, T. (1992) ‘Culture and the Perception of the Environment’, in E. Croll, and D. Parkin, (eds) Bush Base: Forest Farm: Culture, Environment and Development. London: Routledge. Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1987) The End of Organized Capital. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Lukes, S. (1974) Power: A Radical Approach. Basingstoke: McMillan McQueen, H. (2001) The Essence of Capitalism: The Origins of our Future. Sydney: Hodder Headline Australia Pty Limited. Macdonell, D. (1986) Theories of Discourse: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Marcus, G and Fischer, M. (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Melucci, A. (1992) ‘Liberation or Meaning? Social Movements, Culture and Democracy’, Development and Change, Vol. 23, No. 3: 43-77. Milner, A. (1999) Class. London: Sage Publications. Milton, K. (1993) (ed) Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology. London: Routledge. (1996) Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthropology in Environmental Discourse. New York: Routledge. Nash, J. (1981) ‘Ethnographic aspects of the world capitalist system’. Annual Review of Anthropology 10: 393-429. nd O’Riordan, T. (1981) Environmentalism (2 Edition). London: Pion. O’Toole, F (1997) Lie of the Land: Irish Identities. London: Verso. Peace, A. (1993) ‘Environmental Protest, Bureaucratic Closure: The Politics of Discourse in Rural Ireland’, in K. Milton (ed.) Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge. (1996) ‘Loggers are Environmentalists Too: Towards an Ethnography of Environmental Discourse’. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 7:1, 43-66. (1997) A Time of Reckoning: The Politics of Discourse in Rural Ireland. Memorial University of Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic Research. (1999) ‘Anatomy of a Blockade: Towards an Ethnography of Environmental Discourse (2), Rural New South Wales 1996’. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 10:2, 144- 162.

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(2001) A World of Fine Difference: The Social Architecture of a Modern Irish Village. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Roche, D. (1982) Local Government in Ireland. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Rosaldo, R. (1989) Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Rudig, W. (ed) (1990) Green Politics One. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Saurin, J. (1993) ‘Global Environmental Degradation, Modernity and Environmental Knowledge’, Environmental Politics 2(4): 46-64. Skogen, K. (1996) ‘Young Environmentalists: Post-Modern Identities or Middle-Class Culture’. The Sociological Review, 44(3): 452-473. (1998) ‘A Touch of Class: The Persistence of Class Cultures among Norwegian Youth’, Young – Nordic Journal of Youth Research, Acta Sociologica, 42: 139-223. (1999b) Cultures and Natures: Cultural Patterns, Environmental Orientations and Outdoor Recreation Practices among Norwegian Youth. (Dr Thesis) Nova-Rapport 16/99, Oslo: Norsk Institutt for Forskning om Oppvekst, Velfed og Aldring. Strandbu, A. and Krange, O. (2003) ‘Youth and the Environmental Movement – Symbolic Inclusions and Exclusions’. The Sociological Review, 51(2): 177-198. Torfing, Jacob. (1999) New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe, and Zizek. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Tsing, A. (1993) In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World-system: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. (1979) The Capitalist World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1980) The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600-1750. New York: Academic Press. List of Abbreviations: CGM Cork Green Movement CNIAG Cork Noxious Industry Action Group DCU Dublin College University DLP Democratic Labour Party DRC Dublin Regional Council EOLAS Gaelic acronym for the Irish Science and Technology Agency ETF Election Taskforce FoE Friends of the Earth GANG Green Action Now Group GBI Guaranteed Basic Income IDA Industrial Development Authority PDs Progressive Democrats TD Teachta Dala (Member of the Irish Parliament-Dáil) UCD University College of Dublin UCG University of Galway WVPA Womanagh Valley Protection Association ______

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Issues in Environmental Research II: Understanding Environmentalism in Ireland Liam Leonard PhD, School of Political Science and Sociology and Social Science Research Centre, National University of Ireland Galway (2001-2008) and Sligo Institute of Technology (from 2008).

Introduction:

This section will include research undertaken on ecological modernisation for my master’ thesis in 1999, as well as articles on environmental issues I have written since that time. It also includes a number of newspaper articles I published as a political commentator in the Galway press. These articles represent the various outlets and methodologies I employed as part of my wider environmental research and political activism during that time. I begin with an examination of Irish environmental policy. The extent to which ecological modernisation presents opportunities for increased environmental management capabilities while localised environmental movement activism achieves a degree of leverage or exclusion through attempts to exploit discursive and political opportunities is revealed. To develop further understandings of the overall political frameworks surrounding environmentalism an examination of state or corporate strategies, agendas and responses will be presented. The reconfiguration of Irish environmental politics as these issues emerge from their initial social, political or economic focus is also outlined. Here, environmentalism has come to be represented through the broad spectrum of ecological management initiatives or justice movements. In the process, forms of ecological capital are revealed as intrinsic elements of an overall ecological debate, one which now focuses on the perils of climate change. Recently, the economic imperative has been redefined as bad planning and led to centralisation and demographic concentrations around Dublin. One consequence of this has been the growth in infrastructural projects which are being built to facilitate industry and create urban commuter flows around the country. Recent heritage campaigns at the Glen of the Downs, Carrickmines and Tara have occurred in response to the state’s road building agenda. Among other campaigns about heritage include the dispute which occurred at Mullaghmore in County Clare in the previous decade. There is a link between these campaigns and the protests of rural communities in Wexford, Cork, Meath, Galway and Mayo to other infrastructural projects of the multinational or state sector, including campaigns against Nuclear Power at Carnsore Point in the late 1970s, against incineration in the 1990s and the ongoing campaigns of Shell to Sea in Mayo (Leonard Politics Inflamed 2005, Green Nation 2006, the Environmental Movement in Ireland 2008). In order to develop this research further, I have applied certain methodological approaches. For many scholars, a research method becomes the defining link between internal ideologies and external networks. As such, research methods play a significant role in the development of internal monologues, creating an underlying praxis which facilitates that most crucial aspect of academics which is formulated on the palette of debate, peer review, response and wider expression through publication and debate.

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In my own research, I have tended to utilise a case study methodological approach. This has facilitated my own socio-political and historical perspectives and allows me to review and analyse current and past events within an overall theoretical framework. My understanding of the merits of a case study methodology has been facilitated by Andrew Szasz whose book Ecopopulism (1994) provides a discussion of his concept of an ‘issue history’ which represents an attempt to understand events from a wider cultural and historical viewpoint. Invariably, my research has attempted to address that area where communities, institutions and economy interact through an examination of changes in Irish or global society from the perspective of environmentalism and social movement theory. This facilitated a ‘bottom up’ approach to the study of social and political change and allows me to open up my own and my student’s work to a wide range of ideological or methodological perspectives including feminism, Marxism, environmentalism, peace studies, globalisation, development studies ethnic and gender rights.

I was also able to develop my concept of ‘rural sentiment’ (Leonard 2006, 2008) from my analysis of existing literature on rural change in Irish sociology (Varley and Curtin, Commins 1986 and Peace 1997). In so doing I feel I was able to address the rural basis for environmental movements in the Irish case and thread together what had been perceived as a random series of local protests into the first real attempt to understand these events as ‘the Irish environmental movement’. I am also indebted to both John Barry and Chris Rootes, and so many others, for providing such a wealth of material on environmental justice as both a concept and a movement and for their encouragement along the way. I also wish to acknowledge my colleagues at the Department of Politics and Sociology at NUI Galway, as well as the Environmental Change Institute, the Social Science Research Centre and the Sustainability Research Network. The first environmental study undertaken as part of my research was for the M.Phil in Irish Studies at NUIG in 1999. This work, entitled Ecoloiacht na hÉireann: Environmental Policy in Ireland, examined the emergence of Irish environmental policy within the context of the European Union and included comparative studies with British and Dutch environmental policy styles. The study also included a study of attitudes to the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme (REPS). From this work I garnered a good understanding of the problems facing the Irish environmental sector and the gap between rural communities and European bureaucrats in the policy process. This information would provide me with the knowledge and momentum to write the groundbreaking book Green Nation: the Irish Environmental Movement from Carnsore Point to the Rossport 5 in 2006, the first academic book which theorised the environmental movement in Ireland from a theoretical, philosophical and applied perspectives. I have included the largely hitherto fore unpublished material from Ecoloiacht na hÉireann here in order to underpin this study of activism in a wider context.

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Chapter 1. Ecoloiacht na hÉireann: Irish Environmental Policy:

Ecological Modernisation: Introduction

The increasing trend towards sustainable development has seen a shift from ‘end of pipe solutions’ to the ongoing threat of pollution. Policy makers have come to accept the need for some form of inbuilt environmental standards to be included in any overall planning strategy. These shifts come in the wake of the Brundtland Report and the Rio World Summit. They have also shaped environmental policy. A central feature of this new thinking is the theory of ‘Ecological Modernisation’ (EM). Underpinning this debate are the theorists Janicke, Weale and Hajer, who have each contributed to the conceptualisation of EM as a feature of modern society. It can be argued that EM theory reflects a critical new positioning of the environmental debate, moving away from the periphery of social, cultural and political channels and becoming an important aspect of policy planning in these areas.

There has been a marked increase in trends towards the restructuring of Western economies with a view to improving environmental standards. Central to this strategy is the concept of EM, first identified by the German writers Janicke and Hajer in the early 1980s. EM is based on the idea of sustainable development becoming a central feature of future policy processes; to do this ecological factors must become an integral part of social, cultural and industrial planning. Environmental efficiency and lifestyle benefits should be highlighted as the ultimate rewards for embarking on new, eco-modernist approaches to national and global problems.

However, EM has become the subject of criticism from many of the more radical environmental groups who fear that ecological modernisation will be used as a ‘catch-all’ for ecological policy while, in reality, many issues on the environmental agenda remain unresolved. One result of this debate has been the spread of shifting ideologies within the movement out of which the ‘light’ and ‘dark’ green camps have been established. Within these new paradigms an accommodation of environmental concerns must be identified from the wide range of actors involved including those in wider society sympathetic to environmentalists’ ideas. The state agencies and corporate institutions who shape and act on environmental policy must also use these new paradigms.

With this in mind ecological activists argue that policy must be measured in relation to its impact on both local and global situations. If EM holds out the promise of a step forward from an existing ecological consciousness and as a detrimental factor within active society, rather than as a peripheral player, it can only do so by confronting the dichotomy between these two apparently irreconcilable opposites. When policy leans towards technocrats the possibilities for EM diminish in direct proportion to its place in the inherent motivations of a consumerist fuelled, ever expanding society which demands more productivity despite the increased ecological damage inflicted by this productivity.

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Beck has written about and led an examination of EM’s role in the ecological movement. Janicke has proposed a theory that a stable democracy is a vital condition of an environmental policy being implemented. Hajer presents a discourse in relation to institutional change and Weale investigates how a new political approach has grown around the ecological agenda.

EM, Sustainable Development and the Bruntland Report:

Ecological Modernisation is an alternative conceptual approach to what were previously seen as costs and benefits of effects on the environment and is presented as an integral part of the planning process. Costs were shown to be beneficial as they would outweigh future costs of repairing the damage caused by pollution. This approach coincided with a new, consumer-driven demand for eco-friendly goods that arose in the 1980s. At a policy level EM has been used to help forge new and co-ordinated approaches to what were seen as problems facing the differing strata of bureaucracy. Inefficient approaches to these problems led to a crisis in legitimacy and regulatory failure. The eco-modernist discourse has provided a fresh approach or what Weale calls a ‘new politics of pollution’ aimed at harmonising previously competing actors with an improved societal arrangement as the reward.

Recent debates on ecological approaches have been influenced by an acceptance in certain political and economic quarters that free market forces, left unchecked, could damage the environment in a costly and permanent way. Following analysis in the 1970s, such as the paper issued by the Club of Rome on the ‘Limits to Growth’ a report titled ‘Our Common Future’ was released by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). The paper became known as the ‘Brundtland Report’. In its definition of sustainable development the Brundtland Report describes the need to implement plans for ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (Our Common Future 1987 p. 43). Its objectives were to become a crucial factor in ecological debates. It included policy measures such as reviving growth, meeting job levels linked with food, energy, water and sanitation needs, maintaining population figures at sustainable levels and most importantly from an environmental perspective, linking economic and technological planning as an integral part of any policy development. This relationship has become an important aspect of ecological theory and has had an impact on environmental thinking.

Questions of Legitimacy in Democratic Institutions:

In order for environmental policies to be successfully implemented a stable democracy must be in existence. To support this argument one could cite the failures of right wing dictatorships such as Portugal, Spain, Greece and former Eastern Bloc Countries on maintaining any form of pollution control. Central to this fact is the dichotomy between economic expansion and the need to restructure social mores around ecologically friendly strategies. The list of criteria vital to the Green movement, if it wishes to make serious gains on the policy front, was set by Janicke (M. Janicke 1997). His list includes a

172 Issues in Environmental Research pluralist, democratically elected parliamentary system, civil rights, free media and an enquiring, well funded science programme. By contrasting the environmental performance of Western democracies with the former authoritarian states Janicke provides the evidence which suggests strong links between factors of wealth, gross national product (GNP) per capita and success in policies dealing with such problems as sulphur dioxide emissions or attempts at recycling. Studies also point to the fact that while developed nations’ higher standard of living created more pollution, these states invariably have the means of dealing more efficiently with such problems. Links are also found in standards of education and resulting lifestyle changes which create an environmentally minded consciousness within these sections of society.

There is little evidence of policy achievements in environmental matters being related to left wing, liberal or conservative parties being in government. However, these governments would acknowledge the importance of the European Parliament’s (EU) overall environmental agenda. This emphasises the need for an open policy process so that small parties and non-government operatives (NGOs) have access. Strong information systems and ongoing education are crucially important to policy successes. Studies have also shown the need for well structured ecological pressure groups and full time environmental agencies, referred to by Janicke as ‘a kind of eco-corporatism’ (M. Janicke 1997 p. 75 from Lafferty and Meadowcroft). Janicke also emphasises the findings of repeated studies which underline the need for cross-sector policy cooperation and to establish links between the various strata of corporatist bureaucracy. In effect, these studies detail the knock-on benefits of creating a culture of consensus politics in which the ensuing atmosphere of shared aims and goals becomes conducive to the creation of an ecologically-minded consciousness at an institutional level.

It is the parameters of open political structures coupled with freedom of information which underpin much of what Janicke considers the necessary criteria for successful EM policy with EM positioned within the actual dynamic of social structures rather than as an agitator on the periphery. Technological and bureaucratic efficiency becomes central to the creation of any new society that wishes to overhaul its environmental performance. Society is called on to reclaim some of the responsibilities which have been left to a cumbersome central government with the elimination of wasteful production being sold to industry as an indicator of ecological and efficient productivity while new pressure groups and a global media take on roles as environmental watchdogs beyond the nation state’s capacity. This emphasis on a civic participatory response to the crisis of legitimacy experienced by Western governments is central to Janicke’s views on World Environmental Capacity (M. Janicke 1997) in the face of regulatory failure.

EM theory has been built around the view that political modernisation comes through society’s response to and capacity to deal with the crises it encounters. From an environmental point of view the response by Western nations to the oil crisis of the 1970s and the corresponding economic slump led to the questioning of growth and consumption levels and ultimately opened the door at policy level to environmentalists who had previously been seen as an extreme group on the margins. Environmentalists placed a great emphasis on the need to increase levels of civic participation while simultaneously

173 Issues in Environmental Research presenting an integrated departmental response from government. Access to planning through decentralisation and judicial challenges to emergent policies are examples of such measures which stemmed from the necessary response to state failure. The restructuring of conflicting bureaucratic departments which dealt with ecological matters was backed up by an agenda of concerted pressure groups and is also central to Janicke’s theory of environmental policy as an integral part of capacity building. The onset of the ‘communications age’ driven by information technology is seen as a source of further potential for environmental capacity as yet neglected (ibid). It is here as well as in improved participation and bureaucratic integration that the potential for successful environmental policy implementation is seen, in both short and long term (ibid).

Regulatory Discourse Theory:

The Brundtland Report of 1987 was the catalyst for introducing the concept of sustainable development and was successful, despite the difficulties presented by the fractious nature of this form of social planning. In a parallel with Janicke, Hajer outlines environmental policy regulation as a central feature of the current ecological debate. This policy is seen as the institutional bureaucracy of the state with social constructivism and discourse analysis replacing the direct activism of the 1970s radical environmentalism. These changes reflect the acceptance of a policy led approach to implementing radical reforms, that is to say, activism from within rather than protest on the periphery of society. Within this conceptualisation is the thought that institutional arrangements must be both proactive and reflexive, the results of which are tested in the public domain through debate and investigation. The dominant paradigm in this shift in the ecological debate is EM. In the 1990s in relation to policy and institutional change ecological planning became an aspect of the response of the member states of the OECD to the crisis of legitimacy and state regulatory failure. This led in part to the anticipatory future vision which is inherent in ecological policy playing a part in the creation of overall policy by first predicting the most likely conflicts and their resultant scenarios (ibid). The links between technological and scientific innovation and the flexible nature of ecological policy responses are examples of how current and future discourse between institutions, government agencies and ecologists will shape ongoing environmental regulations. They are linked by a common origin of necessity and, together with an outward looking dynamic, focused on the future. These ongoing impulses are rejuvenated by a continuing reflexivity that provides the opportunity for ecological policy to take on a greater significance in the face of rapid technological changes and their spin-off ecological impact. This can be achieved by an analysis of social forces or by ‘providing the sign- post for action within these institutional practices’ (M. Hajer 1995 p. 264).

It is within this sphere that we can identify the trends that led to a transformation of the environmental situation leading to EM’s position as a policy determinant of once unbridgeable forces. This acceptance of a ‘plurality of discourses’ is reflected in EM’s emphasis on open government with integrated and ‘horizontal’ levels of dialogue between various agencies. ‘Policy discourse’ revolves around differing capacities within social structures which have influence on the shift towards new criteria such as anticipatory policy making and an emphasis on the fiscal lengths of environmentalism.

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Central to this is the concept that nature is a resource in itself, necessary to the public good, making it difficult for polluters to escape their responsibilities by a public now aware of its right to a clean environment. Hajer sees a major role for environmental groups in future policy making as an active third party between institutions and concerned civic groups. It would act in parallel with these actors, leave early environmental radicalism behind and move to what he describes as ‘reconsideration of existing participatory practices…based on the existence of a comprehensive environmental problem. EM acknowledges new actors…and shows itself in an opening up of the existing policy making practices’ (M. Hajer 1995 pp28, 29).

In acknowledging EM’s economic benefits and in emphasising the cost efficiency of environmental approaches ecological policy holds out the promise of an effective method of capturing the imagination of both institutional and corporate policy makers. This will place the ecological agenda in the corridors of power as well as the capitalist boardroom in a way which would have been inconceivable from previous green movement approaches. However, the pro-business acceptance of increased sustainable growth can put ecological policy makers at odds with ‘deep green’ environmental activists. Many ‘deep green’ activists feel that EM is a ploy to diffuse widespread ideological protest. It is a claim to which environmental policy lies open along with its acceptance of aspects of modern technological advances. Ultimately, it remains to be seen as to how effective any ecologically driven policy will be, bearing in mind the ever increasing capacity for global environmental disaster and the proliferation of nuclear arms in states with little or no political stability. Conversely, it is this very instability which places the potential of any ecological policy at the centre of Western democracies’ attempts to address both environmental and cultural questions.

Albert Weale: New Political Approaches:

Weale’s theories on Ecological Modernisation echo those of Hajer, particularly in relation to the role of creating new approaches to policy matters and in the resolution of democratic difficulties at both local and national levels. For Weale EM is an ideology within itself, able to draw on large scale support within the political spectrum. It is on this matter that a slight divergence of theory can be established between Weale and both Hajer and Janicke. Clearly, EM represents a new opportunity in the realm of diminishing social movements and could address the crisis of legitimacy being faced by all strata of the political spectrum. At the cusp of this ideal is the need to maintain a strong environmental ethic at the centre of the bureaucratic mechanism which drives policy, creating an ecological dynamic on two fronts at both institutional and activist levels. It is this distinctive feature that provides the theoretical conceptualisation of an overriding EM belief system within any policy determinants.

Weale highlighted these theories in his book The Politics of Pollution (A. Weale 1992). He acknowledges the distinction between civic activism and participation and regulatory bureaucracy which is a feature of pollution control policies in Western governments. In a parallel with both Hajer and Janicke, Weale sees the need to close the gap in relation to these strands of discourse within the ecological debate. He establishes the ‘post-welfare

175 Issues in Environmental Research state sector’ (ibid) nature of pollution controls, outside of traditional public spending. He outlines how the potential for disharmony between the market driven industrial and government agencies on the one hand and environmental policy makers on the other is avoided by the use of central policy initiatives such as taxes on polluters or even educational drives that effectively reclaim the element of control in the environmental debate. This in turn gives the appearance of a strong ecologically friendly system, led from above, which leaves no appearance of inter-departmental discord that could be seized upon as evidence of inaction by environmental radicals. There is, as a result, an ethic of professionalism in the field of environmental policy making which creates strong links with the scientific and technological experts, groups that are not noted for their radicalism. These interrelated factions may be a major determinant in the eventual creation of any regional environmental policy and ultimately shape that policy in such a way that original ecological theory cannot always anticipate.

Essentially there is a link between economic growth and the need to build environmental policy around increasing consumerism in Western society. In acknowledging this fact we see the advances that can be made from environmental policy which presents pollution control as a consumerist lifestyle choice, or in the extreme, as a luxury item which must be aspired to. By raising this consumerist ante the risks of alienating poorer nations must be acknowledged but the transglobal nature of pollution that often results in industrial nations relocating their heaviest polluting industries to Third World and Developing countries must also be accepted. These nations are often then left with a choice of alleviating want in their own countries or destroying their environments by accepting heavily polluting industries. However, the possibility of raising environmental standards to their highest capacity in the wealthiest countries, who are the largest consumers and the worst polluters, exists. This is a departure from Janicke’s notion that high standards of living and stable, liberal governments create the best potential for being of benefit if the global nature of the ecological crisis that reaches beyond the frontiers of the individual nation state is acknowledged.

The most important aspect of this concept is the need for technology to develop in a far sighted and efficient way, ever conscious of the environmental impact its expansion has and will have in the future. Without this, Hajer sees merit in radical ecologists who question what Timothy O’Riordan called ‘certain features of every aspect of the so called Western democratic (capitalist) culture – its motives, its aspirations, its institutions and performance and some of its achievements’ (T. O’Riordan 1983). This places Weale’s view of Ecological Modernisation on a very fine tightrope with radical analysis being used to reinforce the ecologists side of an EM/sustainable development ‘deal’; in effect, going forward with a policy paper in one hand and a ‘monkey-wrench’ in the other. Any environmental discourse remains open to the varying social forces which are part of a complex interplay between competing analyses, both green and technocratic. However, Weale remains optimistic in the outcome of this interplay due in part to what he describes as the ‘socio-cognitive dynamics of the discourse-coalition that shaped up around eco- modernist story lines’ (A. Weale 1992). In other words, by establishing an eco-modernist discourse in the heart of the policy debate environmental theorists have influenced the language of future debates creating an element of perpetuation in the way EM holds sway

176 Issues in Environmental Research as an established policy parameter. This ultimately results in a tendency towards more eco-sensitive and anticipatory implementation of policies and development overall.

Ulrick Beck & Risk Society:

Writing in Politics in an Age of Risk, Beck outlined some of the shifts in industrial society from a sustained productivity to the need of late, fragmented capitalism to dump dangerous industries and pollutants on developing nations in order to avoid Western consumerist protest and substantial costs in both fines and restoration of damaged sites (Beck 1995). Beck defines this transglobal ‘dumping’ ethic as a factor of ‘the Risk Society’ which created a divergence from the moral expectations implicit in such organisations as the United Nations choosing instead to reject established means of political interaction. This is linked closely with problems of regulatory failure and the crisis of legitimacy faced by Western Politics as free-market institutions and media groups move into the political void; therefore leading to a globalisation of environmental problems as precious structures set in place by the UN or other treaties become threatened by a ‘profit at all costs’ rationale.

Beck outlines the need for a political rejuvenation in the face of both new technological challenges and the growing tendency to favour the immediate needs over any ethical or visionary idea of social and global requirements. Science and technology have fuelled this process and buoyed up by the weakened state of institutional policy making have seen their advances tested and introduced with a decline in the regulatory tests or inspections. This led to an increase in trans-national pollution together with the establishment of many environmentally damaging industries in developing nations. In his article ‘Risk Society and the Provident State’ Beck details the ‘risks created by the momentum of innovation’ (Beck 1996) which seems to have gripped Western Society. He sees the shift from ‘Industrial’ to ‘Risk’ societies occurring when hazardous waste becomes uncontrollable and the dangers posed by this hazardous pollution becomes the centre of both public and private debate. Institutions still go through the motions of appearing to be in control of these situations but the influence of fear caused by the increased risk has come to dominate the mechanisms of society. Irresponsible and hazardous production has led to a crisis in the agencies charged with dealing with this explicit threat. Beck established the main reasons for this situation as stemming from a growth in the individualisation of society, the crisis of political legitimacy and the influence of technology on the environmental debate, part of what he sees as the flawed nature of EM.

Beck goes further in his condemnation of ‘the automatic operation of autonomous modernisation processes which are blind and deaf to consequence and dangers’. His fears for this form of ‘reflective modernisation’ are based on society’s inability to deal with risks it introduces. He goes on to describe ‘conflicts of accountability’ (ibid) which arise from the consequences of hazardous overproduction. These consequences are worth noting and include: large scale nuclear and chemical technology, genetic engineering, threats to the environment, the arms build up and the increasing impoverishment of humanity living outside the Western industrial society’ (Beck 1996). There is a need for

177 Issues in Environmental Research social change in relation to many emerging factors including how industrial society deals in the future with nature and indigenous cultures. Acknowledgement of the dangers of continuing hazardous overproduction which poses a threat to society and the environment in new and incomprehensible ways needs to be part of this social change. A restructuring of society, with a de-emphasising of the individualist basis of that society augmented by Western socio-political concepts such as the Welfare state, educational, labour and legal systems which are centred round the rights of the individual should be part of social change. The lack of any acknowledgement of the scale of risk to society inherent in any ongoing industrialisation and its corresponding institutional decline are central to Beck’s critique of both ‘reflexive’ and EM. Here Beck ultimately rejects the discourse between technology, politics and environmentalism presented by Janicke, Weale and Hajer on the basis that EM is modernism but it has overproduction and risk at its core.

Beck fears that EM will be another factor in the manufacturing of an acceptable image of what has become an experiment with the planet and its inhabitants in the name of profit and technological expansion. Furthermore, Beck sees a future of risks expounded by the attempts to deal with the dangers for society inherent in these risks with further technologies being engaged to confront risks presented by previous technologies; in effect, an endless cycle of ever increasing destruction in the name of progress and modernity. While these themes present a provocative and justifiable critique of the modernist ethic of linear expansion the alternative is never clearly spelt out. Beck’s view could be taken as a worst case scenario that presents a series of ‘no win’ analyses without any pragmatic or attainable subtexts. The discourse of EM with technological expansionism does, however, provide society with a detailed and attainable success in the policy field. This is needed in the immediate political future if environmental concerns are to maintain a foothold in the shifting political and societal arenas.

Conclusion:

The background to EM was examined through the writings of Janicke, Hajer and Weale. The links between the development of an EM ethic and institutional concerns about sustainable development, the crisis of legitimacy facing Western politics and the need to address bureaucratic regulatory failure provide the backdrop to most of this debate. Janicke’s arguments on the need for stable democratic structures have been outlined. Among the criteria listed he cites the need for pluralist, democratic governments with an activist ethic in civil and voluntary organisations to create the conditions necessary for the fundamental changes needed for a successful implementation of environmental policy. This is vital for Janicke if questions of legitimacy in democratic institutions are to be addressed.

The concepts of Hajer and Weale were explored to show the differing approaches these writers take to EM. These differences centre on Hajer’s regulatory approach to policy creation and implementation which contrasts with Weale’s view of EM’s ideological aspects. Essentially, Hajer promotes EM as a new form of political discourse which can facilitate a combination of sustainable development and controlled economic growth by presenting the benefits of environmental efficiency to the corporate sector. Taking his

178 Issues in Environmental Research cue from the Brundtland Report Hajer outlines the economic benefits of policy creation through a corporate-style approach bringing together government agencies, ecological NGOs and civic groups to work in tandem with the corporate industrialists who create much of society’s pollution.

Ultimately, this differs sharply with Weale’s view of Ecological Modernisation’s ideological potential as part of what he envisages as a ‘social learning’ capacity at social and cultural levels. It also differs with Hajer’s theory in relation to a shift in emphasis away from corporate and economic concerns placing, instead, a strong significance on the potential benefits of a process of re-education in both public and institutional arenas in regard to environmental matters. This takes into account new social dynamics and political movements such as green politics and ecological pressure groups. Weale sees a need for the interaction of these diverse strands to help shape future educational and policy minded approaches which he feels will need to confront the corporate sector rather than working in tandem with them - a form of acquiescence which Hajer explores. Weale wishes to ‘turn governments green’ by making environmentalism the new focal point of the policy process as opposed to its current place on the periphery. He sees the potential for this to be achieved by integrating the public participatory sector with a revamped political structure and both sectors taking an environmental ethic as their one determinant.

In response to these views Beck highlights the risks inherent in any eco-modernist approach. He sees this as a symptom of the ‘risk society’ where dangerous consequences are excused and reaffirmed by maintaining a technologically dominant approach to global structures. Beck details his theory of the ‘risk society’ as that which allows ongoing destruction and pollution to continue as society loses sight of basic ethical approaches to productivity dumping hazardous industries and the resulting pollution on developing nations. By allowing expansionist industries to use EM as an ‘eco friendly’ front Beck feels that modern environmentalist discourses could be doing great harm to future generations. Beck rejects modernisation out of hand from its Enlightenment roots to the current global environmental crisis. He sees the ultimate challenge facing society now as being based around the re-negotiation of social groups with environmental considerations leading the way for the future.

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Chapter 2: Environmental Policy Implementation: Introduction:

The ongoing shifts in environmental policy throughout Europe have been influenced to a large extent by ecological modernisation (EM) in its many aspects. The varieties of interpretations which have been constructed around EM are reflected in the fragmentary nature of current European policy responses. The indigenous problems of each member state, in turn, make any overall community policy in relation to the environment problematic and fraught with regional tensions. In The Implementation and Enforcement of European Community Environment Legislation Collins and Earnshaw (1992) point to the void between policy agreement and subsequent implementation, preceding the introduction of the Single European Act in 1987. While this Act gave certain legal guidelines regional variations have persisted.

While legislation is continually being introduced implementation remains sporadic. Collins and Earnshaw highlight some recent attempts by the Economic Community (EC) to increase policy realisation. These include the Fourth and Fifth Environmental Action Programmes which are statements in the Maastricht Treaty relating to the adoption into domestic law of EC directives and declarations such as that of the European Summit in Dublin n 1990 which states ‘Community environmental legislation will only be effective if it is fully implemented by member states’ (Collins and Earnshaw 1992 p 214). Janicke’s criteria for strong democratic structures to facilitate policy implementation is echoed in Collins and Earnshaw who see the need for improved structures in the domestic managerial approaches to policy goals by member states. They outline the need for improved coordination between existing indigenous implementation bodies and any current or future EC inspectorates. However, the unrealistic short term probability of any such development is acknowledged.

The impact of the EC legislative process, enforcement procedures and suggestions for potential improvements in this process will be detailed further on. From this detail conclusions can be drawn in relation to the adaptation of indigenous policies in the composition of EC laws. Furthermore, the need for cooperation between agencies involved in policy planning and implementation is expressed with an earlier anticipation of implementation needs being highlighted. Enforcement of this policy is seen as crucial with stronger links between member states and EC authorities being called for. This includes plans for further harmonisation or ‘osmosis’ between national agencies and the EC authorities. Improvements suggested include changes in managerial approaches in relation to decision making processes, the potential establishment of regulated national standards and an overall European Environment Agency to deal with inspection and enforcement. Concerns about policy implementation at a national level are a central feature of the environmental debate as is how this area has become an integral part of any overall environmental performance at national and global level. Particular attention is paid to questions arising out of economic and fiscal difficulties and the bureaucratic tensions that can result. The national cases of Holland and the U.K. are presented to highlight these issues, based on responses to ecological challenges through the 1960s to the present. The next four sections will each explore an area of national policy that has

180 Issues in Environmental Research influenced Irish environmental approaches. The first section outlines the role of European Union (EU) integrated policy and its implications. The second looks at the specific problems of the NEEP in the Netherlands. The third explores British Policy Styles in relation to ecological matters. The fourth and final section looks at the area of cost efficiency and economic criteria surrounding environmental policy implementation.

One of the major causes of concern for environmental policy makers is the conflict between economic interests and the inherent costs in maintaining natural resources through pollution levies or market constraints. This becomes most evident when the basic equation of jobs equalling votes becomes the prevailing criteria for any policy maker as any disruption of market forces by the state is usually unwelcome and rigorously resisted by industry. The question of environmental regulation in the ideological base of the national and European political spectrum then arises. Despite the rise of Green parties throughout Europe a marginalisation of environmental issues that challenge environmental policy exists. The fact remains that to economists and industrialists natural resources are simply underdeveloped and underutilised commodities waiting to be exploited for commercial gain. In recognising this it becomes clear that many obstacles are placed before policy makers dealing with environmental issues even prior to any coordinated position being agreed. Politicians could improve this situation by recognising the electoral benefits that would result in an investment in ecologically friendly industries and improving environmental practices at domestic level. Here the difficulties of policy such as coordination, integration and regulatory behaviour can be confronted. The difficulties encountered by proponents of EM in the face of active policy decisions both nationally and in the EU as presented by Sbragia will be examined (Sbragia 1996). An analysis of Dutch environmental policy cases with references to the shifts from a compartmentalised, bureaucratic approach to a more holistic dynamic will be presented.

In the main, this shift reflected a policy change from ‘end of pipe’ to more preventative measures reflecting the oscillating perspectives of both policy makers and industrialists to transformations in technology. The second part of this analysis highlights the problems faced in the 1970s and 1980s due to the lack of a coordinated policy both regionally and in the wider European community. Specifically, we will deal with the difficulties faced by the state in relation to both economic growth and its subsequent environmental problems and how different forms of pollution affect state policy. There are questions related to problems of substantive legitimacy and political accountability in relation to the debate between democratic majoritarism versus ‘zero-sum game’ or ‘win win’ policies which have been a feature of the holistic policy response to the concept of EM. Writing in Regulating Europe Majone highlights the introduction of new efficiency standards as being central to a successful policy implementation (Majone 1997). However, he also accepts the limitations of regulatory directives which are used to restrict policy parameters rather than facilitate substantive changes in overall approaches. Majone points to the importance of ‘value creation’ and ‘value claiming’ (ibid) to the introduction of efficiency standards which are necessary to integrate the policies of EU member states. This integration process is of particular importance to environmental policy makes, as established by Van der Straaten and Skou Andersen in their article ‘The Dutch National

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Environmental Policy Plan: To Choose or to Loose’ in 1992. However, at this stage a fuller explanation of environmental policy as integrated in the EU would be appropriate.

Policy and Integration in the EU:

It is argued that governments have allowed the EU to dominate environmental policy due to the difficulties faced with industrial regulations and ongoing shifts in technology that make implementation expensive and therefore politically volatile. Because of this policy is now driven by what are described as ‘Leader States’ such as Germany, Denmark and Holland. The remaining states of the EU are labelled ‘Laggard States’. Policy implementation is compromised by the conflict of interests that results from this dichotomy. Ultimately, any environmental initiative by these ‘Leader States’ is delayed and diluted by the EU in order to facilitate overall integration of policy. This was described by Haas as ‘the Leader-Laggard dynamic’. The worst ‘Laggard’ states include Ireland, Greece, Italy, Spain and Belgium which are also the least economically developed states of the EU.

While Greece, Italy and Spain have historically weak democratic structures pointing to difficulties on the policy level placing environmental policy, with its accompanying taxes and restraints, at a particular disadvantage. An additional problem is identified when inter-EU competitiveness is examined. As industrial policy remains unregulated between member states any subsequent environmental policy is usually the result of advances made by ‘Leader’ states. But more often the advances stem from initiatives made by German policy makers. Indeed, Sbragia identifies Germany as the ‘key leader’ in this regard and in certain cases, such as water policy, existing German legislation has been co-opted into overall EU policy directives and laws which reveals a startling democratic deficit in regard to internal environmental policy in member states.

German environmental policy was developed in the 1970s and 1980s due to acid rain problems and the need for legislation for large scale industries which were often major polluters. When international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) or the European Union wanted to draft environmental legislation, German policy was the strongest existing such legislation to draw on. This led to a range of environmental issues being addressed by specific German cases which may prove problematic for certain regional variants due to the contrasting degree of industrialisation in different states. According to Weale ‘the political agenda of Germany has been decisively changed’ this was due to environmental issues (A. Weale 1992). While problems of competitiveness remain Germany’s high economic standard had already been achieved in contrast to many other EU member states. It can even be said that advantages were gained by German industries due to an ability to anticipate EU directives based on existing domestic legislation. This was reinforced as EM became a prominent feature of German policy making and in turn environmental aspects became central to economic forecasting. The advantages can be seen in ‘the principle of precaution’ which is now central to both German and overall EU environmental policy highlighting the economic benefits of ecological concerns and pollution controls. These policies remain the standard to be met as part of member-state deregulation and harmonisation of environmental criterion.

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Problems of Coordination in the Dutch Case:

The research of Van der Straaten includes the results of the introduction in 1989 of the Dutch National Environmental Policy Plan (NEPP). While the NEPP is not without its critics it can be seen as an important example of both the problems and the potential of EM when implemented as actual policy. As the Dutch government began to respond to the Netherlands’s heavy pollution in the 1980s following a decade of environmental debate it became clear that new institutional structures would be needed to successfully implement any EM policy. A new cabinet ministry was set up which would involve planning and policy coordination with industry. The then liberal government linked its environmental policy with its plans for industrial deregulation; in other words, industry was to police itself for pollution levels based on government set efficiency standards. This policy included a new decompartmentalised approach reducing bureaucratic red tape and integrating the various government agencies responsible for the environment and planning.

These changes were introduced after decades of problems with uncoordinated policy plans that left environmental issues on the periphery of government policy, outside the remit of any industrial or planning agenda. In the 1970s economic considerations far outstripped any environmental concerns which were at this stage confined to a few academics and like most of Europe and the United States, part of the prevalent counterculture. However, a growing eco-awareness had its roots in fears about acid rain around the Rhine Delta. In 1972 a government Framework Policy introduced an emission ceiling of 500m kg. (M. Hajer 1994). Prior to this the ‘polluter pays’ principle was central to Dutch government policy with levies and subsidies introduced by the Ministry for Environment on its establishment in 1971. The problems facing the three distinct areas of Dutch municipal government in relation to the environment were soon apparent; the layers of bureaucracy involved prevented any comprehensive policy on specific issues being implemented and maintained. An additional problem in the Dutch case was the traditional open politics of the country; with coalitions the norm policy is always faced with compromise. This gave rise to an economist led overview taking prevalence in regard to environmental policy making more incisive procedures unlikely.

By the 1980s national policy was being influenced by EEC directives adding another level of bureaucracy to the system. In addition to this a culture of compliance existed between successive governments and indigenous industries in avoiding certain EU directives for economic benefit. Lubber’s neo-Liberal led government wanted to reduce state involvement in Business affairs and withdrew many of the procedures which had been introduced to maintain certain environmental parameters. EM had introduced the concept of environmental efficiency to the policy process; this was now turned on its head as ‘eco-modernist’ ideas about the deficiency of the legal regulatory approach and the advocacy of ideas about internalising environmental care had a strong affinity with the neo-liberal goal of deregulation’ (M. Hajer 1995). However, by the end of the decade problems such as high acid rain levels left government with no option other than a renewed policy programme in regard to the environment. It had become clear that the old Environment ministry with concern for planning and housing had no real teeth when confronted with economic factors either at cabinet level or in the marketplace. A major

183 Issues in Environmental Research catalyst in this re-think was the Brundtland Report of the WECD in 1987 which proposed the introduction of guidelines that promoted sustainable development policy. This ultimately led to the Dutch National Environmental Policy Plan (NEPP) in 1989. The main thrust of the NEPP involved a detailed analysis of what were then the most immediate environmental problems facing the Netherlands, including:

• reducing substance emissions by 70 to 90%

• overall energy savings

• improvement of environmental standards in the production process

• improved transport policies

• reduced fertilisation in agriculture

• intensifying long term environmental policy

(Van der Straaten 1992)

A major concern of the NEPP was the breaking of economic and ecological substance cycles (Van der Straaten 1992; A. Weale 1993). This view is close to eco-modernist ideas of environmental efficiency, that is to say environmental problems have severe economic and social repercussions. Links were made between renewable cycles of ecological ‘raw materials’ and maintaining substances for economic productivity. Furthermore, it was now becoming apparent that human interference with substance cycles was taking its toll on the global eco-system placing conditions for human existence at any level in jeopardy.

A summary of the NEPP’s environmental goals to be implemented by 2010 includes:

• responsible citizenship,

• allied responses with other nations,

• promotion of technological development towards sustainable development,

• structural source-oriented measures,

• further development of integrated policy including issues such as environment, responsibility of actors, implementation of risk liability and the utilisation of financial and fiscal instruments.

These goals were introduced to a system with a history of problems regarding environment laws since their inception in the 1970s. There were difficulties in getting proper financial backing from the Treasury so levies and taxes were applied in a rigorous adaptation of the polluter pays principle. Pollution was to be rendered financially unviable for industry. But this in turn increased levels of bureaucracy in local and state

184 Issues in Environmental Research government departments. This soon became so costly that monies gathered from levies were outstripped by bureaucratic expenses. As a result the polluter pays principle became unpopular in government circles by the late 1970s. It was replaced by a single fuel levy with responsibility for this procedure shifting from the Ministry of Environment to Treasury. It soon became clear that tensions between those Ministries, allied to ideological problems relating to tax increases for the centre right government, had the potential to curtail much of the content of the NEPP agenda. Subsequent elections gave control to a coalition of Lubber’s Christian Democrats and the Social Democratic Party who then gained the Environment seat. Following these changes the NEPP was introduced as policy with economic factors being measured against what became known as ‘the ecological norm’ (Van der Straaten 1992). However, tensions remained between the Environment Ministry and the more traditional economic views of the Treasury. Without an overall change in policy by the entire government environmental policy can never be properly implemented and the results never rise above peripheral and incremental changes. Ideological questions relating to the role of the state in the market place and of industry’s inherent obligations to society and the environment continue to cause divisions in Dutch governmental circles. While government policy is dominated by financial considerations policy advances such as the NEPP are often paralysed. This leaves the role of environmental NGOs in a position where they must continue to put pressure on government agencies while simultaneously keeping the environmental agenda alive in the public domain.

British Environmental Policy Styles:

British policy styles were more influenced by domestic UK agendas than continental European policy which has an EU led dynamic underpinning much of its legislation concerning the environment. The distinctive nature of British policy styles are examined now while the challenges to domestic policy presented by EU legislation and the indigenous problems which create certain tensions between domestic UK politics and British-EU policies are outlined.

While the distinctive features of UK policy based on internal factors are a particular aspect of that nation’s legislative response to many issues Richardson and Jordan highlight the role of each EU member state’s policy style in influencing subsequent policy positions. They see this form of internal policy style as being a distinctive facet of member state policy rather than providing each state with a clearly defined or unique national analysis of EU legislation. Essentially, they see close similarities between member state’s policy styles describing them as ‘convergent’ while accepting that localised variations play a role in domestic responses. Consequently there is a shift in the structuring of this response ranging from the point where a potential policy is agreed to the actual implementation of a coherent policy initiative. Within the mechanism of this implementation distinctive national characteristics become crucial to the shaping of policy and it is this, in effect, that shapes policy styles throughout Europe. As a result, dominant formulae for implementing policies become a feature of a nation’s bureaucracy. However, certain anomalies remain in any standardised definition of policy styles. These can be summed up as follows: ‘Even if a predominant style can be identified, exceptions will always occur…One of the biggest difficulties in trying to identify a predominant

185 Issues in Environmental Research style is, of course, present by the now familiar phenomenon of the sectorisation of policy making’ (Richardson and Jordan 1998 p 3).

What becomes clear through this definition is the role of indigenous bureaucracy in the shaping and influencing of domestic policy. This in turn affects the implementation of any such policy giving EU legislation its localised variants while heightening inter-state tensions. Elements of this bureaucratic discord can manifest itself within the national body-politic taking on ideological dimensions and increasing anti EU feeling, as has been seen in the British case. As a result of this, certain issues that are linked with the EU directives, such as environmentalism, become further isolated from local political delegates and lead to increasingly alienated responses from a public unsure of domestic political positions in relation to an apparent EU bureaucratic monolith in Brussels. These incremental changes have lent themselves to the formation of any distinctive British policy style. As this distinctive policy becomes standardised it gains acceptance among politicians, bureaucrats and the public, ultimately providing a ‘national’ policy style. It then becomes the national bargaining position adopted when approaching central EU government or other member states. Jordan and Richardson identify UK policy as deriving from a ‘logic of negotiation’ based on what they see as five distinct aspects of British policy style (Richardson and Jordan 1998). These aspects include sectorisation, clientelism and consultation, institutionalisation of compromise and development of exchange relationships (ibid). Central to this style is a policy of ongoing accommodation through bureaucratic negotiation, with an established position being presented for acceptance by the parties involved, rather than having a potentially fractious debate in order to reach a potential outcome.

British Policy Background:

Taken as a distinct entity British policy style is at its most apparent when confronted with EU legislation. While much of European policy had become binding by the late 1980s long standing British attitudes of unease with the nature of much of this policy persisted. British policy has had an inconsistent evolution in parallel with the rise of what is seen as German led EU legislation. As such environmental policy can be seen as a good example of these underlying tensions in this regard and the history behind this dichotomy will be outlined in the next section and based, in particular, on Lowe and Ward’s findings in British Environmental Policy and Europe 1998. These writers emphasise the fractious nature of overall EU policy, which they see as a reflection of inherent domestic cultures and as a result they see their examination of British policy perspectives as only one of many pan-European distinctions rather than highlighting British tensions as an outstanding area of policy difficulty. In addressing this issue the role of distinctive national policy is detailed as being ‘the basic unit of the EU…having particular conditions which shape policy positions…EU policy making is an amalgam of national agendas’ and that ‘national governments hold the key positions in shaping European policy through the Council of Ministers and…domestic policy’ (Lowe and Ward 1998). Essentially, it can be seen that domestic agendas with their own regional economic and social circumstances take precedence over any EU considerations and in any such case EU issues can be relegated to a secondary position to suit domestic policy. What becomes evident is that resulting tensions increase as EU directives become the policy

186 Issues in Environmental Research norm in individual member states often as the result of an absence of domestic action within these states. Britain’s tradition of ‘Euro scepticism’ has led to many difficulties regarding that nation’s dealing with certain EU directives. Environmentalism and ‘the principle of precaution’ being a case in point. Lowe and Ward identify the historical backdrop to a ‘semi-detachment’ to the EU power base in Brussels despite what they see as ‘any realistic alternatives’ being evident. This history has its roots in traditional elements of an ‘island mentality’ heightened by a strong imperialist tradition with world wide trading links, the ongoing relationship with the United States and the Dominions and a reluctance to accept a modern role as ‘a middle ranking European power’ (ibid).

This shift can be contrasted with the traditionally strong role of domestic British environmentalism specifically in areas such as wildlife conservation. International environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the Institute for Environment and Development (IED) were then established and these organisations had a major impact on the global ecological consciousness in the 1970s.

Another, traditional influence on British environmental policy was the ownership of large tracts of lands by the establishment which led to a divide between common land and land restricted to use by the upper classes. Codes of law in relation to rights of passage, wildlife management, hunting and fishing practices were developed by the upper class which created that divide. Consequently, an insular perspective developed in relation to the onset of EU environmental directives. Furthermore, EU legislation tended to draw influence from German and Dutch regulatory experiences without references to long established British ecological practices and this heightened the rising resentment to Brussels. As a result the emphasis has been put on mid European ecological viewpoints leaving Britain exposed as ‘the Dirty Man of Europe’ (Lowe and Ward 1998), a label that can only be seen as having a prejudice in favour of European Greens. This view of Britain as falling behind European standards was taken up b the British Green Movement in its opposition to Thatcher’s government policies during the 1980s. A particular example of this was the Windscale/Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant and the anti-nuclear missile base campaign at Greenham Common. Ultimately, the EU came to be seen as ‘an environmental beacon’ (Lowe and Ward 1998). Domestic political agendas, Cold War alliances with the US, cultural and historical factors mentioned, above all, lead to a dichotomy in EU and British environmental policy.

Cost and Efficiency:

Skou Andersen addresses the question of economic criteria and its negative effect on environmental policy in Governance and Green Taxes 1992. In his examination he explores the effects of eco-modernist tax and levy systems on indigenous industries and details the difficulties faced by legislators and governments. The difficulties rise when administrations prefix economic measures to environmental efficiency standards without allowing for the inevitable market fluctuations which then expose any environmental policy to fiscal restrictions. His response is to set eco taxes within an overall policy that has been reshaped in the approach to pollution threats as opposed to guidelines set which

187 Issues in Environmental Research can then be ignored or rallied against by industry at will. Pre-emptive ‘green’ taxes are built into the state’s annual budget and would be above inter-departmental regulatory problems. The key to this approach is in the costing of each unit of pollution which anticipates market fluctuations and allows industry to make pollution control an economic target with the efficiency argument of eco modernisation (EM) at its core. One of the difficulties with pre-set eco taxes is that the ongoing development of new technologies is left out of any ecological guidelines leaving industry free to continue to produce more inefficient and polluting products in an efficient and cost effective way. This compounds problems in pollution control as green taxes and efficiency standards mask ongoing pollution from non-conducive technologies. While technology and environmentalism remain separate it becomes impossible to formulate a comprehensive policy. High costs are often shifted into the public tax arena making pollution control unpopular and politically divisive. This affects short term policy as well as any future initiatives leaving environmentalism marginalised. Questions of expense are passed on to the next generation who, in turn, may find ecological damage to be irreversible and economically overwhelming. Economics rarely has a future-vision and the value of the environment both now and in the future remains outside the estimations of economic experts. Final criteria for environmental policy are also going to be open to influence from pressure groups with vested interests leaving any such policy with a potential democratic deficit. Ultimately, economic and technological actions are intrinsically linked and form a powerful lobby group in governmental circles. Taking this into account is a strong factor in any argument for the completely restructured approach to environmental issues at policy level, including the coordination of government agencies and a holistic, socio-economic approach.

Conclusion:

The main thrust of this examination has been centred round the problems for policy makers when confronted with the full rigours of fiscal rectitude and bureaucratic intransigence. It has highlighted how even a major policy breakthrough such as the NEPP is open to the influence of both inter party ideological struggles and inter departmental coordination failure. This was shown by exploring EM’s influence on active policy and attempts being made at holistic approaches which only succumbed to tensions within departmental coordination and integration. These problems compounded Lubber’s government’s attempts to implement the NEPP. Environmental policies were diluted due to economic and electoral considerations. The challenges of integration policy within the European Union were explored as well as how countries like Germany, which has advanced environmental laws in place, come to influence and even dictate much of EU policy. The concept of ‘Leader’ and ‘Laggard’ states illustrates this point. Problems of coordination at a European policy level such as how differing forms of pollution like acid rain influence indigenous ecological policies were outlined. This led on to an examination of the problems of policy integration in the Dutch case with a detailed analysis highlighted. In particular, Dutch reaction to the Brundtland Report and the emergence of EM as a policy tool is considered placing specific emphasis on the problems and success of the NEPP through the 1980s and 1990s. A study of the British case is also provided which examines differing policy styles.

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Localised variations have given UK policy a negative tendency towards overall EU directives with very real consequences for both British environmental planning and policy implementation. This fractious relationship with the EU has taken on an ideological perspective that increases the difficulty faced by subsequent planners. Theories are presented in relation to the tensions arising from UK/EU implementation conflicts. There are problems for all member states in this regard with many of these tensions having domestic political origins. EU legislation and directives challenge and ultimately shape domestic policy styles. Member states are described as having an overall convergence in their policy styles with regional variations stemming from local political debates. The role of bureaucratic interpretations in the sectorisation of policy style based on the sum of aspects of indigenous problems is acknowledged. This provides member states with their initial bargaining positions making an acceptable vision for environmental policy on an EU wide basis a near impossible goal in any policy area. Following on from this the negative impact of rigid economic parameters on environmental policy as well as the need for shifts to holistic approaches are presented with an emphasis on the problems and benefits of ‘Green’ taxes and levies. A main concern put forward here is the difficulty faced when economic fluctuations disrupt pre set tax and levy points leaving the way clear for industry to avoid some or all of the levies it could potentially face in regard to pollution controls. This raises questions of how environmental policy can react and interpret changes in technology and if it is possible to link technological advances with holistic environmental approaches to socio-economic planning. The results of these inquiries remain to be seen. What has become clear, however, is the need for concern with such planning by all including industrialists, lobby groups and policy makers to consider the costs involved in continued environmental damage both in fiscal and planetary terms.

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Chapter 3: The Irish Response to Environmental Challenges Introduction:

Ireland’s history is dominated by its population’s relationship with the land. A strong social and cultural tradition has grown around this relationship and the resulting network of pastoral, agrarian conservatism has led to a culture of clientelism and corporatism that makes new policy approaches difficult to implement. Many of the responses to the challenges of the environment in Ireland are led from the outside, particularly in the context of EU directives. Domestic political responses, such as the introduction of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have had a mixed reaction while the political culture of the country has prevented a strong ideological campaign from gaining influence. We will now look at the background to the introduction of the EPA and examine whether its functions have improved environmental capacity or is it being used by sectional interests to enhance industrial opportunities in the State. Then the position of the Irish Green Party and their role in the Irish political arena is examined. Following on from this the civic responses to environmental matters will be analysed outlining ongoing problems with equality of public access, difficulties with legal structures and local authorities. The Conclusion explores the concept of a democratically guided democracy which places environmental concerns at the core of State requirements.

The Irish Green Party:

With an absence of any real environmental planning from Dublin and faced with a less than decisive body of legislation from the EC future Irish governments will have an opportunity to introduce a positive and visionary environmental agenda to the domestic and international body politic. Ireland still retains a less than deserved image as a place of unspoilt natural landscapes and still developing industrial and economic infrastructure. By introducing the holistic structures that will produce an environmentally minded society in future years Ireland could provide a model of how successful economic management can be achieved by working on all the different levels of policy which have an environmental dimension and by bringing consensus to planning and industry in relation to all ecological obligations. Thus far, Irish administrations have relied on EU and British innovation to apply any form of environmental legislation so the likelihood of a major ecological breakthrough on the domestic political scene remains very unlikely. However, a far reaching environmental agenda remains as the best political strategy yet to be fully exploited by the Irish political parties. A future advance by the Irish Green Party which has consolidated itself on the political scene is possible particularly in light of the convergence of the major parties towards the centre.

The fact remains that the Irish Greens have had an ambiguous relationship with sections of their activist wing as far back as the late 1980s. In a parallel with left wing parties around Europe activist and ‘militant’ groups were seen as a threat from within by party leadership in advance of an overall shift to the centre. While this shift came as world politics was in the grip of a Right wing political wave it has left a gap in political activism for Green parties throughout Europe. Though Centrist politics has grappled with ‘Green’ issues since the 1992 World Summit Green parties have not made the major

190 Issues in Environmental Research advances that may have been possible at that time due, in part, to a disillusionment with the rigidity of mainstream politics which left a chasm between ecological movements such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (FOE) and European Green Parties. This gap has equally affected the growth of the Irish Green Movement and can be seen in the distance between the position of the ‘Eco-Warriors’ in the Wicklow Glens and attempts by Irish Greens to attract votes from the professional classes and young urbanites.

Equally significant is the fact that the Irish Greens do far better in European elections than in Dáil and Local elections. Mullally has outlined the Irish Green Party’s shift from a ‘party of protest’ towards being a group that has had ‘more pronounced success on the European level’ (G Mullally 1999 ‘Treading Softly on the Irish Electoral System’ and ‘The Irish Greens in the 1997 Elections’). The Irish Greens, who had been known at their inception as The Ecology Party of Ireland or ‘Comhaontas Glás’ had gone through a process of splits and realignments as had other European Green Movements. In adopting the standard ‘Green Party’ title in 1986, while retaining the Irish language suffix of Comhaontas Glás, the Party ‘signalled a commitment to electoral politics’ (ibid).

Initial gains by the Irish Greens were soon countered by a process of adaptation of Green issues by the major centrist Parties. The business oriented thrust of the EPA Acts drawn up the Progressive Democratic Party is an indicator of how Green issues were co-opted and manipulated by government parties in order to facilitate job development. Despite this, successes for the Greens in European elections have given the Irish Greens an established position on the Irish political scene. Other successful, local campaigns have pushed the Green agenda into national politics. These advances are tempered by the stilted nature of Irish politics where shifts in European policies are adopted in a gradual manner while local issues and agendas take priority. All major political parties have converged towards the centre and have adopted pragmatic, ‘catch-all’ policies, including whatever is seen as relevant in regard to the Environment. In light of this, it is perhaps unusual that the Irish Greens have also staked a claim for the suburban and middle class voter.

However, this can be seen as part of an overall European trend away from ‘survivalist’ agendas and a move towards adopting a ‘green lifestyle’ centred on middle class, suburban concerns such as recycling, retaining green areas like forests and the spread of genetically modified foods. Like their European counterparts Irish Greens have adopted many issues to suit the increasing trend towards suburbanisation rather than advocating any real alternative. This has left some theorists questioning whether the Greens are as yet ready for Government and how much of a truly ‘Green’ agenda they can maintain in the pursuit of this aim. The question remains open as to whether ultimate goals of environmental communion, species cohabitation and universal non-violence are attainable through the political structures of Western Liberal Democracies and if not how can realistic alternative structures be realised.

In this respect, Irish Green Party policies such as the Mayoral Commission on Cycling and the court case taken to force equal funding for the divorce referendum in 1997 can be seen as campaigns geared as much for individual re-election as that of a fully structured

191 Issues in Environmental Research and far reaching plan for an environmental future. It would, for instance, be interesting to see how a Green Minister for Justice in a future ‘Rainbow Coalition’ government would deal with an event like the eco-warrior protest at the Glen of the Downs. Power provides its own dilemmas, yet the Irish Greens like all other Green Parties must pursue power through the political channels which currently exist.

In addition, Green Party advocating campaigns of urban recycling and consumer consciousness rely on a high degree of civic responsiveness and responsibility. Any major challenges to the existing status quo cannot therefore be too extreme or rooted in civil disobedience as this would challenge the structures needed to highlight the domestic Green agenda. That position leaves legal action as the only recourse left to Greens who wish to challenge existing structures. However, there are problems remaining. This approach ‘fails to acknowledge the importance of participation in creating a consensus to underpin the legitimacy of the regulatory framework’ (Taylor 1999). In other words, an over reliance on legal actions and challenges to planning permissions while maintaining a legislative presence and ‘watchdog’ image for the Greens can ultimately remove them from the civic participatory groups which are needed to back up any advances on the ground. Because of the problems a breakdown in communications between the bureaucratic central Party structures of the Greens and their activist support base could happen that would lead to a further distancing between the general public and the party as a whole. To avoid this, the Irish Green Party must maintain an activist base with moves towards a sufficiently politicised agenda outside the increasing trend towards challenges to the legal framework of the planning process. Older ecological issues based on conservation could be revisited rather than exclusively working towards a ‘greening’ of suburban lifestyle. There is also a need to bridge the gap between forms of public protest which verge on civil disobedience and a plan of action that alienates both activists and the wider public through excessive legal parameters. Taylor has highlighted this need to make the channels of protest more available to the public. Open public hearings are one way to highlight and facilitate public debate over environmental issues. However, Taylor points to the weakness of EPA legislation in this respect citing how ‘the agency shall have absolute discretion to hold an oral hearing which shall be conducted by a person appointed by the agency (from EPA act 1992 p 64).

Problems of equality of public access in terms of format and agenda as well as difficulties for the public in approaching a legalistic framework are areas that are left unanswered by the EPA legislation. The lack of answers to these problems points to the structure of the Act having been built around a framework which is devised to suit the legislature with no cognisance of open public inquiry into the process being allowed for. Taylor’s article highlights the major difference between this approach to public interjection or scrutiny and that of license applications by companies who are told that the EPA will go ‘as far as possible to assist industry’ and to ‘provide pre-application clarification facilities where necessary’ (G Taylor 1999 from EPA Act p 5). This leaves the EPA independent of public or civic scrutiny while it is equally relatively free of Dáil interference. Yet the nature of its own guidelines leaves the EPA as a facilitator of industry in the areas of licensing and control which were initially meant to be the main focus of the Agency’s agenda. Furthermore, the granting of licences to companies to operate a toxic incinerator

192 Issues in Environmental Research despite wide public protest point to a worrying potential to override public opinion and environmental concerns in favour of business interests. Pollution prevention becomes, by extension, pollution management and even pollution toleration in order to facilitate industrial expansionism.

In this respect, the EPA Act can be seen as a pro-industry ‘Trojan horse’ planted by big business advocates as opposed to being any major step forward in environmental protection. It is fair to say that the whole thrust of the EPA Act and its ongoing implementation has moved a great deal from the original debates of sustainable development which had influenced calls for this type of legislation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Writing about the future for the EC’s Environmental Impact Assessment Programme (EIA) Fry puts forward a series of items that have become accepted as the standard components of sustainable development for which the EIA was established to oversee implementation in member states. These include ‘ecosystem maintenance, pollution control, preservation of genetic diversity and a rational utilisation of resources’ (Fry 1999).

If these components are implemented by agencies such as the EPA or advocated in policy by the Irish Green Party then the projected outcome for Irish society should be built around a cohesive equality in that society which sees development maintained with an environmental balance; with a minimal encroachment on natural resources combined with efficiency in human production. The EPA has as one of its objectives the aim of achieving sustainable development yet the specific aspects of the Act make it possible for industries to avoid environmental responsibilities. Concepts such as ecosystem maintenance and pollution controls at the source have given way to a legally aided system of deception and avoidance of environmental responsibility in Ireland. In many respects, the emergence of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy has negated the need for much of the ambivalent guidelines contained in the EPA Act.

With industrialisation and economic growth forecast to increase in the near future the circumstances surrounding the pro-business/IDA leanings of the EPA Act have been removed. In the absence of stronger legislation Ireland has become increasingly known as a country that tolerates pollution in order to attract multinational enterprises. Far from enhancing sustainable development the lack of protections granted by the EPA Act, together with the poor impact of the Irish Green Party, has led to a situation where the environmental protections that should be provided for, either from the direction of domestic green politics or government agencies, are available only in a weakened form or absent altogether. In the worst case scenario the background which underpins much of the EPA legislation actually enables the industrial polluter while having simultaneously withdrawn many of the Local Authority’s powers to intervene.

These factors, together with the problems previously mentioned leave Ireland’s environment exposed to the worst elements of modern industrial pollution such as pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries, toxic incinerators and agricultural waste. While policy innovations from Britain, Holland and Germany are eventually co-opted into overall EU directives which affect Ireland’s environmental legislative impetus the process of continuing reactive rather than pro-active environmental legislative policy is

193 Issues in Environmental Research clearly inadequate. It remains to be seen if this ‘eco democratic deficit’ can be addressed by future Irish governments and in particular if a strong environmental agenda can be set by the Irish Green Party during their term of office.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA):

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established in 1992 as an autonomous public body which was set up as a response to the external pressure emanating out of the ‘top down’ directives from the European Commission on the Environment and the European Courts. The remit of the EPA also included dealing with the ‘bottom up’ pressures exerted on the State by the many campaigns against the siting of multinational plants or infrastructure projects in the preceding decades (Leonard L. 2005, 2006). The Agency came into being through Section 19 of the Environmental Protection Agency Act of 1992. Under this Act a management structure was created through an Executive Board comprising of the Director General (DG) and four other Directors (Scannell). The DG was appointed by the State while the other Directors were appointed by an independent body that includes further appointees of the State as well as senior members of the Civil Service including the Secretaries of the Departments of Government and the Department of the Environment.

The independent selection committee is further comprised of senior figures from civil society that form the basis of the Irish State’s neo-corporatist social partnership model. They include the Director of the Industrial Development Authority (IDA), the Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), and the Chief Executive of the Council for the Status of Women and significantly, the Chairperson of An Taisce, the Heritage Trust, which is an organisation that has been to the fore in Heritage and Conservation issues in Ireland. The Director General of the EPA sits for a period of seven years while the term for the other Directors is five years. All Directors can be returned to their positions. Section 21(16) of the EPA Act also provides for the removal of the Director General if deemed necessary by the Government. However, the EPA remains independent of any of the Government Departments to whom it must report annually. Regional headquarters were established in Dublin, Cork, Kilkenny, Castlebar, Monahan, Letterkenny, Athlone and Mallow. The primary functions of the EPA involve the licensing, regulation, planning and monitoring of issues of environmental concern in Ireland. The Agency also contributes towards the furthering of academic knowledge through research in the field of environmental studies.

Licensing:

The EPA has responsibility for overseeing the licensing of practices that may have significant polluting potential. Under ‘General Functions (Section 52) of the Environmental Protection Agency Act 1992’ licensing is deemed part of the overall control of activities for the purposes of environmental protection. Licences are issued under ‘Best Practice’ guidelines which incorporate a range of approaches including the following measures:

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The prevention or elimination of pollution at all levels of production and disposal with the incorporation of recycling, reduction and reuse and the avoidance of dangerous waste when possible. The Dangerous Substances Directive (76/464/EEC) defines those forms of pollution as ‘toxic, persistent and which bio accumulates…and which have a deleterious affect upon the environment’ (ibid).

The EPA’s licensing activities cover a range of areas such as the granting of Integrated Pollution Prevention Control (IPPC) Licences, the granting of Waste Licences, overseeing emissions trading, the licensing of the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) (http:www.epa.ie).

Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) Licensing:

The original Integrated Pollution Control (IPC) licences which were first introduced in Ireland in 1994 have been replaced by the IPPC (IPPC Directives 96/6/EEC) licensed industries which have a potential to pollute. The IPPC Directive became law in Ireland through the introduction of the Protection of the Environment (POE) Act 2003 and this Act contributes the framework for environmental regulation along with the EPA Acts of 1992 and 2003 (http//www.epa.ie). The EPA Act of 2003 introduced a licensing system which has many important requirements:

• A change in the requirement for technology which is considered as using the Best Available Technology not Entailing Excessive costs (BATNEEC) to that which was Best Available Techniques (BAT).

• Increased emphasis on energy efficiency.

• A greater emphasis on pollution prevention in the licensing system and on waste minimisation at the source.

• Provision to request an oral hearing on the granting of a license by objectors.

• Power to seek a High Court order when license agreements are being contravened.

• An open and transparent IPPC system where the public have access to application material. Objections can be made within 28 days of notification of any determination on proposals by the Agency and submissions are available for public attention (ibid).

Waste Licensing:

The EPA’s remit also covers the licensing of the disposal and recovery, landfilling and transfer of waste in Ireland. The EPA must be satisfied that any activity involving waste will not cause environmental pollution (ibid). The provisions for the licensing of waste related activity stems from the 1992 EPA Act and the 1996 Waste Management Act. The Minister for the Environment updated the Protection of the Environment Act in 2004 which included the introduction of the following:

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• Applications for Waste Licenses are subject to the Waste Management (Licensing) Regulations (2004).

• Waste Licenses to be issued under Best Available Technique (BAT) guidelines, replacing BATNEEC.

• New mechanisms to fast track license services of a minor nature.

• Energy efficiency to be considered in relation to waste licensing.

• Open and transparent waste licensing system which allows for public access to documentation; provision for written submissions or objections to applications within 28 days of proposed decision (ibid).

Emissions Trading:

The EPA is a participant in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) which was introduced in 2005. The EU ETS was devised as part of efforts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in order to reduce the threats of climate change and ozone depletion. The EU ETS provides EU Member States with a framework with which to address their commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. Under the EU ETS Member States establish an emission cap on industrial plants or installations. Industries then apply for emissions allowances under the Scheme. The Kyoto Protocol was agreed by all Member States of the European Union and by the EU itself along with other global governments with the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2012 and beyond that date (http.epa.ie). The consequences of greenhouse gas emissions include the following:

• Geographic affects on species of animals, including extinction.

• Changes to rainfall patterns and subsequent supplies of fresh water.

• Increased incidents of extreme weather, floods and draughts (ibid).

Licensing Genetically Modified Organism (GMOs):

Genetically Modified Organisms are the bacteria, viruses, fungi, plant and animal cells capable of replication or transfer of genetic material in an unnatural or scientifically assisted manner. The EPA oversees the implementation of GMP regulation, use, release and movement (ibid). The EPA has begun to seek out land for the experimental and controlled use of GMOs at selected sites in Ireland, including a five year experiment in County Meath.

Regulatory Enforcement: Office of Environmental Enforcement (OEE):

The office of Environmental Enforcement (OEE) aims to improve levels of compliance with environmental regulation and legislation. The OEE is responsible for the enforcement of EPA licenses and oversees the environmental protection of the Local

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Authorities as well as other bodies including the Health Authorities, An Garda Siochana, the Criminal Assets Bureau, the Revenue Commissioners and the Office of Corporate Enforcement (http.www.epa.ie).

EPA Inspectors are also involved in the enforcing of licenses issued under the Waste Management Act and the Environmental Protection Agency Act. These Inspectors also monitor emissions trading and oversee the introduction of Environmental Management Systems (EMS) at industrial facilities in order to prevent pollution at source (ibid). The supervision by OEE of Local Authorities is undertaken through the assessment of information, audits and performances of the authorities, by directing Local Authorities to respond to issues within a set timeframe and through issuing sundry directives to the Authorities in cases of pollution. The OEE investigates complaints of environmental laxity or regulatory failure made against the Local Authorities. The OEE operates in conjunction with an Enforcement Network which incorporates Government Departments, State agencies and Local Authorities in a comprehensive framework which assists enforcement and Best Practice. A similar European Network for EU Member States also exists. In addition, the EPA is a participant in the European Network for the Implementation and Enforcement of Environmental Law (IMPEL). This network of European regulators cooperate on implementing environmental legislation across the EU Member and Candidate States by sharing data and expertise, standardising influence taken approaches and developing Best Practice (http.www.epa.ie).

The EPA Protection Act:

The EPA was established by the EPA Act of 1992. The Agency emerged in response to the first phase of environmental populism in Ireland which was characterised by local opposition to multinational plants that were perceived to pose risks to the communities in which they were sited as well as to the environment (Leonard 2005, 2006). The EPA Act was an attempt to provide an integrated model for environmental regulation based on the US or Scandinavian models which were researched as part of attempts to develop a framework for the Agency. The introduction of the EPA Act came in response to a series of issues including concerns about the absence of relevant expertise in the local authorities which had previously been charged with environmental regulation; the concerns of the public about this failure to enforce regulations adequately; the problems encountered by industry in obtaining relevant approval for developments; the need for increased regulation of local authority performance in relation to the environment and the need for clarity encountered by industry in obtaining relevant approval for developments; the need for increased regulation of Local Authority performance in relation to the environment and the need for clarity and fairness in the pursuit of environmental protection and regulation (Scannell 1995 p 513).

The EPA’s constitution obliges the Agency to retain an overview of the performances of the public authorities; maintain a high standard of environmental protection; promote sustainable development and to promote precautions in relation to the potentially harmful affects of emissions; to regulate according to the polluter pays principle (ibid). The EPA’s authority extends to control of public authorities in relation to previously held exemptions from Planning Permission and pollution controls. Together with the

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Department of the Environment the EPA provides advice and a regulatory framework for the public authorities establishing codes of practice and other guidelines designed to create a standardisation in environmental regulatory enforcement.

The EPA and Political Culture in Ireland:

Without doubt, the creation of the EPA in 1993 was an attempt to address the myriad ‘bottom up’ populist interests which were opposed to industrial plants or communities or increased regulation at a time when the ‘top down’ external pressure being exerted by the European Commission by way of environmental directives was increasing. The State’s response was to introduce the EPA Act in 1992 creating an Agency that came to be criticised for its pro-industry leanings (Taylor 2001) but one which, nonetheless, has developed into a facilitation of improved regulatory performance in addition to a significant contribution towards environmental research and education. However, the overlapping personal and direction of some appointees to the EPA Board has been the subject of controversy from time to time while an effective dialogue between the Agency and Environmental activists remains elusive. However where the Agency has been criticised for having a pro-business and development perspective throughout the boom years of the Celtic Tiger a sustained effort to deal with issues created by the post- consumption waste management crisis has also led to criticism by populist community campaigns of incinerators or landfills (Leonard L. 2005, 2006).

That there must be a paradigmic shift in the power relationships and infrastructure which exist between local and national authorities in relation to the tensions between economic expansion and environmental protections has been argued. In addition the hierarchies of power which control EU directives must be replicated within the Irish domestic political arena in order to fully implement environmental protections in a comprehensive way. In order to facilitate such an outcome a strengthening of the EPA Act, together with a concentrated policy agenda being implemented by interested parties such as the Irish Greens, must take place. Furthermore, civic groups and NGOs must help to establish public access to the judicial system while providing a backdrop of citizen activism and political participation which can be built around ecological issues. A comprehensive examination of government actors such as Lancefort, the private company set up under central government auspices, must be made so that matters become clearer to the public at large.

This would require a strengthening of the democratic system which is currently in a reverse process as can be seen in the weakening of the nation state and subsequent democratic deficiencies. Writing in Democracy and Green Political Thought Christoff argues for ‘ecologically guided democracies’ where there is a ‘reconstruction of the state enabled ecological requirements to be met nationally and internationally’ (Christoff 1996 in Doherty and DeGeus 1996). This type of wide ranging policy agenda must be comprised of a co-ordinated effort at local, national and international levels as ecological problems often move beyond national frontiers. Ireland’s complex legal and political status involves levels of bureaucracy from Dublin, London, Belfast and Brussels being involved with environmental issues for the island as a unit. Robyn Eckersley makes the point that the traditional ‘liberal epistemological premise’ which holds that ‘it is up to

198 Issues in Environmental Research citizens and their elected representatives, freely to decide for themselves the meaning of public good’ (Doherty and DeGeus 1996).

This leaves little room for the framing of ecologically minded legislation which places environmentalism as a priority in the shaping of future societies; Green parties or environmental issues must withstand the full rigours of public scrutiny through democratic elections. This induces subsequent ecological political movements to contest their agenda on a par with all other political lobbies including national self interest and industrial expansionism. Green political parties and NGOs in Ireland and abroad must set their policy framework around existing political structures while highlighting the urgent nature of global domestic environmental problems ranging from global warming and Sellafield’s nuclear power to localised agri-pollution such as fish kills. The varying strata of the Irish social and political landscape underpin much of the environmental legislation and political activity. The major difficulties thrown up by the drafting of pro-industry legislation by relevant government agencies have been highlighted. But any response through the political arena is stymied by a poorly focused and centrist-led Green Party. If these two critical components of any national ecological agenda are weak the social responses of NGOs and civic bodies are at times unable to develop in an incisive and constructive manner through existing legalistic or political fora.

In the absence of environmental superstructures industry and planning regulations have developed with a deliberate pattern of avoidance in relation to environmental responsibilities such as pollution control. Rootes provides an analysis of what type of response is needed to arrest this gulf between the ‘dilemmas’ of ‘institutionalism’ that face alternative ecological groups, problems in the relationship between local environmental struggles and national (sometimes transnational) EMOs’ and the problems facing local activists in regard to the ‘development of a global environmental movement’ (Rootes 1999). It is only by strengthening the existing legal and political structures open to environmentalists that progress on ecological protection can be made in Ireland. The links between disparate groups such as the Wicklow eco-warriors, the Burren Action Group and the actual Irish Green Party should be strengthened in order to enable a fuller debate on environmental issues at local, nation and ultimately international levels. The immediate priority of these groups should be based around a reversal of the EPA Act to provide legislation with real environmental protection as its basis. In addition, the wide ranging freedoms currently open to planners and multinationals must be reversed. Any future legislation must fully deal with these components of the national environmental agenda in order to create the conditions for the type of ecologically based society that places the environment at the centre of its long term plans rather than reducing it to a commodity to be exploited.

This section has covered the background to the formation and subsequent performance of the Irish EPA and highlighted the fact that environmental protests have increased since the EPA’s inception in 1993 despite the Agency’s remit of dealing with the sources of the pollution that cause many of these protests. The reason for ongoing concerns about the performance of the EPA is outlined as in some way due to the State’s attempt to position the Agency as an all persuasive answer to the external pressures it was facing in regard to the political structures surrounding environmental policy formulation and

199 Issues in Environmental Research implementation. While the State had to create the policy frameworks necessary to allow EU environmental directives to be implemented it was also concerned with the extent of community resistance to local sitings of toxic plants and industries. However, in spite of these prominent concerns the EPA was ultimately founded in the context of the Irish State’s emphasis on creating economic growth and competitiveness through its neo- corporatist partnership model whereby the attraction of multinational investment superseded any real concern for environmental degradation. In effect, the establishment of the EPA answered the State’s need to address the perception that industries in Ireland had been ‘left to police themselves’ in the area of pollution Controls (Irish Times 5 September 1989 from Taylor and Horan 1999 p 16). In so doing the State would not compromise the operations of the multinationals or address what Greenpeace had described in 1993, the year the EPA was founded, as the ‘ambivalence towards the concept of environmental protection’ (Allen R. 2004 p. 13) which existed in Irish Politics.

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Chapter 4: Policy and Practice: An Investigation of the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme (REPS 1) Introduction:

The principle of sustainability in agriculture was, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, a central feature of EU eco-agri policy and was to have major consequences for domestic Irish agricultural practices. The Irish Heritage Council has described the subsequent Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms of 1992 as ‘the most significant shock to the Irish agricultural sector since EEC entry in 1973’ (Report on The Impact of Agricultural Schemes 1998 p 14). The changing nature of European agriculture has seen an increase of risks for the environment due to intensification of production which has threatened water supplies and natural habitats. The EU led the response to these changes which, in turn, impacted on Irish agrarian policy and practices. Increasing demand for agricultural produce has led to an increase in technical approaches that have ultimately left agriculture at odds with environmental agendas. Reforms were inevitable as environmental awareness increased and this led the way for global agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and in Europe the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

CAP reforms will become full policy directives by the year 2000 and will change practices in Irish agriculture substantially. However, the problems of implementing such fundamental changes in long standing Irish agricultural practices remain in the face of a political system that is wary of facing down a volatile agrarian sector now bloated by EU funding. The major policy target, Farmer attitudes to REPS and sustainable practices and the difficulties of implementation will be examined while arguments that better consultation and education would improve the outcomes for environmental policy initiatives will be posited. While there have been many attempts to reform Irish agricultural practices since the country gained EC membership in 1973 these reforms have been met by a strong refusal to adopt wholesale change which is symptomatic of the underlying ethos of deep conservatism that runs through Irish rural society. The agricultural sector has been led by the Irish Farmers Association (IFA) and other groups on an orchestrated campaign to resist changes while taking as large an amount of EU funding as possible. This may be seen as shrewd practice but, as many of the reforms being resisted relate to the protection of the environment, long term damage can be the result.

Inherent in the working of governments and any sectional interest groups are what Adshead described as a ‘closed policy community’ which reflect Ireland’s corporatist social relations and clientelist framework. Personalism and a prevalence of localised vested interests have left politicians unable to implement government policy or EU directives without first referring to those interest groups that could be used for or against a candidate in any forthcoming elections. This can lead to a fragmented policy process and with the community at large rallied against a particular policy directive individual politicians can become non-committed and ultimately ineffective in the face of such an orchestrated campaign. This has weakened the political process and with other factors led to a degree of cynicism amongst the overall electorate. In this type of political

201 Issues in Environmental Research climate it becomes less difficult for groups such as the IFA ‘to protect and preserve the livelihoods and lifestyles of those involved with farming’ (M Adshead 1999).

Furthermore any such interest groups can now target bureaucrats in their EU offices bypassing internal government ministers. It is interesting to note that Irish farmers have moved from a historically weak position on the domestic stage to a point where they now have their own offices in Brussels on a par with government representatives. They have targeted the commission management committees who have responsibility for implementing the CAP reforms. While having no political mandate interest groups such as the IFA build up and ‘use informal personal contacts to canvass committee members’ who ‘usually make themselves available to interest group’s representatives (ibid). Essentially, these types of informal contacts have become an integral part of the policy process of the EU and may even have become an overriding factor which has ultimately led to the exclusion of alternative sectors. This weakens any real environmental position in regard to agriculture as environmentalism has no strong voice at the negotiation base or any economic spin offs, which is what usually attracts interest groups in the first place. These impediments have to be measured against the closed shop nature of policy making. For instance, Adshead reports that the CAP reforms were ‘designed almost exclusively by Commissioner McSharry and his cabinet’ (ibid) so any group such as the IFA, which would have considerable access to the Commissioner, could ultimately have an inordinate influence on policy decisions.

Clearly, there are now two opposing approaches developing in farming practices. In a report on attitudes toward sustainable agriculture P Petrezelka, Korsching and Malia identify these two ‘contrasting paradigms’ as ‘the sustainable agricultural paradigm’ and the ‘conventional agricultural paradigm’ (‘Farmers’ Attitudes and Behaviour Towards Sustainable Agriculture’ in the Journal of Environmental Education Vol. 28 No 1 1996). Sustainable farming is concerned with the protection of the environment and the place of the community in an overall agri-Rural lifestyle that sees farming as a lifestyle and philosophy. Conventional agriculture is geared towards large scale production and profit with a reliance on mechanised technology, chemical fertilisers, pesticides and scientific by-products such as genetically modified food. Both paradigms are now in direct competition with each other and as a consequence have increased the chasm between agri-environmental practices and its capital driven, highly intensified counterpart. One major result of this extensive divide between the two contrasting paradigms is that farmers’ attitudes are shaped by their economic position as it relates to sustainable practices. Closer consultation and substantial education programmes must accompany new directives or eco-policies to bridge this perceived divide. In relation to REPS a study of attitudes towards the Scheme amongst Co. Galway farmers revealed that

(1) ‘Only 54.9% of respondents viewed nature conservation as involving some form of wildlife protection while 27.4% saw nature conservation restricting the way they farm.

(2) 40% said ‘No’ to a question which asked ‘Do you think there is anything on your farm which is of value to nature conservation?’

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(3) Only 50% considered themselves to be ‘environmentally friendly farmers’.

(4) Only 27.4% felt ‘environmentally friendly farming’ involved the prevention of pollution

(5) 46% thought the purpose of REPS was ‘clean and tidy farms’.

(6) 37.5% said their primary motive for joining REPS was for ‘additional income for housing stock’

(7) 59.37% responded ‘No’ to the question ‘Have you changed farming practices, as a result of joining REPS?’ (T Aughney and M J Gormley Environmental Science Unit UCG 1999).

While an environmental consciousness may not be clearly evident from these findings, 87.5% said they would continue with REPS at the end of its 5 year period. What becomes clear from these findings is that many farmers are involved in REPS for a primarily financial reason and that the environmental aspects of the Scheme have not been made clear. Furthermore, any reforms have been largely resisted by farmers’ lobby groups. This had had the effect of alienating farmers from the ecological spirit of REPS and reduced it to a matter of ‘tidying the farm’ thus losing much of the inherent environmental potential which the Scheme encapsulates. Taylor has put forward a major reason for this prevalent attitude when he identifies the ‘simplicity of the vision which has undoubtedly proven crucial to its widespread reception – tapping into the image of ‘small farmers tending their flock/environment’ (Taylor 1999). This pastoral image of the farmer as being ‘in tune with nature’ leaves little room for an acceptance of policy directives from Brussels or Dublin. It is at this level that a sense of resentment of outside interference begins to develop. Taylor also highlights the relatively typical clientelist response from politicians wishing to be seen to support this pastoral vision. For instance, he cites the Minister who claims farmers wee the natural custodians of the environment because ‘they ore so directly affected by it, they are more attuned to its protection than most people’ (Taylor 1999 from Dáil Debates 1996).

This reflects the position for Irish farmers that began with EC membership and was strengthened by the 1991 McSharry reforms which were a response to the GATT negotiations. Irish trades unions and industry groups had hoped for a shift in policy emphasis but this lack of a decentralised vision makes any attainment of environmental levels difficult in a pan EU context as each member state is left to contend with the struggle between implementing the directives while local political conflicts are played out. REPS were drawn up in 1992 as part of the overall CAP Reforms. Its main objective was to increase environmental standards and awareness running through the policy process and on towards improving agricultural practices. Furthermore, the Scheme included proposals for land maintenance reform, a diversification in agricultural methods and in uses of land and provided an opportunity for farmers to retire early. These new policies were to run in addition to existing supports such as the headage payments for disadvantaged areas. According to the 1998 Report for the AFDA payments from

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Brussels into the Irish exchequer have increased from £119 in 1980 to £866 million in 1996 (Agriculture and Food Development Authority Final Report September 1998).

While this represents a considerable rate of financing, current proposals have set these types of payments as an integral part of any future agricultural policy. This policy has at its core an acceptance of the need for ending ongoing problems which have surrounded agriculture throughout the EU including oversupply of produce, extensive bureaucracy and built in anomalies in existing subsidy arrangements. It is in this context that REPS must be considered. The Scheme is administered by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Food and is carried out in accordance with an Agri-Environmental Plan and the Department’s specifications. Participation in the Scheme takes place on a voluntary basis. To date up to 40,000 farmers have taken part in the Scheme (ILO figures 1997). There are up to 12 measures contained in the Scheme, the first 3 of which are compulsory:

1 Farm nutrient management plans

2 Grassland management plans

3 Maintenance of all watercourses and wells

4 Retention of all wildlife habitats

5 Maintenance of farm and field boundaries

6 Cease using herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers around hedgerows, lakes, rivers and streams

7 Protection of features with historical and/or historical interest

8 Maintain and improve farm’s visual appearance

9 Produce tillage crops without growth regulators, burning straw and with unsprayed margins

10 Attend related ministry courses

11 Keep farm and environmental records (REP Scheme January 1999).

Supplementary Measures included in the Scheme cover areas involving the Conservation of Natural Heritage which has target areas such as:

• Natural Heritage Areas proposed by the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands

• Farmlands based in Special Areas of Conservation designated under Council Directive 92/43

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• Specialist Protection Areas designated under the Wild Birds Directive 70/409

• Areas of Commonage (REPS 1 Jan 1999 Regulation (EEC) No 2078/92)

The Commonage Framework Plan includes:

• Establishment of grazing regime including environmentally sustainable stock numbers.

• An overall grassland management plan.

• Measures for habitat protection.

There are also provisions for restriction and/or prohibition in the use of fertiliser, plant protection products, ploughing, reseeding, planting of trees, turf cutting and other requirements deemed necessary (REPS 1 Jan 1999 Reg. EEC No 2078/92). The Supplementary Measures cited above give an indication of how REPS has been introduced with an agenda of changing existing techniques and introducing more environmentally friendly and efficient agri-practices in Ireland. In addition to this REPS aims to prioritise controlled production methods in areas such as conservation and landscape protection. One such area cited in the scheme is that of ‘Riparian Zones’ which are areas set aside from designated river or lakeside margins where grazing and livestock are held back to a minimum width of 10 metres and a maximum of 30 meters. Other areas which come under the REPS remit include the production of food under environmentally friendly conditions particularly through organic methods and the protection of wildlife habitats including certain species of flora and fauna listed as endangered. This extends to the rearing of localised animal breeds that face extinction. Farmers are also obliged to improve grassland management and preserve wildlife habitats which can affect afforestation, drainage schemes and turf cutting.

Teagasc and other environmental agencies work with the Department in detailing and implementing the Scheme and these agencies undertake the monitoring and evaluation of the Scheme on an ongoing basis. Farmers are required to keep detailed records, detailing mineral uses, stock numbers and dates of fertiliser application as well as recording the implementation of the various measures agreed in the Scheme. Furthermore, an important aspect of the Scheme relates to the protection of sites of historical or archaeological interest and the promotion of a visually attractive landscape and countryside. Farmers are only paid for one additional environmentally friendly measure outside of the 12 already listed but they are encouraged to take up additional activities. They are also encouraged to take up organic farming and agri-tourism. Training and educational courses are available through Teagasc and farmers are paid £100 if they take a 20 hour training course. The Department of Agriculture has also established 50 demonstration farms which are run in accordance with the Scheme and that are used as working models for farmers to visit.

Difficulties in turning Policy to Practice:

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Initially, many Irish farmers felt that they had not been properly consulted about the REP Scheme. They also felt that local practices and traditions were undervalued and threatened by some of the proposed measures. One result of this dissatisfaction can be seen in an ongoing campaign by the IFA to dilute aspects of REPS. Their proposals include provision for the following:

• Farmers with less than 50 acres should be paid £70 per acre rather than £50.

• Farmers with lands of more than 100 acres should be eligible for the Scheme.

• The number of paid supplementary measures should increase to 2 per farmer.

• Farmers should have an a la carte system where they could opt for certain measures and disregard others.

The IFA also sees a larger role for farmers in the discussion for the designation of Natural Heritage Areas (NHAs) such as the Burren and in reaching ‘practical’ solutions to environmental matters. Issues such as consultation and compensation are highlighted by the IFA as central to farmers’ participation in REPS. However, when the priorities of a second associated organisation are considered, in this case The Heritage Council of Ireland, it becomes clear that certain priorities are at variance with what is expected from REPS. For instance, in a report to the Chief Executive of the Heritage Council by Michael Starrett REPS is cited as having a role in ‘realising the value of its true heritage potential’. The report argues for an integrated approach which in some respects may reflect the Heritage Council’s relatively weak position in relation to powerful lobby groups when they encounter strong economic interests as represented by the national farming organisations. An indication of the disparate range of approaches to the environment is seen when the Heritage Council’s definition of their own objectives in relation to REPS is examined against the IFA findings referred above. The report claims that the Council’s definition and functions included the following:

• To establish farming practices and controlled pollution methods which reflect the increasing concerns for conservation, landscape protection and wider environmental problems.

• To protect Wildlife habitats and endangered species of flora and fauna.

• To produce quality food in an extensive and environmentally friendly manner (Starrett, M.: Report to the Heritage Council 1998).

The Report does acknowledge the positive impact of REPS as a factor in raising environmental debate and awareness between farmers and related agencies. Here, a national and international commitment to sustainability is reinforced. It becomes clear that an emphasis must be placed on the individual first and then on the agricultural

206 Issues in Environmental Research community as well as the associated agencies in order to get the best response to any ecologically based scheme.

A critical analysis of REPS would place the lack of structured links between interested actors and agencies. This criticism can be directed at the sectionalised interests of the groups involved but it could be argued that this type of fragmentation becomes inevitable when there is a lack of any comprehensive approach in the overall implementation of the Scheme. Furthermore, many aspects of the Scheme have far reaching legal implications for participants yet this aspect of the Scheme is not dealt with or catered for. The Heritage Council even raised doubts as to whether current REPS measures go far enough to meet the requirements of the EU’s Habitat 2000 Directive. Brussels must share some responsibility for this anomaly due to poor consultation and backup services. The Irish Government must, in some way, unite its own disparate departments that have a role in protecting the Environment. These departments are often vying with each other for financial support. They are the Departments of Agriculture, Forestry and Food, Industry, Transport and the Environment as well as the Department of the Arts, Heritage, the Gaeltacht and the Islands.

In addition, the rate of participation by farmers must be improved. Intensive dairy and beef farmers have largely opted out of the Scheme due to factors such as high stocking rates and measures which would lead to certain changes in practices. Certainly, a review of some of the current conditions laid down in REPS must be part of the agenda of any overall review of the Scheme. What becomes clear, if one examines recent agricultural scandals such as BSG or Genetically Modified Foods, is the increasing importance of consumer demand on agricultural practices. New approaches to farming such as organic farms, together with the highlighting of how environmental practices are efficient and beneficial, must be introduced to the overall agricultural industry at every level. Teagasc’s proposals in relation to consumer interest have been outlined in the following manner:

a) Food quality – this is to the forefront because it directly affects human health. Regulation on residues, bacteria, etc, will be vigorously enforced.

b) The importance of the landscape in which farming is conducted. There will be ever increasing pressures to maintain high water quality in our rivers / lakes. There will be demands to preserve our landscapes, hedgerows, wildlife and biodiversity.

c) Animal Welfare – Consumers will expect that animals are housed, reared and transported in humane conditions (Teagasc REPS Conference Proceedings 1998).

These proposals acknowledge the importance of increasing environmentally friendly measures in relation to schemes such as REPS, not just because of EU directives but due to the economically driven acceptance of consumer demand which expects a higher environmental performance from the agricultural sector. The REP Scheme can be a successful factor in addressing consumer demands while also being a force in educating

207 Issues in Environmental Research them. Any easing of environmental consciousness which leads to changes on the ground in agricultural practices is ultimately beneficial to the overall ecology of the nation. However, a more far reaching and comprehensive Scheme with a wider consultation process is required to meet these outcomes.

Conclusion:

Notwithstanding the complexities of any analysis of agricultural environmental practices, certain conclusions can be drawn from our findings so far. The opportunities provided by environmental policy and practices are by far too important and beneficial to succumb to bureaucracy, poor management or apathy. Clearly, a need to consult farmers at every level of eco-agri schemes is manifest, as is the need to make people agents for environmental protection rather than subsidising the occasional pro-ecological measure. Links should be made between farmers, NGOs, academics, policy makers and environmental agencies as a part of the policy making process rather than as a response to a policy in crisis. It is crucial that the objectives of agriculture and the environment become integrated and that this is the basis for future policy in both sectors. Agricultural practices must be given an environmental aspect through the utilisation of funding. That is to say that all funding of agricultural practices must be reliant on environmental practices. This should replace the concept of subsidies which place environmental practices on the level of a handout which is seen as an object for exploitation. Further training and advice is needed so that environmental standards can be raised. This would place a larger emphasis on restoration and enhancement of habitats and species populations. Environmental objectives, with enhanced targeting and monitoring, should reflect these raised standards and should be a priority for all Member States.

This represents one area where Ireland could play a leading role reversing its current image as a reluctant participant in eco-agri practices. A natural forum linking all relative Departments, agencies and participants should be established sending a signal of intent in regard to environmental standards. This could be seen as a Millennium Project, one which brings the Celtic Tiger back to its agrarian roots. Better consultation and education for all involved in the long process of drawing up policy, framing legislation, highlighting local variations and implementing new agrarian practices would improve all aspects of environmental and agricultural policy and help to ultimately merge both areas into one overall paradigm.

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Chapter 5: Green Activist Methodologies Journalism:

Between 2004 and 2005, I worked as a political commentator and journalist for the Galway Independent. My editor, Ronan Lynch, would go on to publish the Great Corrib Gas Controversy with Frank Connolly and the Centre for Public Inquiry. My articles were intended to challenge the mainstream orthodoxy in Galway. This strategy may have had some influence on the 2004 local elections which saw four Labour and one Green candidate elected to Galway City Council. Two of these ‘green-left’ candidates would go on to be Mayor. By 2007, in the absence of our journalistic efforts, the electorate in Galway West returned the same five sitting TDs. This section will introduce a selection of some of the articles published during this period; they make for an interesting snapshot of the political events of the day, and the manner in which I tried to address these as a consciously environmentally minded and left leaning journalist.

The State of Our Democracy (on the 2004 Presidential Campaign):

The collapse of the opposition parties’ presidential campaign is indicative of the diminishing nature of the existing democratic options currently on offer in Irish society. While President McAleese is an undoubtedly popular First Citizen, elections should nevertheless be contested, to ensure that the ongoing political debate is maintained thereby replenishing the consensual ethos which provides the democratic basis for our national institutions, reinforcing the bond between the public and the systems of executive representation which they have voted for.

While the parties of opposition may, on paper, have not appeared to be the likely winners of this election, campaigns can take on a momentum of their own, and surprise results are not uncommon. Many Galwegians will be disappointed that our own Michael D. Higgins was unable to contest the election. He would have brought a degree of eloquence combined with sharp political analysis that would have enlivened the hustings, while also highlighting important issues of national and global importance. The ramifications for the opposition’s reticence to contest this election are, as yet unseen. However, the centre- right coalition of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats, which are backing President McAleese’s campaign, may now be left with the political equivalent of a walk over, as Labour and the Greens have been left in some disarray by their ineptitude. One must question why Labour constantly attempt to coalesce with one centre-right party, Fine Gael in order to challenge another centre-right party, Fianna Fail. It may be time that an alternative opposition is considered and given time to develop.

However, one aspect of local democracy which is going from strength to strength is the Galway City Community forum. Recently, elections were held for two of the Forum’s co- ordinating bodies, the Galway City Development Board and the Galway City Council Strategic Policy Committee. As a network which brings together groups from civil society with local representatives, the Forum is an important part of our democracy, providing community groups with a say in the decision-making which shapes and reviews the provision of local services throughout the city. The Forum provides a

209 Issues in Environmental Research platform for local activist groups such as Galway for a Safe Environment, Cairde na Gaillimhe, and An Taisce as well as resident’s associations, equality groups and sports clubs. These civic groups can work together to ensure a fair distribution of resources across the city and may represent a new form of community-based politics which could provide an alternative to the jaded system of party politics in this country. As the public’s faith in the parties of the Dáil declines, the enrichment of local politics as represented by the Community Forum is both timely and welcome.

Hospice Protest:

The public demonstration planned for next Saturday is set to reflect the growing sense of anger over the prolonged closure of the Galway Hospice inpatient facility at Renmore. The unit, which has remained closed for over a year, provided palliative care for terminally-ill cancer patients at the twelve bed facility until it was closed while investigations into medication procedures were undertaken. Palliative care has been described by the World Health Organisation as the care of those patients who cannot be treated by curative medicine. Patients facing their transition to the next world are provided with the means of reducing pain and controlling symptoms, while psychological and spiritual support is offered. Families of the patient are also included in the support network. Hospice treatment has been offered in Galway since 1990, when a Home Care service was established. The need to facilitate those who required in-patient facilities was met through the establishment of the Renmore Unit in 1992. This unit was established due to the extensive fund-raising activities of Galway people, through individual and professional donations.

While the current dispute arose due to an investigation into medication procedure, the Hospice Foundation reported in March that of the seventeen incidents reviewed, twelve were found to have caused either no error or harm. In four of the remaining five cases, the interventions were necessary in order to sustain life. While of course all due care needs to be applied in medical procedure, the fact remains that the Hospice could have remained open while such an investigation took place. The provision of such a service can only be measured in the testimony of the families of its patients. In the case of Galway Hospice, the support of the public has also been demonstrated by the more than 20,000 signatures to its petition, which now sit on the Minister for Health’s desk, waiting for action. Local activists have called for the immediate restoration of the Hospice in- patient service and the appointment of a locum consultant, as soon as possible. The Hospice dispute looks like it may become an issue in the forthcoming election.

Medical Cards:

The news that over 100,000 fewer people are in possession of medical cards now than in 1997 is a very real indicator of the type of hardship many families are having to endure in Irish society. The fact that this number has been reached in spite of government promises to increase medical card eligibility for 200,000 people is indicative of the cynical type of politics currently in vogue in this country. Despite all the smug claptrap about the Health ministry being likened to ‘Angola’ by our politicians and their friends in the Dublin 4

210 Issues in Environmental Research media, the fact remains that the issue of health has a major impact on people’s lives. As families struggle to find the costs of attending the doctor, many are postponing visits due to financial hardship, risking a worsening of the conditions, which ultimately creates greater costs to the economy as hospital waiting lists increase, with time also missed from school and work as a result. The number of families losing their eligibility for medical cards is increasing across the health boards and counties of the country. In Galway, the people who had medical cards decreased from 73,724 in 1997 to 66,432 in 2004, according to statistics released by the Department of Health last week.

According to the Irish medical organisation, up to one quarter of a million people now are unable to afford to attend their doctors when ill, a shocking amount in a society as wealthy as ours. Overall there has been a drop in the percentage of people with medical cards, from 37 percent in 1997 to 28 percent in 2004. The risks to those with serious diseases is obvious, as ongoing treatment can be disrupted, leading to further risks of complications. The threshold for a married couple with a child is a combined income of 232 Euro per week, or less than 115 Euro per week if each parent is working. By denying families medical cards, and therefore access to proper medical car, our economy suffers, so the current situation appears to be the result of a mean-spiritedness rather than an ideological attempt to reduce costs by the state. As the threshold stands, a family would have to earn less than the mandated minimum wage to become eligible for a medical card, so it appears to contravene the spirit of the law. And while the numbers of people with medical cards has dropped, the tax-breaks for multinational pharmaceutical companies, who charge exorbitant prices for medicine, has remained. Ultimately the sheer scale of the numbers now facing risks due to an inability to pay for medical care demands action, not more broken promises.

New Political Voices (on the 2004 Local Election Campaign):

As the local and European elections will soon be upon us, it may be time for Galway’s electorate to consider exactly what type of politics we are being asked to vote for. Are the candidates seeking our franchise exponents of new and innovative ideas or do they represent the tired politics of the past, based on a stilted carve up of resources? In the wake of successive scandals, the public are anxious that the cycle of political corruption be broken. The forthcoming elections will provide the electorate with an opportunity to pass judgment on the performance of outgoing representatives while measuring the potential of a new wave of political hopefuls.

Certainly, the range of candidates on offer to the public is greater than previous elections. Therefore, the electorate has a major opportunity to make a statement about the type of politics they want to see over the next few years. For instance voters can demonstrate their opposition to the government’s unnecessary and unjust citizenship referendum by voting against it, while choosing Nigerian candidate and local activist Tokie Laotan as their voice on the council. Her presence in City Hall would no doubt bring a degree of balance to debates about issues facing those who have arrived in our country from different cultures, placing an emphasis on their potential contribution rather than the

211 Issues in Environmental Research negative focus put forward as part of the Justice Minister, Michael McDowell’s, ‘citizen tourism’ debacle.

For too long, the only effective opposition to the mainstream in City Hall has been provided by Labour’s two councillors, Catherine Connolly and Tom Costello. Labour is hoping to maximise their vote across the city by adding new voices such as Derek Nolan, Billy Cameron, and Collette Connolly to their ticket. The Green Party has also increased their profile with Niall O’Brolchain, Kieran Cunnane and Aoibheann McCann running in the city, while Siobhan Nevin is standing in the Tuam ward. They stand to gain from the increased interest that has resulted from recent environmental disputes. Meanwhile, Sinn Fein’s political star appears to be in the ascendance and their candidates Daniel Callanan and Ann Marie Carroll may benefit from their rising profile.

Some of the new faces from the mainstream include the PD’s Garry Creavan, Fine Gaels’ Niall McNelis, Geraldine Gantley and Maureen Egan and Fianna Fail’s Michael Kelly and Fearghal Wall. Their presence on a crowded ticket provides scope for fresh perspectives on Galway’s political scene. Many Galwegians will also take an interest in Sean Naughton’s attempts to become an MEP after his successful joust with the Fianna Fail hierarchy. With so many new candidates to choose from, it seems that the local political scene is on the threshold of change. Having heard so many people complaining that ‘sure, they’re all the same’ when speaking about politicians, the opportunity to make real changes through the electoral process on 11th June [2004] should not be squandered. Each vote cast provides a new opportunity to shape the political landscape, so make sure you’re registered, and have your say in Galway’s future.

Election 2004: Public’s Response to Inequality (on the 2004 Local Election Outcome):

While the ramifications of last week’s election have caused much navel gazing in certain political quarters, the underlying issues which gave rise to the electorate registering their discontent have yet to be identified by those currently in power. One of the main issues that surfaced during the campaign was the continued poverty suffered by marginalized communities, despite years of economic growth. The forms of poverty endured by many families across Ireland include a poverty of resources, housing, and healthcare.

According to the Public Health Alliance of Ireland (PHAI), the inequalities in healthcare contribute to a higher death rate among those in lower occupational classes. As up to forty percent of our population exist below the poverty line, factors such as restricted access to healthcare and support, poor nutritional diets and overuse of alcohol and tobacco are compounded by the financial difficulties faced by those unable to avail of medical cards, or afford private healthcare. It seems that the ideologically driven attack on our public health system is having severe consequences throughout society.

Poverty also affects the life chances open to those from marginalized or lower-income areas. Highly populated estates with few amenities or green areas are all too

212 Issues in Environmental Research commonplace. Surely the time has come for all developments to have public amenities built before houses go on the market, to prevent sprawling estates becoming urban wastelands. The inclusion of playgrounds, sporting facilities and alternative transport options are crucial to a communities overall health and well being.

These quality of life issues were raised time and again by people across Galway over the course of the election. Resources should not be given as bribes at election time, but should be distributed equally, according to the needs of all communities. The days of marinas, equestrian centres or golf clubs suddenly appearing in a remote area in a Minister’s constituency before an election are, hopefully, behind us. The alienation caused by poverty is also a contributory factor to rising crime rates. Young people with limited options are more easily induced into anti-social activity. The increase in suicides is also a tragic consequence of social inequality, according to the Health Alliance Report.

Their report titled ‘Health in Ireland-an Unequal State,’ identifies areas where government activity could be altered to reduce patterns of social inequality. These include an end to the biases in funding that create public and private healthcare imbalances, an increase in universal healthcare funded by insurance contribution, and increased funding for public healthcare consultants. The removal of the regional health boards may create the opportunity to act on this issue. The message from the electorate should be noted, with an end to all forms of inequality becoming a priority for our politicians. It’s time the net of equality was cast across all of our citizens, enabling everyone to experience the benefits of social inclusion.

Anti War Protests:

While the connections between Ireland and the United States have been strengthened by the millions from these shores who sought refuge in the ‘land of opportunity’, these links have never been extended to the political realm. This particularly applies to the subject of American foreign policy, which many here in Ireland feel has similarities with the type of imperialism which was for so long synonymous with British rule in this country. Ireland has not participated as a nation in wars of conquest, and has remained neutral while maintaining an independent voice in the European Union and the United Nations.

Indeed, despite the strong blood ties between many here in the West of Ireland and US cities like Boston, Chicago and New York, many Americans have failed to grasp the depths of Ireland’s anti-imperialistic feelings. It is within this context that we must consider the comments of the former American diplomat, George Dempsey. Mr. Dempsey has declared that during his time in the American Embassy in Dublin, he felt that the Irish media was ‘anti-American’, due to the publication of criticisms of American foreign policy. The Irish media was, he claimed, ‘heavily leftist’ and was even in some way to blame for the September 11th terrorist attacks, due to its support for the Arab world’s cause.

Coming in the aftermath of the controversial images emanating from the prison in Abu Gharib, Mr. Dempsey’s attack on the Irish media is somewhat ill-timed and unfounded.

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The question has to be asked ‘if Americans like Mr. Dempsey don’t support the concept of a free press, one of the accepted tenets of democracy, then what is the point of ‘bringing democracy ‘to the inhabitants of Iraq? As has been the case with many examples of the US’s militaristic foreign policy in the past such as Vietnam and Latin America, innocent human life has been shed at an alarming rate in Iraq, while human rights abuses have escalated.

When US President George Bush visits Ireland in June, he will be met by protestors from the anti-war movement, who count Galway TD, Michael D. Higgins among their spokespersons. As Bush sleeps in comfort in Dromoland Castle in County Clare, US troops will be landing while their military planes refuel nearby in Shannon airport. We in the West are not that far removed from the war. We mourned the loss of all the victims of September 11th, including the many who had origins in the West of Ireland. But we are an independent nation, with a free press, and an instinctive opposition to imperialistic occupations and military interventions. We also support the United Nations, and our soldiers have served around the globe as peace keepers under the UN flag. We are not, however, anti-American. And despite Mr. Dempsey’s misgivings, there is no leftist agenda in Irish media circles, but there is however a growing consensus that American foreign policy in Iraq led to a tragic war which has neither reason nor direction.

Affordable Housing (written at the height of Ireland’s Housing ‘boom’):

The issue of housing has become one of the major issues facing Irish society in recent years. As the economy has grown, the value of property increased dramatically. Extensive infrastructural development throughout the country has also led to soaring construction costs. Land on the periphery of our towns and cities which was once earmarked for agriculture has been rezoned for housing, exchanging hands at massively inflated prices. Some would say that the issue of housing has replaced some of the traditional problems of the past, such as unemployment and emigration, as the new major crisis facing the post ‘Celtic-Tiger’ Ireland.

While recent reports have claimed that the demand for housing in now being met, the question of affordability remains a significant problem, particularly for the many young families hoping to buy their first home. Attempts by the social partners to address this issue appears to have ended in failure, particularly while we read reports claiming that less than two hundred affordable houses were built last year, despite record numbers of new housing development completions.

This has come after an ideologically driven reassessment about the nature of social housing. While many criticised the spread of large-scale council-estates throughout the seventies and eighties, these areas were affected by a lack of basic resources, of amenities. The fact remains that social housing provided people with homes, whereas the current approach to the issue leaves vulnerable families exposed to the vagaries of the property market, where profit making is the primary focus.

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In truth, the housing issue gets to the very heart of the question of social exclusion in Irish society. Although we pride ourselves on not having a British-style class system, it is clear that we have simply replaced peerages with fashionable addresses. No issue seems to motivate people more than the maintenance of social divides, restricting the building of much needed social or affordable housing near ‘good’ neighbourhoods. This less than charitable attitude has resulted in nearly 50,000 families being stuck on local authority housing-lists. As the negotiations for a settlement in Northern Ireland resume, it is worth remembering that the inherent unfairness in the North’s housing system was one of the main issues of the Civil Rights Movement in the late sixties. Isn’t it a shame that we seem to have ignored this lesson from our own recent history?

Bin Charges and the Polluter Pays Principle:

While Irish society has become characterized by increased consumption patterns, the manner in which we deal with an issue of waste has not changed sufficiently. The lack of a focused drive to reduce waste output in the industrial and agricultural sectors and to introduce large-scale re-use and recycling throughout our commercial sector, remains a problem. By primarily targeting domestic waste the state has missed an opportunity to challenge the culture of waste production which is currently the norm for producers as well as consumers. The success of the municipal recycling project here in Galway led the way for the introduction of similar schemes across the country. If this was to lead to similar initiatives between our city and county councils, chambers of commerce and agricultural groups across Galway, we would reap the benefits for years to come, and could present Galway as the most progressive centre for ecologically-efficient practices.

One way in which we all participate in inefficient waste practice is through domestic recycling. With the new pay-by-use system that is being introduced, householders should be able to reduce their costs through the increased reduction, reuse, and recycling of materials. However, the introduction of a flat rate for domestic refuse collection prevents householders from becoming eco-efficient. This approach runs counter to the accepted practices developed around the 'polluter pays principle', whereby polluters must bear the costs of the pollution they produce.

However, the concept also implies that those who reduce waste production should be rewarded. The obvious reward to the domestic householder who reduces their waste would be a reduction in bin charges at that point. In this way, we can interpret the polluter pays principle as being efficient in an economic as well as an ecological sense, serving to protect the environment as well as being in the best interests of all in society. So we might ask the question, where is the commercial waste producer in this equation? And what of the packaging industry, which must have a role in the reduction of unnecessary waste? Only a holistic approach to waste reduction, incorporating all of those involved in the production, consumption and disposal or recycling of waste materials can lead to a sustainable and efficient waste management system.

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Such an inclusive interpretation of the polluter pays principle would lead to a decrease in waste production and consumption and in addition to the widespread reuse and recycling of materials, would lead to a decline in the waste being collected through the wheelie-bin service. Is is only then that the domestic producer should be charged, and they should be further encouraged to reduce their output by the introduction of a pay-by-weight system. This system has been successfully introduced in Cork, but our own city council hasn't met the deadline for the introduction of a similar scheme. The end result is that while householders in Cork can reduce costs by reducing their waste output, we Galwegians must continue to pay a flat rate, while still being inundated with unwanted packaging in the consumer products we purchase. The time has come for a bit of fairness in the system, allowing the rewards for reducing and recycling materials to be enjoyed by all.

Night Crossings: Representing the Western Isles (Discussion with Brian Brennan: Environmental Artist and creator of the work on this book’s cover):

Painting is a spiritual journey. Since early times man has used his power of vision for spiritual quest. From cave paintings to urban graffiti, human beings have needed to share their power of vision, which is an expression far beyond the means of words. While systems indoctrinate us into understandings of how art can be seen as 'good' or 'bad', we all retain this power of vision, and my journey reflects this need to express (Brian Brennan)

The West of Ireland has produced many evocative responses from artists who are inspired by the landscapes, and hinterlands of the rivers, valleys and islands up and down the coast. One such artist is Brian Brennan, who has been engaged in process of representation which has brought him into contact with the islands off the Western shore in recent years. His most recent exhibition "Night Crossing", which is being held upstairs at Nimmo's restaurant behind the Spanish Arch, is the latest in a series of presentations that interpret the crags and cliffs that come to shape our off-shore islands.

The artist allows his work to reflect the timelessness and sense of place that exists in these surroundings, as the sea continues to crash around the rocks, and the first hints of Spring brings its warmth, light and colours to the patterns hewn around the inlets and slopes of the rocky shore. Brian has been inspired by ´the wind and rain which has worked deep grooves into every rock as the sea carves blocks from the cliff face´.

Set against the backdrop of the flow of the Corrib River, with the golden light of an early spring sunset illuminating the works, ´Night Crossing is an exhibition which engenders a meditative response from the viewer. The works challenge the perceptions and senses, transporting us at once from our mainland setting back to the coastal isles, and a different time or timelessness we have come to forget, playing with our memory and imagination through the type of sensory illusion only art and nature can produce.

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´Night Crossing´ is the latest in a series of studies known as ´the Oilean Project´, based on similar themes by the artist. The first of these, "PolyRhythms", was launched by Padraic Breathneach in the Town Hall Theatre in February 2001. This exhibition used ultraviolet light to reflect the array of colours crafted together in a reflection of the deserted islands off the coast. This was followed by the cooperative Irish Lacken Project, an artistic collaboration undertaken off the coast of Roundstone, with artists including Brian, Cyril O´Flaherty and Lol Hardiman. Galway city council’s own Arts Officer James Harrold spoke of the significance of this collaboration when he launched the ´Night Crossing´ exhibition last Saturday.

Other exhibitions by the artist have included the award winning “Island People" series which was featured at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, as well as the collection opened by Ted Turtin for the Arts Festival in 2002. Some of the artists work can be seen at his website brianbrennan.net which is being launched by Micromarketing in the near future. "Night Crossing" a reflection of the Aran Islands by Brian Brennan, runs until the end of the month at Nimmo’s Gallery.

Racism and the ‘New Irish’ (One of my final articles before my period as a journalist in Galway ended. The paper ran an editorial titled ‘Some Deportation Necessary’ after it was published, alongside an unsigned letter attacking me and my stance on the deportations. The deportation policy of the then PD Justice Minister been repudiated by the Irish Courts in 2008. The paper, which came to be very supportive of the right wing PDs after I left, contacted me to say they were going in a new direction, and my articles would no longer be necessary. I was pleased to have stood against these unnecessary and unjust deportations):

One of the notable features of life in Ireland today is the diversity of its population. For many years, a stagnant economy gave rise to a mass exodus of young people, to destinations such as Boston, Birmingham and Berlin. Here in the West, the emigrant’s plight was all too familiar, as our own ‘illegals`’ in countries like the United States found work and shelter among their own, often eking out an existence which revolved around hard labour with poor pay and conditions. These Irish abroad were often harassed and exploited, and had little recourse to the protections enjoyed by citizens of the lands where they had found refuge.

In recent years, all this has changed. With the economy soaring, people began to return to Ireland. First it was the ‘lost generation’ of the 1980s, who wanted to raise their children in an Ireland that seemed safer and friendlier than the mean streets of the big cities where they had been exiled to. Others followed; often the second and third generation Irish who had different accents, but knew Ireland from visits to relatives during their childhood. Soon they were followed by people from around the globe, who had no family connection with Ireland, but wanted to escape war or hardship in their own countries. Ireland was prosperous and part of the European Union, making it an attractive destination for these new exiles of a globalised world.

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In many instances those seeking asylum or work here have been given a generous welcome by their new communities. So many individuals and families from around the world have come to Ireland and become a part of the local scene. They contribute to their local community despite the legal barriers that prevent many from partaking in the workplace according to their skills, rather than their place or origin. They have become the ‘new Irish’ and have made an impact throughout Irish society. They have come to be interwoven into the social, cultural and political life of the country. And while the scourge of racism remains a sad reminder of the intolerance displayed by some people, by and large the new arrivals were becoming a welcome feature of modern Irish life.

Unfortunately, last year’s citizenship referendum signalled a change in attitude to ‘the new Irish’, at least on the official side of things. Suddenly, we were being told that people were not coming to Ireland to make a contribution but to exploit our system. The referendum raised fears and prejudices that were not based on reality but were shaped from the same intolerance that was often directed at Irish exiles in the past. The lack of a reasonable debate during the referendum was followed by a silent acceptance of the result. In the absence of debate, there seemed to be a resigned acceptance that some new arrivals would have to be sent home.

This month, between International Anti-Racism Day and Saint Patrick’s Day, the loud knock on the door that many of our own exiles had dreaded during the 1980s was to be heard across Ireland. Officials began to seek out individuals and families for deportation. Families that had become members of their communities, neighbours, friends, are now rendered asunder as their shocked communities campaigned to have their friends and neighbours returned. In some tragic cases, children and infants have become separated from their families, while others have gone into hiding. Irish society seems to have crossed a moral threshold, as many feel that the ethical and moral bounds of the nation have been transgressed. We have become the same as all the other countries that abused those who sought refuge in their societies, in a way that many Irish felt we never would. Not for us, the ‘colonists’ mindset, abusing others in the way we were abused while in exile. And yet, this appalling moment has come to pass; a dark night of the Irish soul, a threshold of human decency crossed.

The question remains, why have these deportations occurred, in whose name have these attacks on our communities been carried out? Whose interests are served by this debasing of our multicultural and inclusive society? The response of communities, often schoolchildren traumatised by the inhumane removal of their classmates, indicated that the policy of forced deportation is not representative of the will of the people across Irish society. We must be unequivocal in our response to these injustices. We should speak out against these forced deportations. In this context, it would be worth recalling the words of Pastor Niemoler from 1930’s Germany:

First they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist; then they came for the Social Democrats and I did not speak out because I was not a Social Democrat. Then they came for the Trade Unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a

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Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew, then they came for me and there was no one left to stand up for me.

Chapter 6: Research Methods: Interviews:

Interview: with Councillor Catherine Connolly (later Mayor of Galway):

Having been involved with the Galway West Labour Party as an activist, re-establishing the NUIG branch, Youth Officer and (briefly) Constituency Secretary, I was concerned about the treatment of individuals in that party. Locally, a councillor rang me to ask me to support him at the party’s selection meeting for the 2000 local elections. I attended the meeting, and voiced my concern at the lack of female candidates among the five men who had been put forward by the party. One woman, who was sitting next to me, clearly wanted to speak, and we encouraged her to do so. Her name was Catherine Connolly, and over the coming years, she would become a major figure on the local political landscape, winning election to the local council and becoming Mayor of Galway in 2005. Councillor Connolly would leave the Labour party in 2007, due to a perceived attempt to keep her off the ticket in that year’s general election. This interview took place shortly after her election in 2004.

How did you come to be involved in politics? Through a sense of anger really, about a lack of facilities and the lack of accountability from city councillors. I would have been very socially aware, through my family.

What have you achieved so far? We’ve done a lot in 5 years; I’m delighted with the progress that we’ve made. A child friendly city was one of the first things I put on the agenda. The Webb Report was a very comprehensive report on this, analysing the needs in the city. We have had 15 playgrounds upgraded now and I’m delighted with that. The playgrounds in Salthill and Westside need to be made wheelchair friendly. As for planning, I was astonished by the opposition in regard to planning, they were unrelenting. At the last city council meeting, after 5 years of our efforts, there was a commitment made to have separate planning meetings.

What did you make of the election campaign, and results? Were you confident of taking a seat in the South Ward? At some stage over the last year I decided I’m not going back with only two Labour councillors, I’d decided that I’d simply had enough. In regard to changing wards, my father’s family all come from the Claddagh and I thought it was a risk worth taking. My sister Colette was willing to stand in the West Ward. It was a calculated risk and I have no regrets. I always said there were two seats in the West Ward. The feedback was very good during the canvass. We were out on the campaign every night. I wouldn’t have changed anything.

What did you think of the media coverage of the election?

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I was very disappointed with one Galway paper. They ran a deliberate campaign, they were good to give us coverage, but the nature of some of the coverage was structured to undermine us. Some of the editorials were unhelpful and unfair, but I think it backfired, people saw through this.

Why do you think you’ve been portrayed negatively at times? I don’t think they are happy that someone is questioning the system and getting results.

What are the advantages of increased support on the new council? Much more support on a personal level, more power with voting. We’re the dominant group now. I think Sinn Fein and the Greens would agree with most of our local policies. There’s a challenge to the new councillors to vote with us on community issues.

What are the issues you see coming to prominence for the new council? Housing, incineration, planning, I would see those as the major issues. In terms of making people have more respect for the council and working with the council, I think we have to give the public what they want. Practical things like litter bins, showers for swimmers in Salthill, playground repairs, things on a day to day level, but housing and incineration would be very big. We have to review the whole waste issue; we have to stand together and say no to incineration and promote recycling.

How have you met the challenge of carrying the burden of opposition on the council? It’s been difficult, it hasn’t been easy, I’m fortunate to live close to work; I use my bike so I’m not stuck in traffic. I can meet my commitments; my husband has been on board 100 percent.

How would you address conservative voters’ concerns about the new direction of the city council? I would say the agenda that we’ve put out over the last 5 years has been very positive. I don’t think anyone could object to our agenda. I think we’ve made huge inroads in terms of inviting the public up and showing them reports. That wouldn’t have happened before; the public are entitled to see these reports. The council is for the people of Galway. On incineration-There’s no need to bring in incineration as we have achieved 51 percent recycling. On the housing issue, nobody could be happy with 2,076 households on a waiting list for housing, it’s not good for society. All benefit from social cohesion. For the first time in the history of Galway, we can work together and promote our vision of Galway. On the subject of public transport, we need bus corridors and a commitment to transport; we don’t need any more reports on it.

What in particular would you have liked to contribute to Galway’s future? My vision for Galway would be that it be universally accessible to all citizens. We have to implement the Barcelona Declaration as quickly as possible. I’d like to see a city with excellent public transport. I would hope that in the next year we would take steps towards that. On housing, I’d like to see a commitment to ending the waiting list; that can only be

220 Issues in Environmental Research done with central government’s politics. No incineration and a city safe for pedestrians and cyclists.

Interview with Professor Emer Colleran April 2004: Emer Colleran had led the campaign to prevent an interpretative centre at the Mullaghmore site in the Burren special area of conservation during the 1990s (Leonard 2006, 2008). As such, she had become one of the leading spokespersons of the Irish environmental movement. Many were surprised when she stated on national television that she would be happy to live near an incinerator. My interview took place as part of my PhD research on the campaign against incineration led by the Galway for a Safe Environment (GSE) campaign.

Could you provide some background information on your involvement as an environmentalist over the years? I’m a microbiologist. Originally I trained as a biochemist and became involved on a voluntary basis. I became involved in An Taisce when I returned from working abroad in the late 70’s. I became heavily involved here in Galway and subsequently spent 3 years as national chairman and in the meantime my research in microbiology has grown, become more and more focused towards the environmental aspects of microbiology which would include biological options for waste and waste water treatment.

What were the early cases you were involved with at that stage? Most of it was to do with planning in county Galway and I served as planning officer for the Galway Association of An Taisce for quite a number of years. Probably the single key issue in the early stages was the use of section 4 clauses for planning applicants. We carried out a nationwide survey of local authorities and I think we were instrumental in getting these curtailed at some stage.

Could you explain the advantages incineration may present to the community in the waste management crisis? The problem with waste is there area number of alternatives, both negatives and positives for all the alternatives. If we take incineration as one option the advantages I would see are (there are a number) firstly, it reduces the volume and bulk of waste. That’s really quite considerable, there will be a residue that requires landfilling, but it means the amount of material that goes into landfill will be much less. The major advantage these days is that they are called waste to energy plants; which means that they diffuse energy which is reusable; it’s converted into heat. It’s affected by the EU as renewable energy production.

Why do you think some –put forward arguments that claim incinerators provides toxicity levels that provide serious health risks to the public? Well, you asked me the advantages and I didn’t get to reply to the disadvantages and some of the aspects of incineration that are potentially disadvantageous to my mind are that if incinerators are operated at wrong temperatures, or if scrubbers are not properly operated, if they are not state of the art, well maintained, then there is the possibility of toxic chemicals, they are carcinogenic, they are really toxic. I have no doubt it’s a valid

221 Issues in Environmental Research concern. What people don’t realise is when you burn your rubbish in your garden, or tires… people don’t want that in their backyard, so its kind of NIMBYism, but people can never rule out the possibility of malfunction and possibly incinerators although there is no evidence in countries that have adopted incineration, that this can happen. But these plants if they come on stream must be operated to the highest standards. And if they are, and I would like to see them not local authority operated, but professionally, then standards set by the EU, to my mind should not pose a localised threat Where I would be more in agreement with people’s concerns, particularly Green Party concerns, is that obviously, a private company or even a local authority run incinerator, they want to maximise profit, that’s the amount of electricity they can generate, as a result they are described as voracious, the more waste you feed them, the more your benefit, therefore people see them as being counteractive to recycling.

What is your view that recycling and incineration are directly competitive? Obviously I’m pro recycling, but I would also like to say that energy recycling is a form of recycling. Renewable energy generation is a valid form of recycling; I have considerable concerns as to how well in Ireland recycling can function in the long term. Glasses, cans all of these are recyclable, but when you look at other wastes like cardboard, paper, newspaper and organic, its not that easy to insure that the recycler will operate at local, community or national levels. While I’m in favour of recycling, one should not say it’s wonderful, it has its problems. There are loads of options none of them are perfect. Incineration is just one option, not the best one, but then maybe recycling isn’t the best one either. We are in a very fluid situation as regards market value of recycling. Ok, let’s say all our fruit and veg. We compost, what do we do with it? What are the potential public health risks?

What is your opinion of the recent campaign run by Galway for a Safe Environment? I haven’t been involved in that, I think it has been well balanced, I think some of the so- called scientific evidence and they haven’t looked at other alternatives, they have just said we don’t want incineration, that’s not to say I don’t think they have the right, but I would have preferred a more balanced approach. Incineration is a very emotive issue, I can think of campaigns in the past over television masts which became highly emotional, and yet these masts are in place and nobody worries about them. I am not advocating incineration and I want to make that clear, but what I would say is that I have visited quite a number of cities in Europe and seen incinerators working side by side in residential areas with absolutely no problems. And I think it’s interesting that some of the so called environmentally friendly countries are changing their minds a little about incinerators. And I think part of that is because of the present breed of incinerators, they are a hell of a lot more improved. I would listen to some of these anti campaigners, like Dr. Connett a lot more if he also gave me more information on recycling, and the drawbacks, and benefits.

Could the Local Authority and Consultants for the Waste Plan have presented better arguments with more details on incineration and health?

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Yes, I think so, but once people become emotional about topics it becomes very difficult for any authority or developer to provide information, even if it’s valid information. The debate should have taken place in the context of say, an acceptance by the general public that the local authority were involved. People realised management has not been good in the past, local authority management has not been good, there is a lack of trust and people saw incineration coming in and that would fail, and we’d be stuck with real health risks. Ireland is so far behind in terms of good, effective waste management.

Could you outline An Taisce’s relationship with the State? People think it’s a bit like Teagasc, it’s totally voluntary. It’s fully independent. It’s also unusual in relation to other countries, in that it’s obliged to conform with regard to planning applications, environmental or archaeological or whatever, no money is provided, it’s voluntary. I have stepped back a fair bit, we are reflective of the country at large and we would be focussing on this waste hierarchy, minimisation, reduction, recycle, energy recovery, which is the real way of dealing with waste; the most difficult but the most important. We’re attacking it from the wrong end. We have a waste strategy and that is a consensus and would put incineration in its place in the hierarchy.

What was your view on the Health Board’s report on incineration? I welcomed the initiative, trying to compare the potential health and environmental risks of incineration versus landfill. My own feeling was the timescale was too short. The report is deficient in some places because of this. Aspects that dealt with modern versus older ones, that would have required a lot more research and a lot more resources and more planning to do that job properly .It was a wide brief with a short timescale. To some extent it was an alternative to the media debate. It wasn’t pro one or the other; it was: what are the implications?

You once famously claimed on television that you would be happy to live next to an incinerator? Do you still hold this view? Provided it’s a state of the art incinerator operated to the standards of the EU in countries like Denmark. I would prefer to live beside an incinerator than a badly operated landfill. There are other aspects, like transport costs for centralised incinerators, the same costs are going to be deployed for large landfills. These are all aspects that need to be looked at. One should look at energy consideration.

Interview Paul Connett January 2002: ‘By the late 1980’s, if an [incineration] industry proponent were asked to identify a single individual symbolising the opposition, Connett’s name would probably be the first one mentioned’ (Walsh et al 1997 p.17 cited in Politics Inflamed 2005). This interview took place during Professor Connett’s visit in support of GSE’s campaign against incineration in Galway. It was an emotional and frank interview from a charismatic and influential figure in the anti-incinerator and ‘zero-waste’ campaign.

Who are you and what is your background: My name is Paul Connett; I am Professor of Chemistry at St. Lawrence University, in Kenton, New York. I’ve been involved in the Waste Management Issues, particularly

223 Issues in Environmental Research incineration, dioxins and alternatives for 17 years. I got involved when they proposed a trash incinerator, municipal waste incinerator for our county, the most northern in New York State, St. Lawrence County, which abuts the Canadian Border. And since that time we not only were able to stop that particular incinerator, it took us five and a half years to do it, but in the process we helped other groups around the state and around the country and around the world to do likewise. I’ve been to 49 states, only last year and to 47 other countries. I’ve been to Ireland 12 times, this is my 12th visit. I’ve been to Galway; this is my third visit to Galway spanning 10 years. My first incinerator battle was in Derry, the Dupont incinerator. Then the next year we were back in Derry, in Donegal, fighting trash incinerators, people forget this, we keep going through the same arguments again and again. So that takes care of how I became involved in Irish Protest, not in the streets as such, but in public forum, debates and radio, T.V. interviews.

This is remarkable, I am going to be showing a videotape tonight, of Nova Scotia, which has achieved a 50% reduction in five years, and Halifax achieved nearly 60% in five years. But to get 56% in 8 months is absolutely remarkable, it’s unique, and I believe its citizen driven. I think if you get good leadership at the municipal level, you got rid of your old city manager, who I now believe is in Cork and you got a new city manager who believes in recycling. With the educational -these folks educate the public with petition drives, with public meetings with 700 or 800 people. Coming to these meetings with public debates, they educated the people and what they were able to do I think, was to convince people that the notion that the Irish people would not take the time to separate and recycle and compost and so on...absolute baloney. They have taken the time, they will take the time and they do want recycling. And the threat of incineration grabs their attention. And the threat of landfill grabs their attention.

One of the most important developments in this whole debate here in Galway, well first of all you had some brilliant leadership, you had (local activist) Aine Suttle here who had fought incineration in Toronto for five years, so she knew all the arguments and pseudo arguments promoting incineration. We had brilliant leadership from Conchur Ó Bradaigh who I think is just amazing, the way he dismantled and discredited the consultants, M C O’Sullivan, lead by PJ Rudden, so you had tremendous leadership, united community, the politicians listened, the politicians rejected the solid waste plan and of course the government rejected democracy and have imposed the same plans, eventually, the same misguided plans, this is extremely anti-democratic.

I don’t know how Noel Dempsey can walk across the street in Ireland, because he is just tearing democracy up in your face, but its not over, they haven’t built a single incinerator yet, and I don’t think they will, because the public won’t allow them to do it and meanwhile the Galway’s contribution is so significant, they have managed to show there is an alternative, you don’t have to incinerate, and I will show them a videotape, that you don’t have to incinerate, there are better alternatives, which are not only better from an environmental point of view, but better from an economic point of view. If nothing else, incineration is just lousy economics. What we’re also planning, which I think is important, because I think Galway could be very close to that issue, is that the best programs come about when the decision-makers decide to work with the citizens. When

224 Issues in Environmental Research they decide that incineration is not an option and landfill is not an option, and they say to the citizens, well, what can we do, can we work together?

We get good results, local officials who are dedicated, and citizens who are supportive, citizens won’t let them down, if they organise this program well, so I think that’s a very important lesson as far as understanding the success of environmental groups, is this business of how much does your message sound like no and how much like yes? Well, it was no to incineration, but if you look at the poster now it’s yes to recycling. ‘No to Incineration and Yes to Recycling’. And that has much more appeal. People will accept all kinds of monstrosities if they don’t think there’s any alternative. The moment you establish an alternative and there is a genuine interest in moving forward and not just blocking something, I think that was very important. Another very important difference here in Galway and in some other places, was that they very quickly united Citizens opposed to landfill and incineration, they got together and formed one group which was the beginning of Zero Waste Ireland. And that was really important, because the government is still trying to play the one card that there are only two alternatives, landfill or incineration, with a little bit of recycling, but it’s really a question of incineration versus landfill. This is terribly simplistic and trivial. And I think it’s disingenuous and dishonest, deceptive.

What impact do experts have on campaigns? Oh, I’ve got a lovely picture. Effecting change is like driving a nail through a piece of wood, the experts sharpen the nail, but it’s impossible to push a sharpened nail through a piece of wood with your hand and it is the weight of public opinion that you need to drive the nail through. So experts never win anything, but they can be supportive of citizens, they can provide the validation of citizens’ gut feeling. That sharpens the nail, if you’ve got enough public opinion, you can drive a blunt nail through wood, so this is the key, and it’s a nice combination. That’s what happened here, you’ve got the experts, like Conchur who are engineers and his colleagues, who were able to decimate Rudden’s and MC O’Sullivan’s analysis, but it needed the citizens to go out and get 30,000 signatures and hold public meetings with several hundred people there. I have seen reports from governments, absolutely decimated and the public ignored and the government says you’re too late, its public policy. The only way they can get away with that is when the public are asleep and apathetic. When the public wake up, they can’t dismiss these things. It’s absolutely a synergy, a vital combination, of solid analysis, I think the solid analysis from experts is to make the citizens feel confident that they’re not going to make a fool of themselves down the road, that they can feel secure when they say this is dangerous, it really is, and when people say there are alternatives, there really are alternatives. If they can feel secure in that, they will move forward and batter their decision-makers until they listen.

I would say that my single largest contribution in 17 years on the scientific front has been the underlining and essentially proving that the biggest cause of concern from dioxins from incinerators was the accumulation from the food chains. And I think that became significant in Ireland when it became clear based upon the best measurements available that the levels of dioxins in cow’s milk in Ireland were lower than anywhere else in

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Europe and probably anywhere in the world. The only possible exception is possibly New Zealand, but a very similar situation. I think that was very important, to keep stressing to the public and to the decision-makers and to the farmers in particular to this day the farmers can still stop incineration. If the IFA and NFA get together and say to the government we do not want incineration, because what I try to get across is there’s two risks here, there is a real risk that the more dioxin you have in cow’s milk and dairy products and beef and so on, that does increase to citizens. And there’s a real risk. On the other hand there’s the perceived risk and it’s the perception of a problem and it’s the perception of a problem which influences the people who call the shots in agriculture. The middlemen are purchasers for Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s and McDonald’s, these people are the one’s who if ever it became controversial, would play safe. And it’s much easier for you to win this argument, (about dioxins) by saying look, we have low dioxins in our cow’s milk, these are the numbers and secondly the reason for that is we have no incinerator, that’s an easy argument to win.

If on the other hand, you build the incinerator, you say look we still have low levels in cow’s milk, we think. Our incinerators are good incinerators, they’re not the lousy ones, you’ve got all the proof and people to analyse the data and sift through the data and the data is extremely expensive to collect. And quite frankly if you’re not in a seller’s market, if there is a lot of competition, the middlemen don’t bother with the nuances, they just say don’t buy it, they’re 40 kilometres from an incinerator. That was a significant contribution I could make with solid scientific credentials, since I’ve published these papers on dioxins on this very issue and have followed the issue very closely for many years. I think that was a real contribution. And I think the other contribution was experience, because I’ve been to so many countries and communities. I’ve experienced first hand a lot of things: propaganda, the insults, reports, the dubious health risk analysis, and the fact that citizens do respond and are capable of doing this that they don’t let the decision-makers down. Those kinds of things are useful. Basically I was able to say, you’re not alone, you’re one of thousands of communities around the world, that are going through the same thing, you’re one of those communities in Ireland that are going through the same situation, experiencing the same rhetoric, together, we’re strong. Here’s another thing which I think would be useful: the Internet, it is devastating for the opposition, we can communicate far faster than they can around the world.

What do I know of the Danish incineration company currently involved in the promotion of its incineration in Ireland? I know very little about this specific company, but I am very suspicious because Denmark has a lot of incinerators, number one. Number two, those incinerators were built around heating water and there is a different calculation completely as far as the energy calculation is concerned. When you use incineration for district heating you get 80% energy recovery, as opposed to about 20% energy recovery when you make electricity. However, the problem with this is that nobody is suggesting in Ireland, district water heating with incineration because the costs would be phenomenally expensive. Now the problem with Denmark and Sweden is that they already have that district water heating system in place and they are constantly looking for ways of generating the heat to heat the water. So for them having incinerators makes much more sense than in any other

226 Issues in Environmental Research country. You have a number of aggressive companies like Denmark’s Volens Company promoting incineration around the world and then I have to ask the question how close is this sorting company with the incinerator company? And to what extent are they promoting Danish business as opposed to the best environmental protection. Because Scandinavia has a very positive image as far as environmental protection, so when the Danish and Swedes come here and say this is fine, then everybody is very positively impressed.

But I have had two experiences with Danish incinerators; one was the fact that the Volen Company, or rather the Queen of Denmark donated the trash incinerator to India. And they built this incinerator in New Delhi and it hasn’t run for more than a few days since. This was built over 10 years ago and it stands there as a monument to the difference between European trash and trash from the South. Because the trash is too wet, has ash in it, they can’t burn it, they have to use auxiliary fuel, its very complicated and the Indians gave up on this Danish technology and yet they still continue to push it. I was in Mozambique, one of the smallest countries in the world and their proposal was to erect a cement kiln, to burn obsolete pesticide, everybody recognised that they had to deal with, but to use a cement kiln, which I visited and I saw people come out green, a grey-green, covered top to foot in cement dust, that tells me, bare arms, legs, bodies covered in cement dust. And you know that when a cement company burns hazardous waste, and they take the clinker and grind it into a fine dust, which is your cement, that fine dust goes everywhere, including on these workers, when they go home green, if this proposal, went through, would have toxic metals and dioxins covering their bodies, I was appalled.

What was interesting was there were two Danish agencies, one is called Dante and something else, I had a press conference in Mozambique in which I quoted side by side Danita and Dante, one said we have done an analysis of the cement kilns burning hazardous waste and here are the problems. And they found lots of problems, they couldn’t recommend it, here was the other agency recommending to the Mozambique government that they use cement kilns to burn these obsolete pesticides; advocating that they use Danish technology to do it. Even the best countries have an interest in promoting their own industries. So, obviously, I’m very suspicious. The other thing I should verify, is how successful has Denmark been with incineration?

We know dioxin is a big issue. They’ve certainly been very good at telling the public how much dioxin is in their dairy product and cow’s milk. You put all this money into capturing the toxic metals, like Mercury, Lead, Cadmium in the fly ash, and the dioxins and they conveniently (like the Irish government) forget to mention ash. What I was getting at, is that I have yet to see an analysis of dioxin in cow’s milk, or cheese, or anything else, seems to have never appeared, it could be out there, I could be wrong. But, what I do know is that testicular cancer rates in Denmark are higher than anywhere else in the world. The testicular cancer rates have increased at a higher rate in Denmark than anywhere else, the sperm count, I think has gone down lower than anywhere else and I brought this up with the Danish guy and he had no answer for that. I am not convinced that Denmark is giving us an objective analysis of incineration. I think there’s a larger issue here that Ireland is being told that Europe loves incineration. They say here are the

227 Issues in Environmental Research recycling rates and here are the incineration rates. What they’re not being told is that the recycling has grown up around the incineration, because they couldn’t build new incinerators. And because they couldn’t, they had to recycle and guess what, the recycling was so successful in Germany, that they couldn’t get enough waste for their incinerators, they found very quickly that they have excess capacity in their incinerators. And that’s why the Europeans are telling Ireland, Ludwig Kramer said don’t go into incineration, it gobbles up your waste. It’s extremely important that people in Ireland are not seduced by this notion that Europeans like incinerators, that they’ve been effective; they have produced a legacy of problems. For example, Britain had about 40 incinerators; most of them have been closed down. And although Britain has never apologised for it, Britain has admitted that those incinerators were responsible for higher levels of dioxins in their cow’s milk. Even, at the same time promoting new incinerators, they have yet to apologise that the last batch of incinerators poisoned their cow’s milk. The same story is true in other places in Europe.

Holland can’t build new incinerators, Germany can’t, France has tremendous opposition to incinerators, Italy has opposition, Indigo/Inveren is proposing to build 2 incinerators in Ireland, in Cork and Meath, can’t build incinerators in Flanders, there’s a moratorium on incinerators. None of this is coming out, I don’t think the government is doing a service to the Irish people, when they are selective about the information that they’re giving to Irish people. To me when you’re selective, you are promoting something. I have to ask the question why it is that they chose MC O’Sullivan to do 5 reports out of 7, all of them the same, promoting incineration. When, Ireland rejected this, because of people like Aine organising the community. When the citizens democratically rejected this, doing everything they are expected to do, they didn’t riot, they didn’t burn anything down, they didn’t kill anybody, they just did petitions, public meeting, debates and they were able to persuade their officials to reject these plans in at least one county, and what does your Minister for the Environment do, he just comes back, changes the law and reinstates all these proposals. There is something fishy about it.

Would you comment on the 2002 Forfás Report? To compare this report which is essentially promotion of incineration, there is no other way to describe it, with the Citizen’s Agenda for Zero Waste, which is a booklet that we’ve put out, which you can get on the web, environmental campaigns and organisations around the world are drawing on this information. I’ve got to say without any embarrassment at all, that the information you will find in that booklet more informative, more documented, more solid than any information in this government report, and ours is done on a shoestring. As far as the Forfás Report, outrageous of course, there is no reference to ash at all, and yet 30% of all the trash that they burn will be ash, they posit the argument as between landfill and incinerators and that is an old warhorse that was dismissed years ago. There is a 3rd argument which is intensive recycling and composting which avoids incineration. It requires only a little bit of landfilling, but that can be much safer, much smaller. It’s only an interim solution as we approach zero waste. Where their ash is permanent, it’s always going to be in the landfill.

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The second part of that which I thought was disgusting in fact was about the need for public consultation, from the pen of the government which has sabotaged public consultation. They had public consultation, in a big way and county after county said no to incineration. They found in each of the regions one county which rejected incineration which should have meant in Irish law that none of those solid waste plants should have gone forward and instead the government chucked out that law, made a new law, appointed a manager, it’s anti-democratic, I don’t know how Noel Dempsey got away with it, he produced this law which said essentially there would be county managers who could determine whatever they wanted, regardless of what the councillors wanted, it’s Machiavellian to come back with a document which lauds the central role that public participation is going to have and when you read between the lines what you see is not public participation, but public communication, how we convince the public that what we the central government with our managers have decided is actually good for them is good for them. How we communicate it, how we deal with public perception, how we brainwash, this would make Goebbels blush. This is a classic example of propaganda in action. How we get the public to go along with something we the government have done without public consultation. And then to introduce pay offs... to say well we recognise that people don’t want incinerators so maybe what we have to do is give them a swimming pool, compensate them, give them a package...It’s so blatant in this report. They’re going to quantitate health risk assessment.

The old incinerators were a real problem; it had nothing to do with public perception. The government didn’t spot it, the public did because of social activists, we found out what a real problem those last incinerators were. The health risk assessment is a pseudo scientific exercise and what it does is it serves to move the democratic process to a bureaucratic process, the public can’t understand it, and they can’t afford consultants to do a comparable analysis from their point of view. The proponents pay for them, the proponents get what they pay for, the public is helpless, then it goes to hearings and public has been emasculated, but we have proof that the risks from incinerators are no larger than other risks in society. How simplistic can you get? The whole thing is posited on - what about the environmental movement? How are they successful? They are able to get their gut feelings validated by experts like myself and they are able to communicate it to the public and organise the public. If they can’t then we’re dead, there’s 2 environmental movements in every country, the ones that are funded and operated from the centre, they raise money and they have a very important role to play. And there’s one that springs up from the grass roots level, some have expertise, some don’t, they have goodwill, energy, dedication, some of them get burned out, others don’t. They can stop these things.

The national ones can add up all these individual movements, you could get a strong one in Galway, a weak one somewhere else, if you put these all together, you got all the expertise helping the country. I would choose the Grassroots movement, they can stop with their bodies and minds the government from doing this, but you need both. Like Greenpeace in the US and Greenwater Action, they lobbied in Washington and Toronto. You can’t run a grassroots effectively and spend half your time running to Dublin to lobby politicians, you’ve got to do what you can for the local group, we’re talking

229 Issues in Environmental Research internet, which is the critical component in this, if we’re talking about effective coalitions, we’re talking e-mail everyday, to be in contact with every other group in 40 other countries. Its the most remarkable coalition I have worked with, they’re not gaining anything from this, losing sleep, not getting paid, not running, no fame, a lot of insults, some are ostracised, marginalised. These are the real heroes. If you want to reduce an activist to tears, ask them about their children, it’s very upsetting. We’ve got to stop it now, before it gets passed from generation to generation. This is the thing about environmental movements; it cleans up the environment and cleans up the political system. In relation to urban and rural movements, the fascinating thing is when you try to build these in the city, you have a huge margin of people to fight the politicians, but they are competing against other issues, they were stopped once the public got to know, then they put them out of rural areas, the whole thing changes, the politician thought they’d never be able to organise enough people, but this was the only issue in a rural community, so everything stops, instead of having 100 people in Dublin, you have 800 people coming to meetings. The other calculation is a scientific one, if you build an incinerator; much of the dioxin falls on roofs, factories, roads, etc. A lot of it will get to rural areas. If you build in rural areas, it falls into fields, on cows, chickens, etc, ironically if you do the typical risk assessment you deliver more by building in rural areas than in cities.

Interview with Aine Suttle (Galway Anti-Incinerator Activist): Aine Suttle was an experienced anti-incinerator activist who led GSE’s campaign while living in Galway during the 1990s. She was instrumental in bringing Paul Connet to Galway, and was a key spokesperson for the anti-incinerator campaign from its inception. Ultimately, her attacks on Labour during the 2002 general election alienated many GSE activists, and the campaign, which attracted 20,000 signatures to a petition and led the media debate on incineration nationally, when into abeyance (Leonard 2005).

Did you have previous experience with environmental campaigns before the incinerator issue arose? Yes, I got involved in campaigns in Canada, in Toronto, at the end of 1986; one of them was an anti-incinerator campaign.

Did you find it was similar to what was happening here in Galway? Yeah, the same process happened, but what I found was useful, was that I was able to bring my experience from the previous campaign to this one. I find people are very similar, their reactions are similar. The process they go through is very similar. The difference is the politicians and the political system, between the two countries. What I found interesting to see what we did there and the politician’s reactions. In Toronto, we did a petition there and collected something like 6,000 signatures. Toronto has a population of 2 and a quarter million, and in Galway we collected over 22,000 signatures. massively more, 6,000 had a big impact in Toronto, 22,000 doesn’t seem to be having an impact here, so that shows to me that politicians here are far less responsive to constituents, how they can get away with it, I don’t know, I’m not sure. I think that Ireland is going through changes, politically, and I’m hoping that the next general election will progress that change, because I don’t see how any politicians can survive

230 Issues in Environmental Research when the general public are putting out such a message about how they feel about a certain technology. The other thing was that in Toronto, we could go and lobby politicians and they would tend to be very frank about it with us, if they had a position that was opposite to ours, they would tend to tell us, whereas here when you talk to politicians they won’t say where they stand. So, when we were coming up to the July vote of the corporation, we were still having to get what these guys were thinking, whereas in Canada, they would tell us, therefore there was a lot less time wasted. I don’t understand this, I’m Irish, but they make you jump through hoops, that are utterly useless, and they serve no purpose.

So you find they’re deliberately thwarting the democratic process? Yeah, there’s an incredible arrogance with the politicians here, I’m talking generally, of course there are specific politicians who have been wonderful and fairly responsive, but unfortunately, in the minority.

Who would be the more supportive ones? Catherine Connolly, on the corporation has been absolutely wonderful all along and she seems to have it ingrained in her that she is representing the general public and therefore she will represent the public’s views. That’s what being a politician is all about, if you don’t represent your constituents, then what are you there for? At first Fine Gael, particularly Padraic McCormack were very negative towards us, but Padraic seemed to come around. It took him longer to come around, but he did and he’s very supportive now and I think he bought the others along with him, I don’t think they would have come on their own. Fintan Coogan, of Fine Gael, he’s on our side, I find him somewhat disrespectful of the general public, if you read his statement to the Senate back last June, he was definitely being insulting to us, even though he was on our side. Margaret Cox has sat on the fence, she said she was opposed to it, but on the other hand she doesn’t seem to be coming over to act on that, she seems to have this old style politics, where you work in the background, in secret, which to me means I can’t have any faith in her, I need to know exactly what’s going on. In the County Council, Fine Gael, I don’t know whether Padraic McCormack influenced them, but they came around to our side eventually too. There are only 2 PDs on the County Council, and one of them, Noel Grealish was on our side from day one. He seemed to understand the situation right away he’s been terrific. And Tim Rabitte, from Fianna Fail, he’s been absolutely wonderful from the start. So we’ve had somebody from each party, from the TDs who are not on the council, Michael D. Higgins is the only one. The rest of them, the PDs and FF TDs have been next to useless.

Well. I guess you could say that they are opposed to you; they have come out against you in the media. Yeah, what’s infuriating is that they all got invitations, to meetings and none of them ever turned up. So now they’re claiming we’ve been scaremongering, but never turned up to listen to information that we’re providing. It undermines their credibility, also every councilor, T.D. and public representative in Connaught was sent a copy of our submission, from Galway for a Safe Environment, and Galway Safe Waste Alliance. They know the flaws we’ve identified, none of them ever reacted. We don’t know if

231 Issues in Environmental Research they’ve read them or not. The other thing that I find in stark contrast was that in Canada, if you handed in a submission, and we got the chance to make public verbal submissions, we’ve had councilors who have said “oh, I never read your stuff” and why they can’t see how that insulting that is, I don’t know. They are very arrogant. Did you notice in the papers some of the public wrote in letters about the way Catherine Connelly was treated, and I was at a number of meetings after that and they were very careful, for a while, and it made it clear that they are amenable to public pressure, but it has to be extreme.

I suppose your campaign has demonstrated that? Yeah, the other difference I noticed between here and Canada was that in Canada, there was a sense that public consultation actually meant something. I was in one of the incinerators that were going to be built by Metro Toronto, and they did actually set up a public consultation process. And any interested member of the public could go along to them. The consultants were there, politicians were there, the Metro Toronto staff was there and a dialogue could happen between all those people, so the public could present the concerns they had and they had to be addressed. It was treated seriously, they would have to come back with reports on things that were clearly a problem and they did. So, the whole process moved more slowly there, but you did have real dialogue. In the end, Metro dropped the idea of incineration, what happened was the consultation was going on and on, meantime the waste problem was not being dealt with. So in the end, what I call stalling for time, each time they came to a decision, they’d send off for more reports. And we realised this was a way of putting off the day of reckoning. And finally, I remember the commissioner of works said to the council, look, there’s no point going on with this, we may as well accept reality. And that was the end of that particular incinerator.

Does that show the successes that you can have with a good pressure group, if politicians are willing to listen? Yeah, but that doesn’t happen here, it’s like you have to force your way into any dialogue, all the public have to pay. All of the public meetings were organised and paid for by Galway for a Safe Environment, the general public, and later the Alliance. And we had to pay all those hotel bills, all those experts that were bought in; we had to pay for them. None of them were paid a fee, but we had to pay fares and hotel accommodation. Last year we spent €10,000. It’s a lot of money. We never spent anything like that in Canada, and we never had to, because it was taken seriously. I don’t know whether it’s a cultural thing here, but you debate and it seems like a game. I don’t think it’s necessarily the best way to get to the truth. Because you could have a good debater on one side- but he mightn’t have the truth. I think ours tended to have the better debater on this issue, but it’s a dicey situation. You get a slick P.R. guy, that’s one of the major differences.

What got you involved in campaigns in Canada? A threat to my son was what got me going. He had a very high lead level. I found out when he was 18months old. It turned out to be from paint on our house. That was the cause, but the reason they were testing it in the area was because there was a lead smelter that was polluting the whole neighbourhood. And it was a shock to me to understand that people will make money even though they know the process that they’re using is causing harm to people. And that is true for industrialists who are polluting the environment and

232 Issues in Environmental Research the politicians who are supporting them. I learned more from that experience, but it was a horrible way to learn that people are so dishonest. Making money is more important than people’s lives.

Did anything arise from this smelter? Well, I arrived a bit late on that. It had actually been going on for 16 years. The pollution had probably 70 years, the awareness of what it was doing to the under 7 year olds in the community only came out in the late 60s, early 70s. Then a campaign got going, there was a local community health care centre and they lead the charge on the issue. The board members were all members of the community. Also the public health centre was absolutely brilliant. They would be the equivalent of the Western Health Board. I can’t believe how they sit back and take no interest in this issue at all. The public health department in Toronto were very much involved in these environmental health issues. The medical officer of health, went way beyond what was required of him, he would contact the health centre and the community when he would see an opportunity for them to say lobby, or present some information, or to make some move or whatever, he was very involved in helping the community, he probably would have been in trouble, if they knew how deeply he was involved. But he was trying to protect the health of the community which is what, to me, public health is all about. And yet with the Western health Board, we get absolutely nothing. I want to make it clear when talking about Toronto, back in the 70’s, 80’s and first half of the nineties. In the mid 90’s things changed because the Tories got in Ontario. They have dismantled a lot of the things that made Toronto a good place to live, which is why I now live in Ireland, moving back to something similar. The politics now there have changed, they amalgamated all the cities. Before, there were six cities in Toronto, each with their own council, which made the politicians much more responsive. They had the ability to raise their own taxes. They had property tax and that meant that they had independence from other levels of government. When they amalgamated all the cities, there was one government for all the areas, reducing representation dramatically. The number of politicians was reduced from100 down to 30. That has an impact. Up to that point they were very responsive, they could hold public meetings on issues. There they were paid, here they are not and that makes a difference. If you look at Galway so many of them are business people. Less so on the County Council and we’ve noticed the difference. The County Council are more respectful, more rational, I’ve asked people why, and they say they tend to be closer to the people. We didn’t see this as a political campaign, we saw it as an environmental campaign, and politics were secondary. We tried to make sure that no party took over the campaign; no party was allowed to use it. We had people from all parties on our board, except the PD’s. It was important to do that.

Did you have any help from the Greens? I don’t think it was because he was a Green, it was more personality. Niall O’Brolchain had a certain respect; he didn’t push his way into the campaign. I appreciated that. We always knew he was there in the background. He came to every demonstration and meeting, he was there, always supported it, but he didn’t use it. It may have been at the time Niall was getting the Galway Environmental Alliance going and that was very

233 Issues in Environmental Research important, that helped us, and they formed a month before GSE got going. So, once a month GSE could speak directly to all other environmental groups around the city.

Who is involved in the Safe Waste Alliance? GSE, the Woodquay Residents, Cairde na Gallimh Heritage, An Taisce, more latterly, Hands Across the Corrib (Anti-Road development), and the save the Swan people were there at the beginning, but never came to meetings after that, Galway Cycling Campaign, Labour Party members, EcoSoc students. When I first came here I wanted to get involved in Environmental Groups in the city, I couldn’t find any. I went to the library asking for a list, they were very interested in developing one. I ended up at the One World Centre, who were working on environmental issues, but got overwhelmed and had to drop it. I hooked up with the Galway Cycling Campaign. It was very difficult to find the Environmental movement here in Galway. I think very few people in Ireland are paid to voice ... Earthwatch are the only people with staff, I contacted them on the incineration issue early on and found it difficult to get any action, there. They were interested and had put in submissions, and have hired somebody to work on the waste issue, who’s been brilliant. But I found it very hard finding contacts, coming new into the city.

How did you come to be involved in Galway for a Safe Environment? I was trying to find people on the incineration issue who would be interested. I was not getting anywhere. I went to Dublin to talk to Earthwatch. I was on the internet. Through the internet, I found a question on Dioxin site from a woman in Kilough, on the issue of the hazardous waste incinerator that was proposed there. I answered a question and we had a back and forth... then I was contacted by a guy in Wexford, who had heard I had a paper written by some doctors on incineration. So I kept having contacts, but not going anywhere. When the Galway Waste Plan was published, it named sites, the people in Castlegar got organised. They heard about me from somebody from Waterford, and Joe Jacobsen phoned me and that was the beginning of it. They asked me to speak at a public meeting in Castelgar, so I was the keynote speaker at the first public meeting at GSE. I also produced the first bit of literature called “The Burning Issue” for GSE.

Do you feel the different media outlets contributed to the campaign? There’s a big problem here. You have to get on T.V. or the radio to get any attention. And that’s not necessarily the best way to get the truth either. I think journalists here are incredibly lazy. I’ve only met one or two who actually do their own research. You tend to give them your stuff and they tend to publish it verbatim. Anything they get from the consultants, from politicians, they just publish it. There doesn’t seem to be any screening. Except with the Irish Times and they screen out any opposition to incineration.

What part did you play in the first phase of GSE’s campaign? It’s the same role all along; I’ve gone after the information. I arrived with all the information from the previous campaign in Canada. I needed to get a handle on the European situation. I got involved in a national group called Zero Waste Ireland. I’ve been the Galway Rep. for that. I’m also involved in an international anti-incineration alliance-GAI (Global Anti-Incineration Alliance) or alternatively Global Alliance for Incineration Alternatives. Zero Waste has members from all around the country. It’s an

234 Issues in Environmental Research alliance of anti-incineration and anti-superdumps from around the country. It originally got started with some of the anti-landfill groups but the anti-incineration groups joined and we’ve developed a common position. In the same way in Galway we’ve a common position with the anti-superdump groups. I had seen how a wedge was drawn in Canada between the two groups and I was determined that wasn’t going to happen in Galway. In the beginning a number of people didn’t see the point of it. Conchur Ó Bradaigh supported me on that and could see why it was necessary. As it turned out, it was very important. It seemed to happen more naturally on the national front, people were more open. I’m the one who subscribed to the pro-recycling list service. I download all the latest messages, and forward any of interest to the committee, the alliance, and Zero Waste Ireland. I see myself as a researcher.

Why do you think the first phase of the campaign was successful? It was partly the people involved. An incredible group of people got together with the most perfect merge of skills, I had the information, Conchur had the media savvy, we all seemed to all fall into roles very naturally, Joe Jacobson took on fundraising and he has those business skills and contacts. Paul O’Malley became joint secretary with me; Paul tends to do more of the actual secretarial work. There were other people who were willing to fill the gaps. Conchur wanted to get something into the media every two weeks. Joe was doing the fundraising. We never went with anything we weren’t sure about. We wanted a public meeting at least once a month and bring in experts from overseas.

What importance do you attach to Paul Connett’s assistance to the campaign? It’s his personality, he can take very complex information and put it across in such a way that people with no technical background can understand. He’s a brilliant teacher. Because he simplifies his information, people forget that he’s got a doctorate in chemistry. So you get people like Angela Loughton giving out about him, because he’s an absolute street-talker, he doesn’t coat it in nice language, he just comes out straight with stuff. In Ireland, that’s dangerous. We did worry that the consultants were going to sue him; he did imply that there was corruption. That’s a huge difference between Canada and Ireland; here the libel laws are archaic. They really do not allow for the truth to come out. You would think with all the tribunals something would have been learned, but it clearly hasn’t. I think Paul had a big influence on the general public. I think the councillors reacted negatively to him. He calls a spade a spade and they don’t like that.

Had you worked previously with him in Canada? Yeah, he came up to public meetings in Canada, and did the same thing. He will go anywhere in the world to inform people about the problems with incineration. He came up in’87 three times I think.

How did you first come across him? I read about him somewhere, and suggested to the group that we invite him up, and he came. I think he got going in ‘85, and he’s been on the go ever since, there was an incinerator proposed for his own area, he understood as somebody with a doctorate he had the credibility that would help the campaign. We needed to bring in some other

235 Issues in Environmental Research people who were more acceptable to the councillors, but he kick-started the community. At the end of that meeting in Galway he had people singing. I remember coming out of a meeting in Toronto, feeling excited, that we did the right thing. He did that to people in Galway too, infusing you with a feeling that your commonsense is really important and not to be intimidated by experts. I remember him saying you are the experts in your community, you know what’s best for you. That’s even more important in Ireland, people are constantly bullied. I’m Irish, but there are aspects of Irish culture that I hate.

Was the release of the EPA Report about the health risks of dioxins an important factor in getting the first decision? I think it was, up to that point, the councillors were hearing information from us and this was coming from the papers that, was more concrete. At that time, the story about ash being spread on footpaths in Newcastle, suddenly there were 2 stories that were pretty hard to ignore.

What happened when you got in touch with the 6-one news after the Washington Times story? We were such a good team, I got a call from Joe Jacobson, saying my brother has seen this story on Yahoo, check it out, I downloaded it, we’re all in touch by e-mail, Conchur got the story, he wrote a press release on it, within an hour or two, sent it out to all the media outlets and that was it. That was how, as a team, we worked so well together, it was magical. In Toronto, we had some awful times as a volunteer group, you can get some absolute maniacs and they can completely destroy you.

What do you think of pro-incinerator perspective? They’ve saying that since 1986, all the new ones are upgraded, it’s a losing battle, they think they solve one problem... and find out no... they found out that dioxins were coming out of incinerators in ‘78, by ‘83, they really understood that dioxin was a major problem, we need pollution controls, that will solve the problem, but they didn’t eliminate it, so they said we’ll burn the stuff at a higher temperature, that will solve the problem, it destroyed the dioxin that was in the feed material and prevented the dioxins being formed but... the problem is in a country like Ireland, where they never had incinerators before, they can get away with these arguments, because they’ve never been an issue before. They have improved things, however, our knowledge is also improving on the health factors, as they lower the amount of pollution getting out, our knowledge of what the pollutants are doing to us is also increasing, its a losing battle and this is the wrong direction to be going in.

What did you think of Emer Colleran’s statement on incinerators on TV? Emer Colleran never came to a single meeting we had. I first met her in March of 1999, a meeting at GMIT, she was one of the speakers, her point was that these new incinerators are so much better than the old dumps we have here. I said to her later that its not fair comparing new incinerators to old dumps and she said you’re probably right and I said I’d like to keep in touch with you, she was described as an expert on composting, I tried to contact her, e-mail her, Conchur tried to talk to her, and she wouldn’t talk to anybody. And it turns out that her brother is the county engineer, John Colleran. I was shocked,

236 Issues in Environmental Research that first meeting I was impressed, I thought she was good, I went to her on the basis that she’d be open, but she was more closed than the politicians. Maybe that’s why she never came out and campaigned against us. The man from the civil liberties was very good; he phoned us the day before to get a sense of our argument.

Where do you go from here? Taking legal action, a court challenge, I would love to do it, but it costs a fortune. It was recommended to us that we call for a judicial review. Applying is cheap enough, but if you actually go ahead with it, it costs €100,000. This is where the whole thing stinks to high heaven. It’s a major issue, the cost of challenging things in the Irish system. In Canada, there is some money available, to groups, and there is the Canadian Environmental Law Association, which was specifically set up to take on cases of public interest. They will represent environmental groups for free. There’s no organisation like that here in Ireland. Things are badly set up here. There are no checks and balances. Public consultation is purely theoretical, meaningless and Noel Dempsey has proved that. If things go against him, he just changes legislation. I couldn’t believe it when I heard Donal Lyons saying in the debate that night, when they reversed that decision that An Board Pleanála was there to defend people. It cost the Kilcock group €70,000 when they had to go through them. So now you’re up to €170,000, they won their case, but I don’t know if they got costs. They had millionaires funding their campaign. It shouldn’t depend on that, especially when it’s a public interest case.

What about the elections? Oh, absolutely, how we will be involved I can’t say, we’re looking at running candidates, supporting candidates who have been supportive all along. In Ontario, in 1990, the MEP got into power for the first time for 5 years, you had all these people who were former activists, suddenly ministers...Keith Collins was a consultant from Nova Scotia, he was an economist in the treasury department during the MEP period and he said from his perspective, these people who were activists, had these big business people intimidating them and on the other hand they had their former colleagues coming in...

What about direct action? Myself, personally I’m not a direct action person, but I’ve never been pushed to that point yet, I could see sitting down in front of steamrollers if it comes to that, I would hope that it wouldn’t. It’s very clear that these guys are going to push it through no matter what, under those circumstances, I can see direct action, when all other avenues have been closed off and I can’t see any other solution. It’s an absolute indictment of the system, if people are pushed to that.

What type of pro-environmental structures would you like to see introduced into Irish society? I think it’s crucial to have public consultation. Like in Toronto, where you could lay out what you thought the problem was and the solution. If it’s done seriously, with good faith on both sides, I know in Toronto, some of our concerns were identified and acknowledged, some they fixed. Some of our solutions were dead-ends and we had to acknowledge that. At the end of the day you came up with a better solution and

237 Issues in Environmental Research something that people can live with. The other thing in Toronto was that the groups who had seriously involved got intervener funding, to hire their own experts and to critique the proposal. The problem we ran into was finding consultants who didn’t have connections with local authorities, it was very difficult, one group had to go to the states to find somebody. You need somebody completely objective. They had a professional facilitator; you had somebody to guide things. I think the whole legal system has to change. I read a paper written by an academic in Cork, about the Syntex plant in Ennis, he analysed the hearings from a communications perspective, it was very clear from his analysis, that the whole thing was set up against the community, the Community representative had to speak first and could not rebut what the industry person had to say. It was only in the last 3 days that they could refute, but then it was too late, there were no minutes taken... it would not give confidence in the system. There was a woman activist who took it to the high court, she lost ... The public have a role to play and they need to be funded. I genuinely think we played a positive role. We gave pro-incineration side place to speak, it was also clear that they lost the debate. What I found interesting was the chairperson, he hadn’t taken a position one way or the other, until the BSE issue came up, I heard him on “After dark “one night and he was anti-incineration and using arguments that we had used, I thought here’s a man who we obviously influenced.

Interview with Conchúr Ó Brádaigh (GSE spokesperson, May 2002): Without doubt, Conchúr Ó Brádaigh was a most effective spokesperson for the GSE campaign. Only his support for Republican Sinn Fein (led by his father, Ruarí) and their abstentionist stance on attending the Dublin Dáil prevented him from taking a seat in the 2002 general election on the anti-incineration platform. An excellent public speaker and political co-ordinator, his acumen was a pivotal part of the success of the anti-incinerator campaign in Galway and nationally.

What brought you to be involved in Galway for a Safe Environment? I’ve been a member of Republican Sinn Fein since young adulthood and having been involved in election campaigns in Galway I have some political involvement there. Environmentally GSE’s policies would be in sync with Sinn Fein’s.

What are the characteristics and structures that make GSE an effective voice in the debate? It is easy to run the group and get people involved with. The issues are so fundamental: health, children’s health and economics. Recycling makes more sense. The citywide group has formed alliances with the groups in the country that are working against superdumps.

How did you establish GSE and what groups did you hope to target, i.e. politicians, residents’ associations? No nothing like that, it’s quite an immediate group. Within a month we’re going to get a decision on the Galway Waste Plan and that may see the organisation take a different form; it may disband, I don’t know.

Is there anything coming up regarding future election activity?

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Well, we’re keeping our options open. Obviously it’s a stick and carrot approach to the local councillors; the carrot is the support of the people which GSE has received and the stick is: we take their seats if they don’t back up the public opinion, if you like. It’s implicit; it’s a question of strategy and timing. We certainly haven’t gone public with it yet.

How did you gain support? Following the meeting in the Corrib Great Southern the corporation extended the date for the Connacht Waste Management Plan till the end of May. The next big event was a meeting with Dr. Paul Connett, from the U. S., to which we invited all the politicians. We think it made a good impact on the local politicians and we got a lot of media coverage. We got a petition signed by a lot of people at the Galway Shopping Centre one weekend.

How did you link up with other strategy groups? Well, Aine Suttle is on our committee and has experience of campaigning against incinerators in Canada. She advised us that we should form a common front with the people involved with anti-landfill groups. There are three groups around the ‘superdumps’, the Ballinasloe anti-superdump groups and anti-incinerator groups from Clantuskert where an American company is threatening some kind of gasification plant.

How did you come into contact with Dr. Paul Connett? Through Aine Suttle.

What role did the media play in your campaign? The internet was widely used. The local media was helpful and the national media came round after the US EPA report.

Interview with Michael D. Higgins, November 2000: As President of the Labour Party and TD for Galway West Constituency during the 1990s through to today, Michael D. Higgins has become an institution in Irish politics. His role as guardian of the values of the left also includes environmental issues, and he held the portfolio for Heritage during his time as Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht in the 2002 Coalition government. As Youth Officer, Constituency Council Secretary and activist with Labour before I joined the Greens, I worked closely with Higgins and his supporters. This interview took place as part of my PhD research.

What do you think of the ‘Border, Midlands and West’ aspect of the most recent National Development Plan (2000-2006)? Within the region you have the biggest obstacle to that in the very under-developed local government and a weak and inefficient central government. The concept of the region is not viable because it is attacked from both above and below. It is attacked from below because of the artificial nature of the counties. The county manages won’t let anything to

239 Issues in Environmental Research the regions but they will participate sufficiently to kill it. At national level the government departments would be very reluctant to let serious decisions out.

How effective do you think GSE’s campaign was? I think it was very effective. The most impressive part of their campaign was the gathering of the signatures. Secondly, the kind of poster they had which divided the answer into a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (yes to recycling, no to incineration). Third the presentation of the campaign, in terms of focal points, was very good and the lines of people outside the corporation were very effective and having two members of the corporation, Labour Councillors Catherine Connelly and Tom Costello, who were very involved in the issue. There was a special briefing for the public representatives and there was a public meeting. Catherine and I went to the first briefing, in Oranmore, for the external advisors. Catherine had experience of what was happening in Canada through her family contacts.

What was your first reaction to the incinerator? My first reaction to the incinerator was that it was the laziest, costliest and most untried option. The great thing about the incinerator was that you need never talk about recycling, at least for several years. That was the great paradox to it, because the incineration, once you had made the decisions, you would have to get the volume. And why would you be interfering with your capacity to get the volume by having recycling? It is very hard to accept the bona-fides of the corporation on this. The local authority showed that they had little capacity to listen, that they had a culture of non-consultation, that their aversion to consultation, which may have been well meant, was totally dreadful and was to show the people what was to be decided for them.

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Chapter 7: Populism, Place and Protest

In the course of my research on environmental social movements, I have developed an interest in the concept of political opportunity structure, the shifting political frameworks that surround movements in the shape of political events, policies and initiatives. One question that has come to intrigue me about this issue is that of the extensive parameters of political opportunity which occur as part of environmental contests. Within this framework of opportunity we find moments of access or leverage for movements, framing opportunities for spokespersons or consultants and policy processes that provide activists and their state or industrial counterparts with an arena for creating understandings of environmentalism which later become ecological orthodoxies in wider society. In many ways the political opportunity structures surrounding environmental disputes become the forum for creating understandings of environmental politics once the scientific reality of issues such as ozone depletion or climate change become accepted as global realities. However, to understand political opportunity as a concept we must first examine its inception in social movement literature.

As societies undergo periods of transformation, increased discord can create what theorists have come to describe as ‘political opportunity structures’ that facilitate movement responses. This concept, first put forward by Eisinger (1973), describes the contexts in which patterns of political opportunities emerge and decline. The ‘biases’ of the political landscape must therefore be negotiated. If the political structure displays a degree of responsiveness towards activism, the opportunity structure for such groups remains open. Influence can be brought to bear by groups in this case. In the over- centralisation of power, opportunities may be limited, as local interests are superseded by policy considerations. The structure of political opportunities can therefore be derived from a number of indicators, such as the disposition of the political establishment to the concerns of protestors, the availability of and distribution of resources and the existence of prior political expertise amongst the leadership. A group’s ability to recognise the opportunities that surface during a campaign becomes a crucial feature of the campaign. In this way, the leadership of such groups become critical interpreters of potential opportunities. Political opportunities may be seen as a resource for movements, creating the societal strain necessary for collective action responses. Further theoretical understandings of the political opportunity structure have been put forward by Sidney Tarrow. Opportunities may emerge from institutional reform after periods of transformation. Within this context, structural weaknesses in government may result in opportunities becoming apparent to groups or movements, who may then act, depending on circumstances ‘whereby people gain the resources to escape their habitual passivity and find opportunities to use them’ (Tarrow 1994 p.81).

Once activated, movements create further conditions for opportunities to surface in response to mobilisation, emergent networks and responsiveness of government. If participation is widespread and effective, to the point where a successful outcome is possible, political opportunities may result. In addition, repressive or undemocratic responses by the state may create further opportunities for movements to exploit. Those participants who seize upon such opportunities have been described as movement

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“entrepreneurs” (McCarthy and Zald 1977 cited in Tarrow 1994 p.15). These entrepreneurs or leaders have the motivation to invoke activism through the utilisation of existing political opportunities. Tarrow defines political opportunity structure as the external resources that can provide wider incentives for protests. The external features of a political opportunity structure include aspects of the political system that affect the public, through government policies. These are enduring but informal with an uneven distribution, yet are utilised by every level of group organisation. The varied levels of political interaction provide the dimensions of opportunities that frame the political landscape from which a movement can emerge.

The concept of political opportunity structure helps us to understand why movements sometimes gain surprising, but temporary, leverage against elites and then quickly lose them despite their best efforts (Tarrow 1994 p.85).

The changing nature of these structures creates the varied circumstances for opportunity utilisation. Tarrow (1994 pp.85, 87) puts forward four of the ‘most salient changes’ which occur in opportunity structures as ‘increased access’, ‘unstable alignments’, ‘influential allies’ and ‘divided elites.’ The first of these, the opening up of access, provides groups with the incentive to undertake a challenge. In this shifting political space opportunities may arise. Movements that can maintain contact with adversaries through access may measure the effectiveness of their campaign and are able to gauge the extent to which further actions may be tolerated. However, Tarrow also identifies an inherent risk which may result from prolonged access to authorities, as movement leadership may be ‘cut off from their base’ (Tarrow 1994 p.87), thus creating a loss of momentum in campaigns. Another feature of the political opportunity structure that can be exploited is the existence of political instability, resulting from electoral difficulties, uneasy coalitions and political realignments. The existence of political divisions in the ruling elite encourages challengers to act upon these ‘windows of opportunity.’ Electoral success in marginal constituencies and internal political disputes provide instances where opportunities can be seized upon by challengers. One way in which challenges can be undertaken is demonstrated in the third aspect of opportunity structure presented by Tarrow: the availability of influential allies.

The existence of cleavages within elite groupings may present further political opportunities. Where divisions occur among those in authority, challenges can be encouraged. These political circumstances can provide the incentive necessary to induce mobilisation for action. Leaderships in waiting can also try to seize power by exploiting political divisions in the ruling establishment. Ultimately, these aspects of political opportunity structure may not occur simultaneously and the existence of any one of these features may be enough to encourage political challenges. Within this political upheaval opportunities for protest may be found. Therefore, social movements must exploit the political opportunities that emerge during the evolution of a dispute. One way that movements can successfully contest issues is by creating a degree of consensus around the meaning and values surrounding the dispute. By creating meanings based on their positions movements can shape understandings about the nature of dispute, thereby

242 Issues in Environmental Research influencing responses of the public and the involved institutions. This creation of meaning around protest is known as framing. Movements create a frame by ‘identifying events’ (Goffman 1974 p.21) and establishing the sense of grievance that can be presented to the public as part of a movement’s cause.

When a movement has identified a societal grievance which can provide the focus of a dispute, its meaning is ‘amplified’ by the mobilisation of resources by that movement. Therefore, mobilisation transforms old meanings, providing movements with the opportunity to challenge the policy creating the grievance. New meanings are then ‘generated’ through the ‘cycles of protest’ (Snow and Benford 1992 p.141) that emerge from that movement’s ability to exploit the political opportunities arising as a result of their challenge. This creates a link between the manner in which movements frame grievances, mobilise resources and exploit political opportunities. This link is established around ‘the mobilisation of consensus’ (Klandermans 1988 p.175) as movements attempt to promote their perspective on issues through public events, utilising the media and by elevating their campaigns. By ‘amplifying’ certain issues of contention, movements can influence the cycles of protest, framing the wider understandings of these issues in a way that correlates with their ideological perspective. According to Tarrow (1994 p.123), ‘frames like injustice are powerful mobilising resources.’ Movement leaders, made up of entrepreneurs, must translate the grievances inherent in any perceived injustice to their movement, the public and the institution being challenged. Leaders that fail to establish overall understanding about such grievances may lose control of the movements and protests may lose direction as a result. One method of establishing consensus is through ‘media framing’ where movements strategically interact with the media, as it becomes ‘an external resource’ (Tarrow 1994 p.126). This use of media allows movements to contest or create orthodox understandings about the issue or grievance central to the dispute. Internet technology and news networks can be utilised by movements to propagate their grievances and aims as a ‘diffuse vehicle for consensus formation’ and to ‘help gain initial attention and maintain support’ for their campaigns (Tarrow 1994 p.126).

Sociologists and movement theorists use the term 'frame' to discuss a variety of socio- cultural processes. For Goffman (1974) framing is a process where existing meanings are challenged. Goffman’s ‘primary frameworks’ (1974, p21) are reproduced in the Irish case through the pre-existence of what I describe as ‘rural sentiment’ (Leonard, 2006), or the underlying fundamental discourses of life in the Irish countryside (Commins 1986, Peace, 1997). Furthermore, understandings of ‘frame analysis’ or the processes by which activists recognize issues and ‘amplify’ meanings leads to the ‘transformation’ of old meanings (Snow and Benford 1992, p136). For Goffman, the act of framing creates the ‘primary frameworks’ where new meanings are manifested from the unstable structures of social discord. Fine (1995) describes the process of framing as one of ‘public narration’, where shared goals are created from shared knowledge. From this understanding, a ‘staging area’ is created by a movement to facilitate social and cultural interaction through three processes: ‘group identification,’ ‘rituals of activism’ and ‘mobilisation of resources’ (ibid). The culmination of this framing process is a ‘public performance’, invariably characterised by a public protest and subsequent media

243 Issues in Environmental Research coverage. In the Irish case, the public performance of activists and advocates has been a significant aspect of the framing process. In addition, campaigns such as the Shell to Sea protests have undertaken a framing process which has mobilised concerns about justice, moral issues and resources (Leonard 2006). Following from Goffman’s (1974) distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ frames, these Irish campaigns draw on their natural hinterlands to create framing processes from existing ‘rural sentiment’, combining natural and social elements to forge new meanings about the scientific data or technological infrastructure of development.

Snow et al (1986) and Snow and Benford (1986, 1992) develop Goffman's ideas through an analysis of the processes by which campaigns create meanings form grievances and interpret issues. What follows is an understanding of ‘master frames’ which characterise the ‘cycles of protest’ (ibid). Irish ecopopulist campaigns have experienced the cycles of protest, because of their relationship with features of Irish political life, including local populism, clientelism and political opportunity structures shaped themselves by wider electoral cycles (Leonard, 2006, 2008). Framing the significant events of a campaign can allow grassroots movements to mobilise the data and expertise with which challenges to mainstream information sources can be taken. For environmental movements, it is their ability to use ‘interest driven science’ to challenge ‘official science’ (Grove-White 1993 p.22) that strengthens their case and provides the leverage necessary to maintain campaigns. In this way, environmental movements have been able to frame wider understandings of what environmental disputes are about; allowing movements to gain increased access to political opportunity structures through a successful mobilisation of consensus about grievances, making it difficult for an institution or state to win the confidence of the public, who have become wary of risk technologies over time.

A global network of environmental and anti-toxics movements has emerged providing resources, expertise and support for like-minded movements worldwide and challenging ‘the basis of social authority of scientific knowledge…in environmental argument’ (ibid). By contesting official science, movements can frame ‘a new moral discourse’ (ibid) around environmental orthodoxy, creating understandings that can become embedded in social thought. This allows movements to shape understandings, create consensus and exploit the anxieties of the public, in an era where the ‘risk society’ has created simultaneous dependency and concern about technology (Beck 1992). This has led to the ‘opportunistic character’ (Grove-White 1993 p.27) of much of the environmental movement’s contestation of environmental policy. Political opportunities must be seized upon and framed in a manner that correlates with the agenda of populist movements. The shifting and evolving dynamic of the institutional dependence on and need for regulation of technologies, can lead to policy changes which are exploited by environmental movements. However, the evolving POS that emerges around the contestation of orthodox understandings of environmental risks may have as much to do with the dynamic of movement agenda and institutional responses. Some features or variables of a POS may act as both a resource for and a constraint on environmental movements. Some literature (McAdam McCarthy and Zald, 1996; Rootes 1997) has built upon understandings created by Eisinger and Tarrow, by examining the manner in which political opportunity structures are established through the alliances and interactions

244 Issues in Environmental Research formed through movement integration with the institutions of the formal political sphere. This external political environment contains a shifting array of variables from which collective activity is shaped. These variables include the structures of the state and society, prevalent ideology of government and the form of government response to challengers (Eisinger 1973 p.11). Movement entrepreneurs must create opportunities from these variables, thus creating a linkage between movements and wider political structures. Both Government legislators and movement entrepreneurs then translate the meanings that surround an issue.

As government agencies promote policy implementation, movements contest the basis of a policy, challenging the state through activism. Nonetheless, these variables may not exist or may become problematic for interest groups in states that are characterised by tendencies towards centralised power, clientelism and corporatism. These are variables of the political environment that become the external resources that shape the political opportunities which movements can exploit. For instance, when the nature of government is weakened by coalitions, politics, internal competition and corporatist arrangements, the resultant over-centralisation of power leads to reduced or closed political opportunities. Neo-corporatist structures may lead to the exclusion of environmental interests from partnership arrangements that focus on industrial and economic growth.

Ireland’s Environmental Policy: Community Issues and Social Responses: Introduction:

If social policies are developed in order to benefit the citizen and community, how do we come to understand policies which cause negative consequences (be they environmental or health related) to the same? This section will examine the emergence of an ecological modernist environmental policy framework in the Republic of Ireland, as well as the responses of communities concerned about threats that have emanated from this policy direction. As the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom has led to a prioritisation of economic growth over other concerns, this departure in environmental policy implementation is part of a move towards what Albert Weale has called ‘a post-welfare state sector’. This transition from an understanding of social and environmental policy as being a rights based service into a rationalised entity which reflects the prevailing outlook of Ireland’s neo-liberal government and its neo-corporatist ‘partnership’ model. The community responses which emerge in response to the exclusion and concern caused by neo- corporatist social partnership will then be examined, with a focus on disputes about resource policy and communities, transport policy and heritage, waste management policy and pollution and development and water supplies.

After decades of economic stagnation, the Irish state embraced the dualistic agendas of neo-liberalism and neo-corporatism to create the economic basis for the multinational led development that came to be synonymous with the boom decade of the ‘Celtic Tiger’. In addition, the state prioritised unfettered (or unregulated) infrastructural development as a response to the social needs of communities traditionally marginalised by high levels of unemployment and emigration. Here we will examine the consequences of this shift from the provision of a service based social policy platform into that of a policy framework

245 Issues in Environmental Research which promotes industrial concerns over those of the very communities which were meant to benefit from the activities of the state. In areas traditionally marginalised due to the deprivation of poverty, unemployment and emigration, collective responses in defence of communities or environments have been dealt with in an authoritarian manner by the state and its neo-corporate partners in the industrial sector. In many ways, it has been the manner in which rural communities have been neglected by the state over the decades before the ‘Celtic Tiger’ that has created the pool of discontent from which campaigns of opposition to state policy have emerged. The resultant tension between environmental and developmental considerations creates a conflict where ‘the state should mediate to promote the common good’ (K. Allen 2007 xvii). However, in the Irish case, the demands of globalised industry have gained prevalence over that of the community due to neo-corporatist arrangements, with a series of community/environmental disputes occurring as a result in recent years. These disputes have involved small rural communities or the citizens of some of Ireland’s sprawling urban centres which have grown around the towns and harbours along the western seaboard.

Much of this development occurred in response to the location of key infrastructural projects across the West of Ireland. Under the Lemass government in the 1950s and 1960s, a combination of inward investment from multinationals alongside a gradual development of the infrastructure led to the location of a multitude of multinationals across the country. Consequently communities have experienced a change of lifestyle, as the relaxed approach of the past has given way to a workforce now increasingly reliant on commuting to and from industrial centres, while housing has now come to be priced out of the budgets of many in the population, including those migrants who have come to Ireland in search of employment. Even the protection of the trade unions has come to be diminished, due to neo-corporate demands on social policy:

In Ireland, pressure for flexibility and work intensity comes directly through social partnership agreements. Whereas in the past workers were granted pay rises in response to rising rates of inflation, today they must first show ‘verifiable’ improvements in productivity to get a pay rise…outside of the world of work the corporations want to hollow out what is left of social rights or the social wage (K. Allen 2007 p.11).

Such demands have placed a strain on the traditional ‘social capital’ which had been the bedrock of community life in rural Ireland, as families are caught up in a cycle of overtime, commuting and crèches. At the same time, the remaining vestiges of a welfare state have been all but replaced with a regime of a privatised health industry. The mistreatment of immigrants in the workforce has led to unions becoming concerned about a ‘race to the bottom’ in relation to the work and welfare practice of the neo-liberal state (K. Allen 2007 pp. 36-37). Ultimately, there is increased uncertainty as to whether prosperity has come at too high of a price:

The urgent question concerns the relationship between economic and cultural modernisation: is being happier the realisation of the good life?

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Does the Celtic Tiger represent an improvement in our overall quality of life, or moral bankruptcy and spiritual dereliction? (Kuhling and Keohane 2007 p. 4)

This transition from policies aimed at providing services to those embedded industrial practice is reflected in the Irish environmental policy agendas. These policy frameworks had originally been devised in order to prevent pollution and regulate industry, but have subsequently come to facilitate corporations and economic growth. Much of this transition has been facilitated by the state’s interpretation of the concept of ecological modernisation which underpins much of the environmental and developmental regulations in the Irish case.

Irish Environmental Policy:

Ireland’s history is dominated by its population’s relationship with the land. A strong social and cultural tradition has grown around this relationship and the resulting network of pastoral, agrarian conservatism has led to a culture of clientelism and corporatism that makes new policy approaches difficult to implement. Many of the responses to the challenges of the environment in Ireland are led from the outside, particularly in the context of EU directives. Domestic political responses, such as the introduction of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have had a mixed reaction while the political culture of the country has prevented a strong ideological campaign from gaining influence. Over the previous decades the impact of a heightened ecological focus has brought these debates to the fore in Irish life as a previously agrarian society industrialised and the Celtic Tiger economy gained strength. High profile cases such as the ‘Shell to Sea’ and ‘Save Tara’ campaigns have been prominent. However, eco-protest has been a part of the political landscape since the Carnsore Point anti-nuclear protests of the late 1970s (Leonard 2006, 2008).

A recent study on environmental policy examines themes such as the Irish state’s ‘complacency’, ‘lacklustre performance’, ‘historical muddling’ and ‘weak points’ in relation to environmental policy implementation (Flynn 2007). These issues should create ‘a discourse which reduces conflict’ around environmental management issues. And herein lies the crux of the matter; as poor planning practices and political scandals became an endemic feature of Irish society, an increased sense of democratic deficit has come to bedevil policy makers, whose attempts to deal with environmental matters have invariably resulted in a further reduction in trust on all sides of the debate. However, we can apportion blame evenly across the institutional frameworks that make up the Irish environmental sector. Organizations such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Teagasc (the Agricultural Institute) and the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) also must share responsibility for Ireland’s poor environmental performance. The Irish public also comes under scrutiny, as the 2005 Eurobarometer Report into the attitudes of citizens is presented to expose a degree of complacency amongst its Irish respondents (ibid). The ‘Celtic Tiger’ has left a substantial ecological footprint on the Emerald Isle, one which cannot be ignored by those committed to endless economic growth. One criticism of the state’s policy direction would be the lack of any wider discussion of how

247 Issues in Environmental Research communities have found themselves in conflict with the state and multinationals over environmental issues in recent decades.

This interrogation of the state’s policy framework needs to incorporate a wider comparative analysis of all of the nation’s environmental problems, through an examination of Ireland’s social, economic and environmental indicators. These can compared with data from other peripheral EU states such as Portugal, Greece and Denmark on items such as Pollution Control Expenditure and Recycling Rates (Flynn 2007). Ireland underperforms in this international peer group, remaining as a ‘laggard’ state in environmental terms. This raises the question of why Ireland, with its increased prosperity that surpasses the other nations in the survey, should remain at the bottom of the environmental performers’ league. Similar concerns are raised by the state’s poor response to the Kyoto Protocol, emissions and climate change in general. Ireland’s failure to meet our Kyoto obligations may become an epitaph for our obsession with growth at all costs. These issues can only be addressed when the partnership model which provided economic growth to date is extended to include environmental issues.

In effect, the Irish landscape has become a site of conflict in the ongoing struggle for economic and infrastructural development. The lack of a strong ecological dynamic in Irish politics as seen in it’s over reliance on EU policy innovations to deal specifically with Irish test cases has compounded the nature of this problem. As economic and industrial growth increases and EU directives highlight further aspects of ecological threat which need intervention a tension has developed in Irish society that is manifest in the increasing number of environmental protest groups.

Without doubt, the creation of Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1992 was an attempt to address the myriad ‘bottom up’ populist interests which were opposed to industrial plants or communities or increased regulation at a time when the ‘top down’ external pressure being exerted by the European Commission by way of environmental directives was increasing. The State’s response was to introduce the EPA Act in 1992 creating an Agency that came to be criticised for its pro-industry leanings but one which, nonetheless, has developed into a facilitation of improved regulatory performance in addition to a significant contribution towards environmental research and education. However, the overlapping personnel and direction of some appointees to the EPA Board has been the subject of controversy from time to time while an effective dialogue between the Agency and Environmental activists remains elusive. However where the Agency has been criticised for having a pro-business and development perspective throughout the boom years of the Celtic Tiger a sustained effort to deal with issues created by the post-consumption waste management crisis has also led to criticism by populist community campaigns of incinerators or landfills (Leonard L. 2005, 2006).

The reason for ongoing concerns about the performance of the EPA is outlined as in some way due to the State’s attempt to position the Agency as an all persuasive answer to the external pressures it was facing in regard to the political structures surrounding environmental policy formulation and implementation. While the State had to create the policy frameworks necessary to allow EU environmental directives to be implemented it was also concerned with the extent of community resistance to local sitings of toxic

248 Issues in Environmental Research plants and industries. However, in spite of these prominent concerns the EPA was ultimately founded in the context of the Irish State’s emphasis on creating economic growth and competitiveness through its neo-corporatist partnership model whereby the attraction of multinational investment superseded any real concern for environmental degradation.

In effect, the establishment of the EPA answered the State’s need to address the perception that industries in Ireland had been ‘left to police themselves’ in the area of pollution control. In so doing the State would not compromise the operations of the multinationals or address what Greenpeace had described as the overall ‘ambivalence towards the concept of environmental protection’ (R. Allen 2004 p. 13) which exists in Irish politics. Nonetheless, while the agency had a wide remit surrounding the creation of a regulatory regime aimed at maintaining integrated pollution control (IPC), the state still viewed environmental problems with a perspective that prioritised industrial growth and economic development (Taylor 2001).

Ecological modernisation, exclusion and the neo-corporatist state: In recent years, the impact of ecological modernisation on the United Kingdom, United States, Germany and Norway has been analysed to reveal varying degrees of connectedness between environmental movements and ‘core state imperatives’ within these states (Dryzek et al 2003 p.191). What becomes clear from this study is the degree to which local factors in each state influences the impact of EM on policy or the ‘sub- politics’ of environmental movements. However, in the Republic of Ireland, there is a tendency within the neo-corporatist system to focus on ‘technocratic criteria’ (Offe 1987 in Scott 1990 p.142). This technocratic element within the state’s policy making capacity creates difficulties for political parties who wish to represent the concerns of the professional middle class, due to the tendency of professionals to have concerns which go beyond the economic. When environmental or conservation groups are involved in national negotiations, they do so in a ‘semi-detached’ manner (Doran 2007 3). This void can be filled through the campaigns of environmental movements, as public sector professionals such as academics and those with alternative forms of expertise mobilise and challenge the structures of closed corporatist power. Critics of the state’s ‘social partnership’ arrangements argue that although partnership has provided the basis for economic growth, non-economic considerations such as environmental issues, the health service and the rights of the disadvantaged are marginalised. The critique of closed political systems applied to European states such as Sweden, Germany and Austria can also be applied to Ireland’s system of neo-corporatist closure, echoing Scott’s question: What is it about neo-corporatist arrangements that have stimulated the development of Green movements in those countries? (Scott 1990 p. 144).

Middle class participants in many cases posses levels of ‘cultural capital’ necessary for the leadership of movements (Bourdieu 1986). Zald has described movement leaders as ‘program professionals (1987 p.374).’ Leadership is exercised through the dissemination of information to potential activists through communication technologies. This allows ‘program professionals’ to set the ideological agenda of a movement at its inception,

249 Issues in Environmental Research creating a type of leadership which differs from the formal settings of established political parties. Middle class participants contribute to a cause by offering their time or expertise. Networks of potential supporters or activists, some with prior experience, are then activated. A rather different suggestion is that leadership elites may centralise decision-making power and organise movements in a bureaucratic way, in order to increase movement effectiveness. These bureaucratic structures provide the basis for the maintenance of campaigns of collective action which are born from the prioritisation of market concerns over those of the community through:

a favourable attitude towards the role of the market actors and dynamics in environmental reforms; a systems-theoretical and rather evolutionary perspective with a limited notion of human agency and social struggles; and an orientation towards analyses at the level of the nation state (Mol and Sonnefeld 2000).

The political system of the Republic of Ireland is also a factor in the extensive personalism which creates opportunities for collective actors to gain political access. In addition, the ongoing democratic deficit in Ireland which is the result of a series of issues such as political corruption and the weakening of local authority decision making has further strengthened the cause of local communities. Political Representation through the Single Transferable Vote (PR-STV) allows constituents to maximise their voting power and has led to an over emphasis on localism and personalism in the Irish system, as competition within parties between candidates becomes prevalent. Collins and O’Shea (2003 pp.88-107) examine the manner in which a clientelist system ‘facilitates rights and favours.’ They see the clientelist system as a process of distributing goods and services to various sections of society:

Brokerage work affects the operation of the political and administrative systems, and some suggest that it plays a part in shaping political culture (Coakley and Gallagher 2004 p.225).

Critics of corporatist and neo-corporatist centralised arrangements (Scott, 1990; Kreisi, 1989) have indicated that the processes of inclusion or exclusion that result from the state’s facilitation or repression of access to political structures creates a ‘dimension of political opportunity’ (Tarrow 1994, 1998) for movements such as environmental campaigners. ‘Inclusive’ corporatist arrangements are usually ‘restricted to employers and organised labour’ (Scott 1990 p.144). The ‘closed’ (ibid p.145) nature of corporatist arrangements ‘means that groups excluded from these processes may mobilise at grassroots level, knowing that ‘normal’ challenges are ‘closed off’ (ibid). One social group that is particularly affected by this form of corporatist closure is the new middle class professionals. This group is therefore in a position to challenge political exclusion or democratic deficit, providing new middle class advocacy groups with a degree of oppositional power now lost to the now ‘less significant’ (ibid) unionised industries:

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It is the paradoxical position of the new middle class, rather than its exclusion alone, which has inclined it towards social protest and ecological ideology (ibid). This ‘paradoxical position’ has been described as a ‘simultaneity’ between the ‘challenging’ and ‘sustaining’ dimension of rights campaigns and institutionalisation, placing rights campaigns between ‘the power over’ and ‘the power to’ within the wider dimensions of political opportunity structures (Stammers, 1999 p.96). Environmental movement participants are drawn from communities which have concerns about lifestyle issues, autonomy and preserving local hinterlands.

Kieran Allen uses the example of the neo-liberal interpretation of Garrett Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the commons’ thesis to demonstrate the extent to which the state and its neo- corporatist industrial partners will use their alliances in order to overcome local resources and commonage: ‘this means that public officials can get away with “rent-seeking” – using state agencies to maximise their own interest by forming close relationships with organised interest groups’ (K. Allen 2007 p. 41). It was one such conceit between the state and multinational that led to the outbreak of the gas pipeline dispute in County Mayo (see below). The freedom of the press to cover such issues is also threatened in such circumstances and the Centre for Public Inquiry (CPI) was closed as a result of the Minister for Justice’s intervention in the aftermath of the Centre’s publication of a report into the gas pipeline controversy.

Community Responses to Environmental Policy:

Having enjoyed the benefits of the economic growth associated with the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom of the last decade, communities in Ireland are beginning to witness the downside of accelerated growth. Offshoots of rapid development such as hyper-consumption, a buoyant property market and increased car ownership led to further demand for critical infrastructure such as roads, waste management sites and water treatment facilities. Such was the link between growth and infrastructure that those communities which voiced concerns about projects were deemed to be backward thinking and against progress. An understanding of these issues can be derived from an examination of the community responses to infrastructural projects which came to be perceived as threats to locals and their health and environment, or to the heritage of the nation itself.

The first of these collective responses emerged in the wake of the attempt to build onshore pipelines for the natural gas of the Atlantic Field off the west coast of County Mayo. Local farmers objected to this proposal and resisted attempts by the multinational involved to gain access to their land. As a result, five local men were imprisoned for 94 days for refusing to agree to an injunction which would allow the agents of the multinational access to their property (Connolly & Lynch CPI 2005). What followed was a campaign which gripped the nation’s imagination, as ‘Shell to Sea’ protests sprung up across the island and beyond in response to the community’s demand that the gas be processed offshore.

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The men’s traditional lifestyle of farming in an Irish speaking Gaeltacht community seemed to represent to many observers an authentic and traditional way of life which had been abandoned in the rush to embrace the consumption fuelled prosperity that had become prevalent in recent years. The fact that the Mayo farmers put family and community above profit or gain provided many observes with an indication of the wider contest that had become the subtext of this dispute; that Ireland had in some ways sold its soul in return for multinational investment and growth. The men were released in the summer of 2006, and their campaign for justice continued . The second issue to emerge in recent years was the campaign to save Tara, seat of the ancient High Kings of Ireland in County Meath, near Dublin. As the capital city had become home to almost one in three of the Republic’s population, the pressure on existing infrastructure, such as roads, became intolerable. Attempts to address the roads issue were compounded by the surging rise in private car ownership (doubling by one million in the last decade) at a time when transport policy favoured a reduction in investment in public utilities such as rail, leading to a state led roads campaign that threatened to pave over sites of national and international heritage:

The National Roads Authority (NRA) has been seen to take ‘a fairly relaxed attitude to heritage and has become a strong advocate of the use of Private Public Partnerships to build toll roads (K. Allen 2007 p. 69).

Over the last decade, a number of disputes have emerged in response to this policy shift, as environmentalists and archaeologists united to defend forests at the Glen of the Downs in County Wicklow and the site of Carrickmines castle in County Dublin. This band of ‘eco-warriors’ and academics were mobilised again in response to the state’s plans to build a motorway alongside the ancient site of the High Kings of Ireland at Tara, in county Meath. The Tara dispute became a standoff with legal challengers and celebrity advocates such as Irish actor Stuart Townsend and his wife, Hollywood star Charlize Theron adding their support to the campaign. One result of the campaign at Tara was a re-examination of the state’s prioritisation of tolled roads over public transport, which is particularly timely with the onset of the ‘peak oil’ era. The campaign to save Tara continues, with archaeologists currently excavating the site and recording their findings about the ancient Celtic way of life.

A further area of policy which has resulted in community protests has been the state’s attempts to address the bourgeoning waste crisis that has emerged in the aftermath of increased consumption associated with accelerated growth. Ireland had fallen foul of European directives on waste management, due to an over reliance (of up to 93%) on landfill. In order to deal with this crisis, waste policies were introduced with plans for regional incinerators across the country. Previous attempts to introduce an all-island incinerator in Northern Ireland had been opposed by both nationalists and unionists together. As a result of the networks created from the Northern campaign, communities mobilised in regions such as Galway, Cork and Meath and more latterly in Dublin.

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These regional campaigns benefited from links with the global anti-incinerator and ‘zero- waste’ campaigns and from the support of experts from the United States and Britain. As a result, the state’s regional waste policy was challenged, as communities began to inform themselves of the dangers posed by the dioxins and furans which are released into the air and food chain from incinerator emissions. Nonetheless, there were positive outcomes to the community engagement with the waste issue. Regional recycling was introduced in many areas with great success. The state has not abandoned its plans to introduce incinerators completely, however. Two major plants are planned for Cork harbour and Poolbeg in Dublin and these will deal with the bulk of municipal and industrial waste.

Last year, the construction of housing which had come to provide the second cycle of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom caused another environmental crisis when the mass construction of new houses in rural areas led to the contamination of water supplies with effluent from archaic treatment plants. In the western city of Galway, often referred to as ‘the fastest growing city in Europe’, drinking water supplies were contaminated with the cryptosporidium virus. Lax regulation of the construction industry by the state created a growing strain on the city’s water and sewage systems and after heavy flooding in the winter of 2007, water supplies in Lough Corrib, which supplied Galway city, became contaminated. Hundreds of people fell ill due to the virus and a boil water notice was called by the local authority. Panic buying of bottled water ensued and the boil water notice lasted from March until August 2007, costing retailers and hoteliers millions in extra expenses. The water crisis also became an issue during the general election which was called in May and was said by some commentators to have cost the city’s Mayor a seat in the Dublin parliament, Dáil Éireann.

Conclusion:

The shift in policy direction undertaken by successive neo-liberal Irish governments has led to increased conflict between communities and the state in relation to infrastructural projects and development. While the Irish state has attempted to follow the ecological modernisation policy framework set out by the European Union, the emphasis was on economic growth over environmental protection or concerns for communities. Ultimately, the costs of economic growth led to greater environmental degradation and an undermining of significant aspects of the nation’s heritage. In particular, rural communities have borne the cost of Ireland’s transition from a rural agrarian society into an industrialised and globalised economy and this has not been without its problems:

So, while much of the transition has been positive, it has been accompanied by a widening gap between rich and poor; rising crime rates, increased environmental pollution; a large infrastructure deficit; a housing market that excludes many, a huge growth in long-distance commuting; health and welfare systems creaking under pressure; a weakening rural economy…(Kitchin and Bartley 2007 p304).

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In conclusion, as communities have demonstrated a commitment to retaining some aspect of the traditional values and heritage of the ‘Emerald Isle’, the state’s policy of prioritising rapid infrastructural development in order to underpin private consumption and multinational investment over local community services may prove to be ill advised as fluctuations on the global markets continue. As the cycle of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ draws to a close, the values and concerns of these local communities may provide a new direction for the post boom era.

Communications Technologies and the Environmental Movement:

One method of gaining increased political access for movements is demonstrated through their increased proficiency with communications technologies. The utilisation of media and internet technologies by environmental protest groups has facilitated a global network that target global corporate and institutional entities. In addition, cyberprotest movements are able to have their mobilisation and framing processes enhanced while the use of internet technologies provides access to the resources of expertise and scientific professional data. These resources can be combined as material evidence in support of a movement’s cause, as well as information for media based framing campaigns. We can chart this growing trend in movement activism by exploring the impact of the links between Irish protest campaigns and global movements that have provided vital information and strategic material to underpin their campaigns of opposition. One notable feature of the recent political landscape has been the increasing incidents of confrontation between grassroots and elites. These conflicts have occurred in the wake of the declining relevance of the traditional left-right dichotomy and have been exemplified by the campaigns of opposition led by environmental groups against the globalised corporate sector. We may examine the manner in which new forms of political expression emerge from the environmental movements’ utilisation of the new technologies of communication as a strategic tool for campaigns of protest. The use of internet and media technologies by environmental groups has facilitated the growth of a network of committed activists, who provide scientific and technological expertise to like-minded protests around the globe. By exploring movement use of media and internet technologies, I will outline new approaches taken by grassroots groups as part of their resistance to corporate and institutional actors.

The manner in which communication technologies enhance protest movements by providing leverage and influence for grassroots groups in an era characterised by knowledge flows and technocratic expertise has become a significant aspect of that movement’s capabilities. Internet linkages facilitate innovative approaches to political opportunity structures for movements through emergent features of cyberprotest that create a new nexus of capabilities in a globalised age. The ‘repertoires and cycles of protest ’(Della Porta and Diani 1999) of new social movements have come to be underpinned by the onset of interactive knowledge flows, networked alliances, improved tactical approaches and advanced mobilisational capabilities through the development of cyberprotest strategies. The use of internet technology as a basis for support between disparate protest groups is strategically augmented by the utilisation of media networks eager for a steady supply of presentable items on potential ecological crises for their

254 Issues in Environmental Research ceaseless broadcasts. The information highway has become a vehicle for the dissemination of the various components of the environmental movement, academic and scientific expertise, political strategies, legal frameworks and the location of globalised support networks. By facilitating the spread of information which strategically enhances campaigns of protest, the new technologies of communication have become a vital tool in the arsenal of the environmental movements globally. Castells defines internet technologies as a ‘privileged tool for acting, informing, recruiting, organising and counter-dominating’ (2001 p.137). Through the application of communications technologies, localised environmental movements can link with similar groups on a global basis, learning from the hard earned experiences of previous campaigns. This assisted in the transformation of the once isolated pockets of localised environmental resistance into a world-wide movement able to challenge trans-national corporate polluters. An increased reliance on communication technologies by environmental groups has seen a transformation in activists’ profiles, changing our perception of the politically dogmatic campaigner into that of a media-friendly advocacy professional with a high level of expertise in a related field. This use of expertise has created what Castells called ‘the new dynamics of social movements’ (ibid).

While internet sabotage from computer ‘hackers’ is an established strategy of the politics of the information age, it is the ability of social movements to mobilise and communicate through information technologies that provides a degree of dynamic innovation to the politics of protest. The internet has become the activist’s meeting house in the information era. Networks of opposition have been established and continue to reinforce protests globally, with such success that industries and institutions are now attempting to restructure their own practices in response to the new cultural and political expression of environmental values. This process of redefining cultural values has traditionally been part of old social movement agendas; however, internet technologies make this redefinition or reinterpretation of values much easier for relevant movements today.

This shift in social movement capabilities can be seen in the transition of protest groups from a reactive force for change within a dominant ideological paradigm to that of a cultural movement that can set campaign agendas as witnessed in the ability of social movement organisations such as Greenpeace to influence public perceptions of the environment. In turn, old political conflicts can have their overall boundaries redrawn in this era of communication technologies, as cultural values are redefined through information flows. In this way, old political values (and conflicts) can be resurrected through campaigns framed by the communication of new perspectives. The restructuring of political and cultural values through the technologies of communication has become an important strategy for social movements in their campaigns of action. It is what Castells refers to as ‘mobilisation around meaning’ (2001, p.140). The significance of new political understandings that are shaped by collective action becomes evident in relation to the onset of democratic deficit facing mainstream politics. As parliamentary politics veers towards a centrist, Liberal Democratic monolith, radical political expression had adopted new organisational forms, with the traditional hierarchies of the corporate sector and the state being challenged by grassroots movements which can give equal voice to a multitude of concerned activists, with each able to give as much or as little to a campaign

255 Issues in Environmental Research as internet technology allows. Furthermore, social movement campaigns are now structured around the technologies of communication. The medium can affect the message and often shape it. For instance, a movement’s salience may be shaped by the process of media framing at certain key points of a campaign. Public attitudes are swayed by media images, such as Greenpeace running a flotilla in the Irish Sea, alongside ships carrying a nuclear cargo for British Nuclear Fuels. Resolution to the vexed question of nuclear power is not the expected outcome of this form of protest. However, Greenpeace gains a large amount of public support for their movement from the transmission of these images. Ultimately, the media is utilised to create transferable emotiveness around a political event, through the creation of a moral frame.

The link between internet mobilisation of protests and satellite news coverage is evident from the events surrounding the Seattle and Genoa anti-globalisation protests. These protests and the massive publicity they received from global media networks has elevated protest to a new level, giving symbolic meanings and outlets for political expression to a new generation of activists. Issues of significance for young people, such as anti— corporatism or environmentalism, can now be forced on to the agendas of powerful groups such as the G8, with an immediacy that by-passes the slow and cumbersome four- year cycle of parliamentary elections. The immediacy of internet communications increases the spontaneous nature of protest events, making them at once attractive to both the casual activist and the media networks that follow these events. The emergence of global networks of disaffected young people has enhanced the anti-globalisation movement’s ability to mobilise campaigns of protest.

Throughout the last decade a new generation of politically motivated activists with advanced networking capabilities has become part of the discourse of new millennium politics, as characterised by ‘McLibel’ and Monsanto anti-corporate campaigns (Klein, 2000). Communications technologies are a central component of consumer activism that targets sweatshop production by Nike or unsustainable modes of transport like the Hummer sports utility vehicles (SUV’s). Cyberprotesters can challenge multinationals that are now recognised as ‘the most powerful political forces of our time’ (ibid). For protest movements, the internet allows for a strategic diversity which prevents such movements from becoming stifled by drawn out campaigns that can sap morale. Through communication technologies, the battleground of movement protests can be shifted at the press of a keyboard button. This immediacy gives protest movements the ability to link and mobilise with key allies globally. Key events are utilised as mobilisation strategies, with a series of planned tactics ensuring a negative response from the authorities, resulting in the expansion of democratic deficit and moral frames through the filter of any ensuing media coverage. An example of this can be seen in the events around the 2002 ‘Reclaim the Streets’ protest in Dublin. As the police response to the actual march was severe, the media coverage and public outcry about police actions on the day lead to a prolonging of the events salience with the media.

The ability to challenge globalised networks of power by protest movements has become an important aspect of the politics of the new century. As traditional institutions are increasingly redundant, new equations of power pit grassroots protest movements against

256 Issues in Environmental Research the globalised industrial-military complex. Communications technologies, once the preserve of the latter, have become the weapon of choice for the former. Strategically, the mobilisation, coordination and publicity needed for protest movements at a global level can only be achieved through communication networks. What becomes clear from an analysis of how protest movements utilise communication technologies is the increasing importance of these new forms of technology as a tool for spreading information and organising resistance. The new technologies of communication ultimately create a platform for forms of political resistance that can respond to the needs of concerned citizens in an increasingly globalised world. Essentially, the strategic impact new media forms have had on protest movements has been based on a movement’s ability to influence overall media agendas. The ratings potential of protest coverage is dependent on two main themes; the message of the movement, and the potential for an attention grabbing media event emanating from that movement’s activities.

Therefore, the subject of movement salience becomes a critical aspect of how media attention is maintained. According to Rogers and Dearing (1988), there are three main features in the issue maximisation process. These are part of an agenda building structure which incorporates factors such as feeding the insatiable appetites of communications elites such as multi-media news corporations through the provision of movement events that embrace the spectacular and a coordination of media, public and policy agendas. This fusion of demand expectation and need shapes wider understandings of the contentious social events which will maintain public’s attention, as well as viewer ratings. A central feature of this analysis is the importance of the issue in the context of social expectations. Issue salience is achieved through extensive media coverage, but the issues can only be ignited into activism through the intervention of movement entrepreneurs or gatekeepers. Issue importance is maintained by ‘public and policy agenda setting’ (Dearing and Rogers 1996). From this perspective, policy response to an issue is dependent on the importance such an issue is granted by public and media agendas.

In this way, successful outcomes to social movement activity are demonstrated to be increasingly reliant on that movement’s ability to influence professional media elites, in addition to provoking a public response to their issue of concern. Subsequently, the media’s role in a new political equation, as a filter for conflicts between grassroots and elites, becomes a crucial aspect of the new political dynamic. A further understanding of the centrality of media to the grassroots movements can be achieved through an analysis of what has been termed the ‘editorial gatekeeper’. It is the role of agenda shapers to decide what events in society are noteworthy enough to feature on front page or primetime news reports. Their importance to a grassroots movement in need of public support is of paramount importance to the mobilisation process. While political disputes still require the exchange of views from adversarial groups, the influence of media on the public perception of that dispute ultimately influences the outcome of political contestations. What becomes evident from this analysis is the importance of media advocacy and editorial support in order for grassroots movements to gain leverage. In response to this challenge, movements have achieved a greater degree of media professionalism, combined with technological expertise. As the influence of advertisers

257 Issues in Environmental Research increases, media coverage and subsequent editorial support can be effectively driven or censored by commercial demand. Another form of external pressure applied to media has been demonstrated by the US government’s determined steering of the military action taken in Iraq. In a new departure for war coverage, journalists were embedded with various regiments across the field of operations. Favourable war coverage led to priority postings for the relative journalists deemed supportive enough of the Bush administration. In contrast, open criticism of the war led to public accusations of unpatriotic behaviour and even treachery.

Invariably, the media’s coverage of social events can be shaped an underlying ideological perspective. The meanings of societal disputes around topics such as environmental or human rights are subject to an ideologically based conflict of definition. Here again, the media plays a central role, ordaining the public perception of social issues, which is flavoured by inherent ideological demands. One result of this shift in social perception has seen an increased cultural significance of the aesthetics of political disputes, as demonstrated in the campaign of Greenpeace against the French and UK nuclear industries. A further demonstration of the cultural significance of political media coverage can be gleamed from a study of the anti-globalisation phenomenon. This movement has drawn the lines of demarcation clearly, between a grassroots coalition of environmentalists and pacifists and the formal institutions of global power, such as the G8, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In this way, the anti- globalisation movement allows potential activists the widest definition to associate themselves with certain pro-environment and anti-war sentiments with which many people feel some form of empathy. As a result, media coverage is guaranteed, as a mass- mobilisation of a broad range of groups from academics to anarchists provides the potential for a ‘media event’, the focus of which is readily provided for by the heavy- handed response of local security forces. This represents a problem for both the public governance and the private corporate sectors, as environmental movements move away from social movement campaigns of extreme actions, or violent protest, (despite the actions of a some protestors in Seattle and Genoa) and instead present themselves as alternative minded, environmentally conscious NGO’s with a laptop in one hand and a protest placard in the other. Where once violence, at protests or otherwise, from social and environmental movements gave authorities the excuse to respond with the strong arm of the state’s military and police apparatus, this aspect of state repression can be avoided by technologically driven protests.

This avoidance of direct conformation between protestors and the authorities on the streets or at the site of environmental dispute allows for a broader public empathy with the protest movements’ aims. Furthermore, this strategy of utilising technologies and expertise gives protest movements an air of respectability, which belies their anti- establishment motives, while crucially allowing for increased media access. Indeed, this strategy has become a feature of media processes, as the use of sourced information, conveyed by state of the art IT technologies has become a central part of both journalistic and editorial news gathering. This form of political expression through technology utilisation has evolved from the unease felt by local communities in the face of the loss of powers at local and national governmental levels and the rise in multinational

258 Issues in Environmental Research globalisation. As the power of the nation state recedes, communities are utilising the new technologies of the information age and combining them with specialised areas of expertise, to directly oppose corporate entities or toxic industries. Ecopopulist campaigns therefore represent a new form of protest, one which differs from previous environmental disputes in Ireland. Essentially, ecopopulism can be seen as part of what Castells described as ‘an array of transnational social forces animated by environmental concerns rather than a protest group rooted in either NIMBY perspectives or deep green ideology. As such, ecopopulist campaigns can be linked to a worldwide anti-corporate movement that has environmental concern as a basis for their thinking, has as much to do with addressing the onset of risk society and democratic deficit as any emergent eco- consciousness. In the Irish case, this crisis is represented by the onset of a consumer society and a reliance on multinational investment that led to an industrial pollution and a waste crisis for society. Despite an increased economic output, many communities in Ireland have begun to experience a sense of alienation from this ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy, as multinationals have imposed on both the environment and quality of life of many citizens.

Moreover, the political processes, both in Ireland and internationally, have been altered to meet the demands of this new form of politics. As the campaigns of ecopopulists have demonstrated, this new form of politics is based on both the fears of local communities in the face of the growing power of the multinational waste management sector (of which the incineration industry is but one component) and a growing democratic deficit presented by the weakness of the state in responding to its citizen’s fears and needs in regard to both waste management and the subsequent health risks they may pose. Ultimately, the citizenry responded to this challenge through protest movements, circumventing established political channels and turning the new technologies of the corporate sector on the corporations, to oppose environmental degradation. When viewed from an international perspective, this new movement of political resistance has become both an important arena for political expression, and a new form of political action.

Rural Sentiment and Development Introduction:

The recent phase of economic growth in the Republic of Ireland led to an increase in industrial and infrastructural development across the island. One offshoot of this accelerated growth has been a rise in community based environmental movements, as environmentalists and concerned communities have come to mobilise campaigns to protect local communities and hinterlands. I will examine the contestation of two forms of environmentalism, institutional ecomodernism versus a grassroots ecopopulism within the context of the ongoing dispute between a local community in the west of Ireland and both multinationals and the state, who are attempting to run gas pipelines from the Atlantic Corrib Field through the rural community’s lands. Contemporary environmental issues may entail more than the sum of its inherent philosophical debates; contemporary environmentalism can be said to be as much about the interpretation of competing forms of development between state supported industrial actors and local community movements, both of which compete for control of environmental destinies. Within this

259 Issues in Environmental Research contestation, two competing forms of environmentalism have emerged; one based on a growth based form of ecological modernisation that has come to be challenged by grassroots movements inspired by a localised rural sentiment. This dichotomy between modernist and populist forms of environmentalism occur within a wider context of ecologically derived debates which incorporate a series of motivations such as anthropological health risks, democratic deficit and political accountability and a range of attitudes towards everything from the role of the European Union (EU) to the anti- globalisation movement (Leonard 2006). The debate within the context of the Irish case will be looked at now. Local communities have taken on the mantle of environmental protectors drawing on local heritage and beliefs in the process of resisting the onset of a technologically derived industrialisation which has been embraced by state and industry. The ‘social ecology’ of Murray Bookchin is now best exemplified by ecopopulist campaigners who place the ecology of place and community above economic concerns. A further contextualisation will be provided through an examination of a civic environmental ethics put forward by Mick Smith in Environmental Values 14 (2005). Smith argues that environmental civic responses should go beyond contemporary understandings of what citizenship now entails and that a much wider concept of ecologically derived social capital (Leonard p250 2006) could be construed from ‘culturally viable patterns of emotionally mediated responses’ (Smith 2005 p 145) or sentiments borne from alternative forms of communication or expression.

During the course of his editorial in Environmental Values (Vol 15 No 4 2005), Alan Holland had cause to condemn this form of ecologically derived sentiment, which is perceived to be ‘a cognitive stance that in turn generates inappropriate attitudes and emotional responses’… that ‘bears a passing resemblance to idealism’ (ibid). While Holland goes on to make the distinction between ‘technological sentimentality’ and a more philosophically derived environmentalism, it may be that such principles need to be tempered by the ideological praxis of ecological political activism. One aspect of the two main competing principles of environmentalism in Ireland, which have been described as ‘official’ and ‘populist’ by Tovey (1992b) will now be examined. The official section of Irish environmentalism is made up of state agencies and advisory groups such as An Taisce (the Heritage Trust), while the populist section is composed of campaigners and movements with concerns that have ranged from nuclear power and toxic industry in the 1970s and 1980s through to more recent disputes about infrastructure such as roads and incinerators (Leonard 2005 2006).

Political protests, ecological or otherwise often follow from cultural rather than ideological grievances. This understanding is at the heart of the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements, with the movements of the 1960s counterculture embracing idealism and autonomy over the economics and formal politics of the mainstream. As western culture has industrialised so too has a new emphasis been placed on protecting an environment once seen as the very impediment of human aspirations for development. In the case of Micheál and Caitlín Ó Seighin of ‘Shell to Sea’, this emphasis is articulated through a localised discourse which reflects underlying concerns for the hinterland:

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I just love the place, the history of it, the people, the songs, the stories and the way of life here…when I was growing up we were full of stories about our own area in particular…there is a means of connecting with this place through the Irish language…with Irish the entire area is a unity, whereby the place where thing happen becomes part of the event itself…in telling anecdotes you find yourself spatially establishing them all the time…as a language that is not borrowed but indigenous, its idioms and dialectic difference have been honed to represent and describe a world always changing which has the effect of tying the people together (Garavan 2006).

Ecopopulist Ethics in the Irish Case:

This contestation has become a recurring feature of environmental conflicts in Ireland, from the Raybestos Manhattan asbestos dump dispute in Cork in the 1980s to the campaign against incineration across the island in the 1990s or in the recent resource based ‘Shell to Sea’ campaign. These campaigns have come to represent the cutting edge of the ecomodernist versus ecopopulism debate. As the Irish state attempted to revive its ailing economy in the 1970s and 1980s, multinationals, which were relocating due to regulations in the United States, were invited to set up plants in Ireland under a more relaxed regulatory framework. Many communities began to resist these heavily polluting industries and local incidents of environmental protest began to be a feature of Irish society. By the 1990s, the economic growth charachterised as ‘the Celtic Tiger’ led to a waste management crisis, leading to plans for regional incinerators which were also opposed by an increasingly environmentally conscious community sector. Ultimately the Irish case demonstrates that ecological modernisation as a discourse, while acknowledging the role of the citizen fails to address the social reality underpinning the politics of environmental protest, a reality which cast the modern protester in the role of an ecopopulist David opposing industrial Goliaths.

For ecopopulists, deep green ecologism represents the embracing of nature, as opposed to the centuries old Enlightenment process of repressing nature. It has at its root an overall concern with a sense of global cooperation and species ecumenism which go far beyond the compromising elements of ecological modernisation. Where nature was once ‘wild’ and in need of taming, deep green ecology places the environment as the equal, or more fundamentally, a more important entity than humankind. Of course, this places most deep green activists in opposition to the onset of a society enthralled by rapid acceleration, over-consumption and environmental degradation in the name of profit. Moreover, while deep green ecologists may have been members of the larger environmental agencies, such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, many have come to reject the bureaucratic nature of such groups, working instead in small clusters of committed activists, protesting about specific environmental problems, such as the protestors around The Twyford Downs roads protest in the UK, or the like-minded Irish roads activists at the Glen of the Downs in Co. Wicklow, or at the ancient Tara site of the High Kings in Co. Meath, both of which have come under threat from the state’s road building plans for the Dublin commuter belt (Leonard 2006). By rejecting the constraints

261 Issues in Environmental Research of consumer driven capitalist growth in order to protect the environment, ecopopulists have moved beyond the single issue that motivated local mobilisation, going beyond parochial fear in order to embrace a wider sentiment of ethically derived hope and in the process becoming the environmentalists with ‘feelings for nature’ (Smith 2005 pp146- 148); embracing the role of ‘denizens’ (ibid) who advocate for nature as a result of this ethical transformation. This position is articulated by ‘Shell to Sea’s Micheál Ó Seighin, who claims that local resistance goes beyond the economic and stems from deeper concerns about democratic deficit and degradation of place:

They (the multinationals) didn’t even have to consider attempting to con us about jobs…they said you’ll all be rich, but only in a general way…what they are having to do now, that is actually consider what people are saying to them, is something they haven’t experienced for years and years…they didn’t have to put the work in because the state and its leadership had become so subservient to the multinationals that they had stopped caring, had stopped being careful. So when the company came in here, they met with that political culture of dependency and facilitation (Garavan 2006).

It can also be argued that ecopopulist politics has provided a focus for the type of community-based protest movements that can address the democratic deficit created by over-bureaucratic and hierarchical administrations, at both the global and national level. By providing an outlet for social protest deep green environmental movements are addressing the onset of democratic deficit in society. In so doing, green politics has provided a basis for political movement rather than the type of entrenched ideological positions which have emanated from traditional left or right wing politics.

Moreover, as centrist and centre-right ideology have come to dominate the politics of Western Liberal democracies, many disparate elements of the old left have realigned themselves and their struggles with the agendas of deep green and eco-protest politics. This has been as much through necessity as ideological choice due to the lack of any real momentum in radical politics, outside of anti-globalisation protests, as seen in Seattle, Rome and Gleneagles, or localised eco-protests such as Twyford Down or ‘Shell to Sea’. These eco-activists have at their basis elements of an anti-globalisation youth movement which is disaffected and disenchanted with liberal capitalism overall. As activists they also provide a platform for the expression of environmental concern and even anger in a way which the substantive body of mainstream politics can not begin to represent, due to the embracing of models of liberal capitalist development by all shades of Western political expression. Nonetheless, the debate about the future of sustainability has thrown up some interesting arguments. One of the core issues at the heart of this debate is the extent to which liberal democracies can embrace sustainable development. This acceptance of sustainability as a means of continued ecologically derived development is dependent on an interpretations of sustainability ‘that respect liberal democratic values and institutions’ (Barry and Wissenburg 2001 p205). However, the outcomes of these conceptualisations of sustainability must take community values and local sentiments on board in order to be truly ‘sustainable’. In the absence of an agreed understanding

262 Issues in Environmental Research between communities, states and industrial interests, attempts to impose ‘sustainable’ initiatives without considering local relationships between communities and their hinterlands risks ongoing campaigns of opposition, something which has occurred in Ireland since the late 1970s (Leonard 2006, 2008).

Here, the values which shape ‘anti-authoritarianism and moral scepticism’ Barry and Wissenburg 2001 p 207) lie at the heart of liberal pluralistic democracy, as represented by the idealism of those who have over time answered the call of ‘revolution’, ‘movement’ or ‘freedom’ be they republican, socialist, feminist or environmentalist. At the heart of the great intangible of ‘progress’ lies a democratic impulse borne of localised desires for freedom from oppression or degradation through ‘contentious repertories’ (Tilly 2004) whereby understandings of local sentiments come to be replenished by continued opposition to the destruction of what is significant to a community within the context of the landscape that surrounds it.

As ecological management practices and sustainable development approaches become features of industrialism’s compromise with a growing sense of ecological concern, the true nature of environmental protest has come to represent as much a challenge to established agencies of bureaucratic administration. In addition, this led to the challenging of the infringement of industrialism on the environment of ‘unspoilt nature’. The ‘Shell to Sea’ case examined here can be understood in the context of this wider contest between grassroots community campaigns and the technocratic alliance between industry and the state over the introduction of major projects or policies. In many cases the adversaries of the territorial advocate can be the technocratic advisor who creates a contest between competing sets of expertise, a forum that has provided equal footing for advocates who often outperform their technocratic opponents. Invariably, many territorial advocates are charismatic figures whereas the technocrat remains a largely secretive figure, hidden from public view. Thus, the entrepreneurial advocate can facilitate ecopopulist campaign development. This was certainly the case in the ‘Shell to Sea’ campaign in Mayo, where a longstanding dispute between the local community and multinationals over the location of an onshore gas pipeline has resulted in a movement that gained significant national and international attention. This major dispute pitted multinationals against a local Irish speaking Gaeltacht community in County Mayo, to the west of the island.

This dispute centres on the location of an onshore gas pipeline that led to the imprisonment of local protesters in a conflict which gripped Irish society and won the support of Ken Saro Wiwa’s brother, alongside other concerned activists from Nigeria, the UK and Norway. (Leonard 2006). The region includes a series of beaches and bogs which incorporates a Natural Heritage Area, a designated Area of Special Scenic Importance (ASSI) and a Special Area of Conservation (SAC). The area is surrounded by the Blue Stack Mountains to the north and Benbulben to the east, with the heritage site at the Céide Fields, home to one of the world’s earliest agricultural sites. The drinking water is drawn from local lakes and the traditional fishing and farming communities have populated the area since prehistoric times (Connolly and Lynch 2005). The local bay is home to whales, dolphins and other sea life. This sensitive ecosystem and traditional

263 Issues in Environmental Research community are now threatened by the mass excavations and digging of the multinationals intent on exploiting the vast resources of natural gas off the Mayo coastline. However, locals want the gas to be processed offshore, reducing the environmental degradation and risk. In spite of this, the multinationals and the Irish state have proceeded with an onshore pipeline, citing excessive costs as the reason why an offshore plant has been rejected. In 2005, five local farmers were imprisoned for refusing to agree to an injunction which allowed the multinationals access to their land. The case became a major news story in Ireland and abroad. One of the men, Willie Corduff, was awarded an international Goldman Environmental Prize and received €92,000 in recognition of the environmental work he and his fellow campaigners have undertaken.

By using the tools of group culture such as political activism, a social reality is constructed that challenges and redefines our cultural expectations. The emergence of territorially derived group culture has come to define the campaigns of socio-political and culture resistance to the modernising projects of the state or industrial sector. Rural territorial campaigns have opened up a socio-cultural narrative at a key point of departure in Irish society, as that society moves into a post-consumptionist phase, providing an integrity which is all too often lacking in the behaviour of prominent politicians and cabinet ministers. It is this ‘rural sentiment’ that provides community campaigns with their mobilising capacities, pitting locals against the interests of multinationals or the state in the defence of ecology, heritage and democratic values. There are many competing understandings surrounding community-based environmental disputes in Ireland with almost as many perspectives as there are participants or advocates, with the one constant being a concern for the hinterland. Using the rationale underpinning consumption-based behaviour we can say that scientists, advocates and community activists adopt particular roles within the process of accepting change in the context of modernisation. And yet, the state or multinational, despite their array of technocrats, scientists and consultants often fails to recognise the unpopularity of the technology they are attempting to introduce, be it nuclear power, sewage treatment plants, incinerators or gas pipelines (Leonard 2006).

From the community perspective, technology or infrastructure is understood in three stages. At the ‘pre-issue’ stage communities come to an understanding about the pros and cons of the technology being introduced. During the ‘issue-acceptance’ stage communities attempt to comprehend the competing expertise provided by consultants in favour of, or advocates who oppose, technologies or infrastructure. At the ‘post-issue’ stage the functional performance of any new technology or infrastructure is assessed providing that technology or infrastructure is actually introduced. Environmental impacts are assessed at this stage and poor performance or results may lead to further mobilisation against the offending project. In this way we can see that the process whereby projects are introduced to (or imposed on) communities has become part of the culture of the modernising state. Segments of the community may then feel the need to resist modernisation at certain moments where technology or infrastructure is anticipated as too great a risk.

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In the absence of the recognition of community concerns by the authorities advocates can mobilise grievance by establishing ‘consensus’ (Klandermans 1989) built from symbolic understandings of local heritage with a nostalgic sentiment for an era characterised by understandings formed from local discourse. Once ignited, this ‘rural sentiment’ can be mobilised through collective activity which allows communities to share the experience of communal resistance to projects, leading to enhanced integration, communication and participation. By moving beyond the single issue surrounding the technology or infrastructure being challenged local campaigns can open up networks with global movements that provide expertise and data which can then be used to challenge the science of the state or multinational. And while projects are introduced to address a social need that the state has identified through its policy framework, the response of communities is based on a new set of needs that emerge in the pre-issue stage. These community based needs are constituted from within; in what one ‘Shell to Sea’ advocate described as a ‘visceral’ response based to fear of large-scale projects (Leonard 2006). This is a fear which scientists dismiss as irrational but one which may be better understood as natural when viewed from the perspective of members of the public who have grown up in an era where risk and toxicity have become a feature of popular culture, appearing in films, books and even cartoons with the classic ‘good guy’ advocate challenging the ‘mad scientist’ and the ‘evil corporate entity’. The state, which is viewed with suspicion in an era of democratic deficit driven by successive corruption-based ‘scandals’, is seen as a compliant facilitator of multinational agendas.

All of this located ‘rural sentiment’ in the realm of emotionally derived ethically formulated ecopopulist responses to threats of degradation from multinationals or the state agencies who, in spite of their embrace of eco-modernisation, have failed to grasp the extent to which local communities are rooted in the very landscape threatened by the infrastructure of modernisation. For Smith, this emergence of a localised ‘denizen’ embedded in the emotion of the hinterland is the basis for ‘a crossing from ethics into politics’:

Why emotion? Well for many ‘reasons’: partly because of the role of fear, anxiety, hope anger, have in motivating environmental concerns; partly because emotions affect our evaluations, partly because of the fundamental role that emotional responses play in creating a sense of community, however that community is ‘imagined or experienced; partly because such emotional responses are precisely what are deemed inadmissible to our current form of public being which draws a political and ethical boundary around its constituency on the basis of human (reason’s) historical triumph over natural (emotion) (Smith 2005).

It follows, then, that environmental perspectives can be divided into two competing paradigms. One is dominated by a science-based positivistic rational which holds that modern technology can provide a functional answer to existing social or ecological problems. The other perspective has emerged from an age of scepticism and takes a post- modern view which questions or interprets the material assumptions and grand narratives of science. Both perspectives are embedded in current socio-cultural thought and in that

265 Issues in Environmental Research context community-based responses to large scale projects should be seen as one form of rationality rather than being dismissed for not conforming to another. As the state continues to exclude community-based environmental groups when introducing major projects social movement mobilisation becomes part of a conditional response to neo- corporatist exclusion. It is part of a process of socialised behaviour where each subsequent campaign draws on the existing knowledge of prior disputes to formulate their challenges. In many cases a community wishes to be seen to take a strong stance in defence of their territory so as not to be perceived as weak. We can place this ‘interpretivistic’ (Solomon 2002) contest within the concepts of structure and agency where deterministic understandings about social responses are formulated.

Of course, individuals and communities are not constrained by the collective consciousness formed over the ages. Nonetheless, the social relationships of a region shape that region’s perception of what is internal or external. The commonly-held structures that form community sentiment create an institutionalised, or learned, response when faced with external risks. The flow of knowledge becomes part of the associative process by which a community defines itself and formulates responses. By forming extended linkages with communities that have previously dealt with similar technological or infrastructural risk, a network of consensus can be built, transforming disparate campaigns into a movement. Community responses formed from interpretivistic sentiment are triggered by advocates or ‘entrepreneurs’(Della Porta and Diani 1999) who harvest the grievances held by rural communities in order to create the motivation for collective action. While some responses are more instinctively driven by the threat of whatever project is being imposed motivations for collective action are invariably driven by the advocate who manages such responses. This social process reveals the articulation of a transformative praxis whereby environmental ethics becomes ‘an attempt to express our feelings for the natural world’ (Smith 2005 p148).

This shaping of community motivation is part of the agenda setting which occurs at the inception of a campaign and sets the tone for the initial phase of that action. The cognitive process where communities map out a response is a complex one and the depth of collective identity built from adversity has underpinned much of the interpretative cognisance in the Irish case. We can understand the formation of this response as part of a hierarchy of basic grievances or concerns for communities. Ranging from the need for safety from risk and protection for domestic environments at the basic level through to the fulfilment of collective capacities by association with and mobilisation of community through moral framing the process of collective action can ultimately provide communities with significant levels of esteem and accomplishment in an age of contested legitimation or democratic deficit. Ultimately, environmentally-based activism creates an important stratum of a pluralistic democracy allowing peripheral social groups to create evolutional and political interaction with the core.

Conclusion:

The grievances of rural communities that emerged from this perception of a loss of community have contributed to the growth of ‘populist environmentalism’ (Tovey 1992b

266 Issues in Environmental Research p. 283) in Ireland. Populist environmentalism has been manifested as part of the ‘rural discourse’ (Peace 1997) which was a characteristic of anti-toxics and anti-multinational disputes during the pre-boom decades of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Populist sentiment was also a feature of many of the anti-mining and resource disputes which occurred during the same period. The re-emergence of rural populist discourse during the ‘Shell to Sea’ dispute about the Corrib gas pipeline, involving calls for local ownership of local resources, was combined with concerns about the risk posed by on-shore pipelines as part of the framing strategies of that campaign. The existence of strong parochial, rural sentiment has been cited as a factor in the lack of acceptance of ‘official environmental’ organisations in country-based disputes (Tovey 1992b p. 286), as communities attempted to mobilise grievance based on local understandings and relationships. However, this localism also left many populist environmental groups open to the accusation of being mere NIMBYists, as opposition to industrial or infrastructural projects in a community’s ‘backyard’ is identified as the primary rallying point for campaign mobilisation. Further challenges for populist campaigns such as the problems of translating rural discourses as part of normal legal hearings have also been identified (Peace 1997, p.99).

Essentially, the well of grievance that provides much of the underlying discontent for populist campaigns to exploit is the basis for an understanding of exactly how the various environmental campaigns which have occurred over recent decades can be characterised as components of an overall social movement (Tovey 2002 pp. 147-148). While populist environmental campaigns may ‘wax and wane’ (ibid), the significance of each campaign’s contribution to an articulation of community grievance has created a movement of sorts, where outcomes can be measured through an understanding of the extent to which populist fundamentalism has come to be seen as the very basis for traditional rural identities in the post-consumption, post-modern era. This is an outcome that can be measured as part of the social capital of all rural and rural-suburban communities and which has far greater significance than the outcome measurement models that chart the impact of protest campaigns on policy implementation. The true measurement of the impact of rural populist discourse goes beyond moments of access to political opportunity structures and contributes to the shape and nature of the populist Irish political system itself. In this process, citizens become ethical ‘denizens’ (Smith 2005) who articulate a concern for the natural world as their emotions come to be transformed into an expression of ethically charged environmental advocacy (ibid). This transformation has been acknowledged by the award of the Goldman Environmental Prize to the ‘Shell to Sea’ campaigners, whose protest moved beyond its original inception by embracing wider concerns about local ecology and heritage, as well as political issues about democratic deficit in the process.

Over time, a pattern of ecopopulist resistance to the onset of globalised development becomes discernable in the Irish case. We can see that an overall combination of grievances around perceived threats to traditional processes and identities led to a growing sense of resistance which in many cases surfaced around environmentally-based contests and disputes. Moreover, at a time when the cycles of economic growth and recession sundered society through emigration and poverty in the pre-boom years or immigration and accelerated growth in the post ‘Celtic Tiger’ era, the values embedded in

267 Issues in Environmental Research traditionalism, rural sentiment and concern for heritage became appealing and achievable for beleaguered communities when faced with the threat from ‘outsiders’, be they industrial or institutional. And while Irish ecopopulist perspectives may lack some of the conventional wisdom of the bourgeoning globalised environmental movement, the mobilisation of rural sentiment by such groups remains a persuasive form of ecological protest on the contested landscapes of the ‘Emerald Isle’.

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Chapter 9: The Galway Water Crisis:

One offshoot of the accelerated growth which occurred in the Republic of Ireland since the mid 1990s has been an increase in crisis related to infrastructural development. While levels of personal wealth have increased dramatically, the accompanying growth in consumption and waste has created a series of crisis and subsequent protests about sewage treatment plants, landfills or planned incinerators, gas pipelines, roads, electricity pylons and mobile phone masts. In many cases, a political campaign of opposition has emerged from communities concerned about the risks associated with such developments (Leonard 2005, 2006). However, in the case of the cryptosporidium outbreak in Galway in the spring of 2007, a ‘blame game’ of accusation and counter accusation broke out between the various layers of institutional politics involved in the provision of municipal water to the city and its environs. This political framework included a diverse range of actors including the unelected technocrats of both the city and county councils in Galway, the elected councillors of both institutions including the city’s Mayor Niall Ó Brolcháin of the Green Party and the Minister for Environment in the Coalition Government, Fianna Fáil’s Dick Roche.

We will examine the extent to which this issue became part of the wider political agenda of electoral politics in the run up to the 2007 General Election, both within the local context of the campaigns of the parties in the Galway west Constituency but also as an underlying factor in the formation of potential coalitions for government subsequent to that election’s outcome. The paper will demonstrate the extent to which the creation of a society which has been hastily developed without due regard to the inherent risks posed by unfettered growth has created certain societal dilemmas which now shape the Republic’s political destiny. By pursuing a form of reckless growth which is dependent on accelerated rates of house starts and other construction related outcomes, Ireland has embraced what Ulrick Beck (1992,1996) has called a ‘risk society’ which has come to be charachterised through media depictions of brown envelope corruption, bad planning and poor services. Whereas employment was for so long the issue which bedevilled Irish politics, this contemporary group of policy makers have to contend with infrastructure related ills which are by and large of their own making, often as a result of poor planning practices and unrestricted development.

While concepts such as sustainable development and ecological modernisation have become prominent across the global political scene through initiatives like the Kyoto Protocol, in Ireland such ideas are reduced to mere sound bites in party political broadcasts or interviews. While Ireland has signed up to Kyoto, the state has not acted on these commitments, choosing economic growth over emissions controls as European Union fines for non compliance accrue. In this way, the Irish state can be said to be opting for a ‘risk society’, organising growth alongside risk minimisation or management rather than promoting forms of sustainability which embrace the precautionary principles promoted by the EU. In this way many problems of accelerated growth such as poor water or waste crisis are reduced to an issue of personal responsibility rather than state ideology. This promotion of a culture of personalised risk responsibility was

269 Issues in Environmental Research demonstrated in the state’s Race against Waste advertising campaign in 2005. Television advertisements depicted tidal waves of waste washing across communities while the accompanying voice over intoned the mantra ‘it’s up to you’. However, studies demonstrate that levels of construction and industry waste far surpassed that of house holders across the country.

Furthermore, Galway was the site for one of the county’s most successful domestic recycling schemes which negated the state’s preferred option of incineration in between 2002 and 2005 (Leonard 2005). In the same way that the risk of waste was demonstrated to be what Giddens (1999) has described as a ‘manufactured risk’, this paper will demonstrate the extent to which the Galway water crisis of 2007 was also manufactured as part of the wider electoral agendas of all parties involved in that year’s election, both nationally and locally. These responses form part of an ongoing critique of technologically driven growth as part of what Giddens described as a ‘reflexive modernity’ (ibid) which seeks answers to risk crisis from new political concepts such as ecological modernisation and sustainable development. And it is from within this underlying political debate that we will come to understand the politics of water surrounding the competing responses to the cryptosporidium outbreak in Galway.

Of course, some scientific definition of this intestinal infestation is required at this point. The cryptosporidium bug is a microscopic parasite which becomes attached to the human intestine when ingested. It results in cramps and diarrhoea for most people, with severe cases of infection in very young or old people leading to severe illness and in a few reported cases, even death. The key source of the bug is both animal and human waste, with any infestation of water supplies usually being attributed to waste appearing in the water supply at some point (Irish Times April 14 2007). The issue of water pollution goes back some time before the current crisis. Anglers on Lough Corrib have had long standing concerns about water quality, while scientists attempted to raise the issue as far back as 1997 when the Geological Survey of Ireland first highlighted a cryptosporidium risk for the Galway region due to the absence of soil layers prevalent in other parts of the country. In the west, the indigenous karst limestone topography provided little in the way of the filtering effect necessary to break down micro organisms such as cryptosporidium, increasing the risk of water contamination (ibid).

In the case of Lough Corrib, the largest lake in the Republic, effluence from large tracts of counties Mayo and Galway is washed through the lake and into the water supply for most of the local population, including the 90, 000 inhabitants of Galway City. Towns surrounding Lough Corrib and its tributaries such as Oughterard and Headford have become part of the bourgeoning commuter belt around the prosperous city of Galway, enticed by the promise of profit from selling up in the city which is second only to Dublin in second hand property prices. As a result cheaper housing developments have sprung up around all of the towns near Galway city, replicating the inflated national property market which has been synonymous with the second phase of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ once its original determinant of multinational investment had subsided in the years after 9/11. The fact that Galway had maintained its multinational presence through large multinational employers such as Boston Scientific and Medtronic meant that a steady flow of people

270 Issues in Environmental Research continued to be attracted to this western where its two third level institutions and cultural reputation based on the successes of theatre groups such as Druid and Macnas provided Galway with the reputation of a dynamic young and growing city.

It was during one such cultural event, the Macnas inspired St Patrick’s Day Parade in March 2007, that news began to spread of a contamination threat to the city’s water supply. Tests by the Health Service Executive (HSE) were conducted across the city and county as the extent of the problem began to emerge. Residents in the city and surrounding areas were promptly advice to boil all drinking water until notified otherwise. Panic buying of bottled water was reported over the bank holiday weekend as hotels, bars and restaurants struggled with the influx of tourists for the St Patrick’s festival. The boil notice was announced as a precaution while the authorities searched for the source of the outbreak. Testing was initially concentrated at the city’s ageing Terryland waterworks which were first constructed in the late 1940s with a second facility being built in 1972. Most municipal waterworks contain the cryptosporidium bug through a filter system. However, the older Galway facility had a simple mesh to remove large pieces of waste, followed by a process of chlorination which in itself doesn’t kill the cryptosporidium bug. The local council was aware of a significant risk of cryptosporidium from 2005 (Irish Times April14 2007).

The first accusation in what was to become a significant political debate emanated from the city’s former Fianna Fail mayor and local Vintner’s association spokesperson Val Hanley who accused the council of ‘keeping the public in the dark’ about the risk to the local water supply after attempts to deal with the issue through an increase in chlorination failed to eradicate the parasite. Hanley also claimed that many more than the then reported 44 cases has occurred, including members of his family. He also claimed that during his time on Galway City Council, any problems with the local water supply was treated by increasing the chlorination process, and added that a strong smell of chlorine was detectable from domestic water taps for weeks before the reported outbreak (Galway Advertiser March 22 2007). Hanley opened up the first of many fronts in the political ‘blame game’ surrounding this issue. For Hanley, the first issue was one of accountability, with the blame being shared by the officials of the council and the officials of the HSE.

The second issue for Hanley was the dual health risks of the cryptosporidium bug in addition to what he saw as the council’s overuse of chlorination as an interim solution to such threats. His third concern was economic, where he used his role as Vintner’s association spokesperson to highlight the fact that hotels and restaurants faced inordinate extra costs as a result of the crisis, which was unacceptable for those faced with rates of up to 35,000 euros per year. The HSE’s response to Hanley’s accusations was that they were aware of the threat to the local water supply from February of 2007, and they had been monitoring the situation, which they had linked to events such as the lambing season and the spread of slurry into local water tables from the high amount of rainfall which occurred that winter. Meeting between both local authorities and HSE West had taken place, with the boil water notice being their primary response to the crisis which was being continually reviewed (ibid).

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Others involved in this monitoring process included the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Health Protection Surveillance Centre and a myriad of incident service professionals, veterinarians, scientists and environmental health officials. In light of the increasing pressure and media coverage about the issue, the local authorities increased their sampling regime while aerial surveys were undertaken to locate the source of the outbreak. At this point the second accusation in the water crisis emerged when city mayor Niall Ó Brolcháin proclaimed that Galway City Council had known of the risk of contamination risk ‘for five years’ (Irish Times March 20 2007). Ó Brolcháin also set out a series of frames around the water issue. The first was the unrestrained rates of development and population growth which had occurred around Galway in previous years. This had rendered the archaic water facilities to be a completely unsuitable source of water supply across the region. The second issue was a technical one. Ó Brolcháin had examined British filtration systems and had discovered that a carefully operated process of coagulation and flocculation combined with improved filtration provided a much improved quality of drinking water.

The British government had, in 1999, introduced mandatory regulations aimed at a continuous monitoring of the cryptosporidium parasite. When a significant risk remains detectable, water supply companies must reduce the threat to less than one per cent per ten litres of water, something which the city council’s director of services Ciarán Hayes said was ‘not possible’ (Irish Times March 200 2007). Here, Ó Brolcháin was opening another front in the crisis. For many years, Galway’s city council had been in open conflict with its elected councillors, particularly when it came to the introduction of major infrastructural projects. This tactic had proven effective for left wing councillors such as Ó Brolcháin and a previous mayor Catherine Connolly (Independent/Labour) who had operated as effective spokespersons for the Galway Safe Waste Alliance (GSWA) and Galway for a Safe Environment (GSE) respectively in the contested debated about waste management in the region. Both politicians had used populist methods to oppose both the unelected technocrats of the council and the coalition government on the issue of incineration, leading to the abandonment of the project for Connacht and the election of four Labour and one Green to the city council in the 2004 local elections on a populist anti- establishment tide (Leonard 2005).

Now resplendent as the city’s urbane Green Party mayor, Ó Brolcháin would revisit his populist roots, framing the water crisis around familiar issues of democratic deficit, accountability and concerns about the relationship between Fianna Fail and the building industry which was charachterised by that party’s famous ‘tent at the Galway Races’ where local and national contacts and interests were facilitated. This approach was enough to engender an immediate response from the government, particularly in an election year. Fianna Fail’s Environment Minister Dick Roche had spent months promoting himself as a ‘green’ politician, particularly in the wake of opinion polls which indicated that a Fianna Fail/ Green coalition was feasible after the next general election. However, this green façade was soon removed when Minister Roche opened up his own front response to the water crisis, accusing Mayor Ó Brolcháin of incompetence on the issue:

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We're about to go into the season when Galway becomes a very important tourist Mecca so there is a huge amount resting on this issue. It will take some time to get a new waste treatment plant built and we have to resolve the matter in the interim. A mistake has been made and there certainly wasn't the degree of urgency that should have been put into this issue. What we must do now is ensure that the urgency is injected into it. I don't want to get into the blame game. Resources will solve the problem. There have been crises in other areas of the country where there have been breakdowns from time to time. Water tankers go in and emergency supplies are provided. We have to provide the solutions to this particular problem to families in Galway, and to businesses in Galway who must be tearing their hair out at this stage in the year (Environment Minister Dick Roche RTE News April 29 2007).

Minister Roche’s attempts to place the blame for a local crisis at the feet of Galway’s elected councilors had echoes of the city’s waste management crisis, when then Minister Noel Dempsey ordered the early closure of the county landfill at Ballinasloe in response to the city councilor’s rejection of incineration as part of the Connacht Waste Plan (Leonard 2005). This tactic had led to television news reports of uncollected rubbish bags piled high on the shopping thoroughfares of Galway, with the Minister creating a stand off on the issue. In that instance the majority of Galway’s city councilors remained unequivocal in their opposition to incineration, and the policy was abandoned (ibid). In response to Minister Roche’s accusations on the water issue, Mayor Ó Brolcháin paid an impromptu visit to the small Oughterard water treatment plant which had been pinpointed as the source of the outbreak. Refused entry by county officials, he proceeded to climb the facility to carry out his inspection. The Mayor was scathing in his comments about the condition of the Oughterard plant, attributing the blame on the lack of resources from the Exchequer. This populist response to the Minister’s accusations was well received by Galway’s citizens who were in no mood for lectures from a Minister in Dublin. Once again Ó Brolcháin had played the populist card, reframing the issue as one of ongoing democratic deficit at a national level compounded by the facilitation of poor planning practices by an over centralised and technocratic state.

Minister Roche’s response was as immediate as it was authoritarian. He arrived in Galway in his ministerial car after two weeks of a national media frenzy over the water issue vowing to ‘knock heads together’ (Irish Times March 30 2007). However, the minister’s decision to visit the stricken city came only after repeated calls for some form of Government response came from Mayor Ó Brolcháin and the Galway Chamber of Commerce. At that point, up to 136 cases of cryptosporidiosis related gastrointestinal illnesses had been reported in Galway’s hospitals, with the HSE putting the figure of cases in the hundreds (ibid). It was at this point that the political row began to reach its nadir, with Minister Roche accusing the Mayor of Galway of ‘not being fit’ to hold office, while local Fianna Fail councillors joined in the attack on the mayor’s ‘inaction’ on the issue (ibid). This choreographed assault on the mayor’s competency was somewhat undermined when one of these councillors, Senator Margaret Cox resigned

273 Issues in Environmental Research from the party the following week, claiming that Fianna Fail were out of touch with the people of Galway.

The central political issue which emerged at this stage of the crisis centred on the Minister’s claim that up to 21.5 million euros had been released from the exchequer for an upgrading of the waterworks in the city, but that this had not been drawn down by the city council (ibid). This delay had ‘frustrated’ Minister Roche who claimed he would meet with the elected representatives of the city and county ‘to see what in the name of God they are going to do’ (ibid). However, when the minister did arrive in Galway, the city’s councillors were instructed that they would not be allowed to attend the meeting. Rejecting the complaints of the city’s elected councillors, Minister Roche claimed he wouldn’t get involved in ‘this political football that some people down here want to play…if people want to play silly political games that’s fine’ (Galway Independent April 4 2007). This lack of regard for local democracy was reflected in the statements of some of the councillors including former mayor Catherine Connolly who claimed ‘we had to wait three hours and 40 minutes before I forced my way into the chamber. I feel utter shock that the Minister didn’t meet with us’, while other councillors expressed ‘extreme disappointment’ adding that ‘elected officials should have more say in the running of the city’ (ibid). Councillor Connolly went live on the RTE news to reveal that she had herself been a victim of the cryptosporidiosis crisis, revealing that she had lost ‘a stone in weight’ (www.rte.ie).

The controversy surrounding the minister’s attempts to foist the blame for the crisis on a city council elected in 2006 due to the lack of action on funding from 2002 reflects the extent of the democratic deficit surrounding Irish local authorities. Like all councils, Galway’s local authorities had their powers gradually stripped away by an increasingly centralised and corporatist coalition government. Galway’s left leaning councillors were at the centre of this dichotomy as far back as 2002 when their opposition to the state’s plans for incineration had led to the government’s regional waste plan being rejected (Leonard 2005). The Minister’s frustration with this group of councillors was increased by a recent poll which had put Mayor Ó Brolcháin in fourth place in a five seater constituency, potentially reducing Fianna Fail’s hopes of returning three candidates in the forthcoming election. When the meeting did take place only the city and county Mayors along with senior officials of the HSE were able to meet with Minister Roche, although he did brief his Fianna Fail councillors that morning. An extensive 48 million euros 12 point plan was agreed, which included a series of measures aimed at dealing with the water crisis in the short, medium and long term. Measures included taking water from the nearby Tuam/Luimnagh water plant which would bring clean water into the city in the short term of between 5 to 6 weeks. Medium term plans included an upgrade of the plant at Terryland which would bring in 18 million gallons of water a day by the year’s end, while long term solutions included the construction of a whole new plant at the Terryland site which would take up to five years (Galway Independent April 4 2007).

At this point a number of competing frames had opened up around the issue as the various parties attempted to maintain the pressure on their opponents with the forthcoming election in mind. Other interested parties included the local business lobby

274 Issues in Environmental Research who wanted to minimise the damage to Galway’s image in the run up to the tourist season, while ecomodern environmental organisations as diverse as Feasta and the Environmental Protection Agency wanted to test the waters (both literally and figuratively). Essentially, the water issue took on significance beyond its immediate health and service provision aspect as opposition parties took up certain positions while the coalition government continued to appropriate blame to everyone but themselves. At the centre of this maelstrom were the ecopopulist Mayor Ó Brolcháin and the modernist technocrat Minister Roche, with other figures taking up positions which were in some way supportive of one or other of these two central characters. As the attacks on Ó Brolcháin continued, his predecessor Brian Walsh of Fine Gael released a statement which claimed the attacks on the Mayor were ‘the lowest form of politics’ (Galway Independent April 5 2007). Of course Councillor Walsh had two primary motivations for his defence of the current Mayor; both the Greens and Fine Gael were potential partners in any future ‘Rainbow’ coalition (alongside Labour).

In addition, Walsh’s condemnations of the ‘regrettable’ and ‘irresponsible’ (ibid) attacks on Ó Brolcháin reflected the fact that these attacks were also directed at Galway’s city councillors including Walsh himself, who had been mayor during the period when funding had not been drawn down for local water plant upgrades. For Councillor Walsh, the personalised attacks on the city’s mayor went too far: ‘It is regrettable that the Minister for Environment and other politicians sought to blame the Mayor over this. It’s regrettable they entered into the lowest form of politics’ (ibid). Walsh went on to defend the city council and located the blame for the issue with the government, claiming that although 21.5 million euros were allocated for the water plant upgrade, the government refused to fund the extra staff necessary to implement the upgrade due to the staff embargo facing local authorities. Walsh argued that when caught up in a wider ideological contest about reducing spending on public services, the city manager refused to remove hard pressed staff from other projects and maintained his request for additional staff for improved water services.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the response from the media was scathing. One local editorial proclaimed ‘Politicians: you’re all as rotten as the water’ (Galway Advertiser April 5 2007). The editorial was unambivalent in its criticism of the political response to the crisis: ‘We have witnessed the unctuous and undignified sight of the Environment Minister and a number of city councillors play politics with this issue and use a threat to our health as a way to score points for the upcoming election. We can see how ineffectual local government can be…The self- satisfied tone of Minister Roche’s statement, his sniping at Mayor Ó Brolcháin …tell you everything you need to know - how can this crisis be turned to Fianna Fail’s advantage in the upcoming election (ibid)? This populist response was congruent with that of the mayor and councillors as it portrayed the Minister as an uncaring autocrat whose response to the crisis was a Machiavellian attempt to bolster the Fianna Fail vote and weaken a council which had historically opposed the government on major infrastructural projects. However, one group which sat between the Minister and the elected councillors was also targeted for blame.

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Traditionally in Galway, the unelected city manager and his council staff had clashed with the elected councillors on every infrastructural project ranging from the provision of the sewage treatment plant in Galway Bay in the early 1990s through to the clashes over ‘super dumps’ and incinerators and the long running debacle over the renovation of Eyre Square in 2005. What was interesting about this series of political skirmishes was the shifting political opportunity structure that had altered from a point where access was restricted for a weak NIMBY/backyard ecopopulist grouping which faced outright hostility from the local media and the Fianna Fail led government in the sewage treatment plant campaign to a point where local ecopopulist groups opposed to dumps and incineration defeated the stated national waste policy of the Fianna Fail/ PD coalition. These ecopopulist groups spawned local populists such as Niall Ó Brolcháin and Catherine Connolly, whose success in opposing the government led to the rescinding of local authority executive powers on a series of issues nationally. As the authoritarian response of the state led to a downturn in political opportunities for campaigners, leading figures in the populist social movements of Galway emerged as mainstream political figures, with Ó Brolcháin and Connolly going on to become city Mayors and contesting general elections with varying degrees of success (Leonard 2005). Nonetheless, not all populists had been fully co-opted by the mainstream. One local ecopopulist who had chaired the local Community Forum claimed that the 21.5 million euros which the government said had been made available for waterworks upgrades in 2002 had never been raised in the discussions of the Forum’s Environment and Waterways committee. Environmentalist Brendan Smith claimed the water crisis was indicative of ‘a deeper morass that is undermining the quality of life locally’ (Galway Advertiser April 5 2007), claiming that there was a need to return executive powers to local authorities on issues such as water provision and waste management.

However, where the government appointed city managers had previously been spared the wrath of their government masters, the extent of the water crisis, in addition to the precarious nature of Fianna Fáil in a constituency were they had once returned three seats, led to a brusque and somewhat hasty condemnation of elected and unelected city officials by the Minister. This division in the political structures surrounding the water crisis created a new dichotomy in Galway politics as the elected local politicians and appointed council staff now found themselves united in their opposition to the Minister and the policies of the state on the water issue. It was an issue that now threatened to expose the fallacy of the government’s predilection for the rapid development of the housing sector without the proper infrastructure to support such extensive construction in rural areas with what had been small population rates.

And while both the local ecopopulists and government ecomodernists continued their debate, it is interesting to note that it was the wider threat of climate change which many felt had caused the Galway water crisis. Like most of the west of Ireland, Galway had experienced a severe winter with very high levels of flooding in 2006 and 2007. This spell of inclement weather had been attributed to the increased levels of extreme storms in the North Atlantic in the wake of global warming and subsequent melting polar caps. The increase in flooding in the west led to the archaic and over extended sewage treatment plants becoming submerged in flood waters, leading to an increase in waste

276 Issues in Environmental Research matter in the natural water table around Lough Corrib. Of course, Galway’s water problem had not occurred over night. For many years local anglers who fished Lough Corrib had attempted to highlight the deterioration of the water quality in the area. The concerned anglers had employed scientists to support their findings and submitted reports to all levels of the political ladder. The angler’s case won support from the local media who were beginning to look at the wider picture:

‘We reap what we sow- right from the way we treat our lakes and rivers and the way that animal waste is allowed into the rivers and lakes. We should take heed of the anglers and lake users who have the quality of water at heart and who have been saying for years that things are not right in our rivers and lakes. For a place that is quick to refuse planning permission, we are quite lax when it comes to policing leaks into water sources’ (ibid).

One issue that was clarified by the tests conducted by public health scientist Dr. Diarmuid O’Donovan was that the source of the crisis was human rather than animal waste. This confirmed the fact that unregulated development had been the cause of the water contamination due to the insufficient waste treatment plants in areas that had been overdeveloped along Lough Corrib. However, for the beleaguered citizens of Galway, the cause of the crisis was of much less significance than the solution. Within weeks of the crisis, a populist community movement was mobilised in response to the issue. This movement was called ‘Galway Water Crisis’. On their webpage, this group explained who they were:

A number of people are asking "who are you?" So, just to clarify, we are ordinary citizens of Galway. We're not a branch of any group, cause, organization or political power. We welcome all people regardless of age, ability, gender, creed, colour, ethnicity, minority group, work status, sexual orientation, political persuasion or organizational affiliation. All are welcome. We all need water (www.galwaywatercrisis.ie). Another issue which emerged at this point was the threat of legal actions emerging from the water crisis. One Dublin based solicitor with expertise in health law and negligence claims stated that both businesses and ordinary citizens had the right to take civil cases against the Department of Environment or the local authorities, due to their failure to provide drinking water that was both clean and safe to drink (Galway City Tribune April 27 2007). According to the solicitor, Raymond Bradley, the scale of the water crisis was such that ‘litigation is almost inevitable’ under the Local Government Water Pollution Act of 1990 (ibid). From Mr. Bradley’s perspective, the Department and local authorities are obliged to correctly monitor the water quality at treatment plants, maintaining the water supply so that it is safe for consumption. Liability arose if the Department or local authorities were aware of risks to the public water supply. With tourism sources claiming that the water crisis could cost their industry up to 10 million euros, and over 200 citizens’ confirmed cases of poisoning due to the problem, Bradley felt legal actions would take place (ibid).

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Galway City Council announced that UV treatment would be installed in the Terryland waterworks while the supply from the Luimnagh plant in Tuam (which was 20 miles from the city) would be increased from 2000 meters cubed to 17,000 meters cubed (ibid). Under Section 4 (1) of the European Community (Drinking Water) Regulations, water supplies must be clean and free from micro-organisms or parasites to a level that does not constitute public health risks. The EPA had warned local authorities of a parasite contamination risk to water supplies in 2005 (ibid). It would emerge that Galway City Council knew of the risk to water supplies in the area as far back as 2004, when a risk assessment report stated that the threat to the water supply was three times the very high risk score. City councillors only received the report in April 2007, three years after it was published. Mayor Ó Brolcháin also stated that Minister Roche withheld funding for the extra staff needed to deal with water infrastructure. Both politicians and campaigners responded to this news by pointing out some of the perceived flaws in the authorities’ approach to solving the crisis in letters to the local press. Maeve Kelly of the Galway Water Crisis campaign stated that the campaigners as a group felt ‘let down’ by both local and national politicians who ‘seemed more interested in passing the blame than actually doing anything about this crisis’ (ibid). Kelly’s letter continued by stating that the state was taking one and a half million euros a week in VAT for water sales and that the group wanted that money used in the efforts to solve the crisis. Labour councillor Billy Cameron criticised the proposed use of UV technology, stating that ultra violet tubes were less efficient in water which had darkened with a tint, as the contaminated water in the Corrib had due to pollution. In addition, he claimed that while UV light worked with most microbes, it wasn’t effective on protozoa such as the cryptosporidium. The councillor suggested a Russian method of electrochemically activated water or anolyte, which was a non-toxic way of destroying all microbes effectively. Councillor Cameron claimed the crisis arose as a result of ‘a government which is absolutely development led’ (ibid). One Fine Gael candidate for the Galway East constituency, Dr. John Barton, felt that culpability rested with a number of groups such as the HSE, the city and county managers, the elected councillors, the Department of the Environment and the Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Barton stated that risk assessment procedures were not carried out properly over many years and that the exceptionally heavy rainfall and subsequent flooding which had occurred in Galway that winter should have alerted the authorities to the need to monitor the water supply for problems (ibid). One editorial claimed that gallons of raw sewage were being pumped into the rivers and lakes of Galway, as well as Galway Bay, due to new housing developments. The editorial called for an audit of all water supplies in the county, castigated Minister Dick Roche for trying to shift the blame for the crisis when ‘he should bear the final political responsibility’ (ibid). For their part, Galway city manager Joe McGrath claimed that the water crisis would end on June 15 with the increase in supply of clean water from the Luimnagh plant. The council also had plans to repair water pipes in the city. However, with the General election taking place at the end of May, the local media began to speculate as to which candidate would be most affected by the water crisis. The issue had relegated all others to secondary importance, becoming the main election issue in Galway West constituency.

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One candidate, Councillor Brian Walsh of Fine Gael, stated that the issue was being raised on ‘at least 50% of all doors we canvass’ (Galway Advertiser April 26 2007). The Galway Water Crisis campaign had found large levels of public anger with public officials due to the crisis. Speculation began to emerge as to which of the city candidates the crisis would most affect amongst a diverse group including Mayor Niall Ó Brolcháin of the Greens, Michael D. Higgins of Labour and councillors Brian Walsh (FG), Michael Crowe and Frank Fahey of Fianna Fáil, Noel Dempsey and Donal Lyons of the Progressive Democrats and Independents Catherine Connolly and Margaret Cox, who had broken away from Labour and Fianna Fáil respectively after not being selected to run for those parties. Some commentators felt that Ó Brolcháin, as Mayor, hadn’t shown strong leadership on the issue, while others felt that the Fianna Fáil candidates such as Crowe and Fahy would lose out due to the crisis. The independents and opposition parties also had to contend with the campaign of the Galway water Crisis group, who claimed to be non-party political. The group claimed that public faith in the political system had been ‘irreparably damaged’ by the water crisis. Many felt that the risk of an outbreak of cryptosporidium even after a new plant was built would remain, due to poor monitoring and unregulated development, according to the group: ‘The feedback we are getting from the public is that they would be afraid to drink the water from the city system again. Unless we tackle the major problem of cleaning Lough Corrib, then this problem will simply come back again and again’ (ibid). Maeve Kelly of the group claimed that the problem was one which affected all the towns around Lough Corrib, not just the city areas reliant on the old Terryland plant. These areas had unreliable sewage systems which pumped effluent into the Lough. For Kelly, ‘the major problem lies with the cleaning of the Corrib. There will always be a problem as long as raw sewage is coming into the Lough’ (ibid). The water campaign brought its protest to a meeting of Galway City council, calling for ‘Clean Water for Galway’. Protesters brought their empty water bottles to deposit at City Hall as part of their protest, to highlight the rising cost for citizens having to buy water and recycle bottles, in a city which ironically had led the way when recycling pilot schemes had been first introduced (Leonard 2005). The group set up a webpage at http://www.myspace.com/galwaywatercrisis, which had nearly one thousand hits in its first two weeks. For those candidates who had cut their political teeth as environmental advocates such as Niall Ó Brolcháin (anti-landfill) or Catherine Connolly (anti- incinerator), their new roles as city councillors or mayors created constraints as they could not campaign against the council which they now represented. This issue of cooptation of former advocates would become apparent during the 2007 general election campaign. For its part, the Galway Water Crisis group continued with its campaign of public meetings, protests and petition gathering, tactics which had served Ó Brolcháin and Connolly well during their time as social movement campaigners (Leonard 2005, 2006). Senator Margaret Cox, who would break away from Fianna Fáil to contest the election as an independent, called for better information for the public on the issue. The experienced President of the Labour party and election candidate, Michael D. Higgins, called for localised filtering systems so people could collect free water. He claimed that the Government had plans to privatise water supplies across Ireland, something which

279 Issues in Environmental Research led to the delay in ‘the allocation of EU and state funds for water and sewage services to local authorities’ (Irish Times April 24 2007). Higgins pointed out that while citizens faced payment of large fines from the European Union due to the non-implementation of European Union Directives, they were also being denied clean water due to ‘government failure’ (Galway Independent 25 April 2007). Higgins claimed that ‘Lough Corrib is dying and all future generations would be left with is a filthy body of water’ (Galway Advertiser May 3rd 2007). Higgins claimed that the various agencies responsible for the Lough should be amalgamated into one integrated system. Another serious issue emerging from the crisis was that most of those affected by the crisis were children under ten years of age. HSE health director Diarmuid O’Donovan stated that 40 children had been hospitalised with the cryptosporidium virus. With the Galway West constituency being a five seater, attention turned to who would take the final seats after longstanding and high profile candidates such as Eamon Ó Cuiv and Frank Fahey of Fianna Fáil and Michael D. Higgins were elected. Fine Gael’s candidate Padraic McCormack had announced his retirement, only to stand again, while Councillors Ó Brolcháin, Connolly, Cox and Fianna Fáil’s former Independent Michael Crowe were left to contest the city vote, leaving Noel Grealish of the Progressive Democrats aiming to defend his seat with the support of geographically placed party candidates in the city and county. In a city experiencing population growth at ten times the rate of other Irish cities according to the 2006 census, infrastructural problems such as sewage treatment, landfilling, potential incinerators, motorway by-passes and water treatment plants were recurring issues during local and national elections in the region since the 1990s (Leonard 2005, 2006). The city and county were home to 231, 670 people, with 72,729 people in the city, growing 8.2% faster than the national average. This bustling city was often depicted as a progressive one, but had generally returned mainstream candidates apart from Michael D. Higgins of Labour and the left and Green councillors elected in the 2004 local elections. The city had traditionally returned three Fianna Fáil candidates until the split with those who formed the Progressive Democrats in the 1980s. The main contest during the 2007 general election campaign was between the Green’s Niall Ó Brolcháin and Fianna Fáil, led by Minister Roche on the water crisis and by local Junior Minister Frank Fahey on the issue of a by-pass for the city, which Ó Brolcháin had come out against. Independent Catherine Connolly was also attacking Ó Brolcháin from below, while even prospective coalition partners Fine Gael attacked the mayor for his use of the Mayoral position to condemn the proposed by-pass. Faced with criticism from all quarters, the mayor’s predicted electoral success looked more precarious in the last weeks leading up to the election. One correspondent, Lorna Siggins of the Irish Times claimed that ‘the attacks on the mayor had more to do with the election than with the health of constituents’ (Irish Times May 8th 2007). Nonetheless, the Green mayor now found himself on the defensive rather than leading the protests as he had done during previous elections when he had championed the causes of landfill or incinerator protest groups, leaving Noel Grealish and the PD’s with an opportunity to repeat their ‘1,2,3’ transfer based cross-constituency electoral success of the 2002 general election. While Ó Brolcháin had a good initial response and recognition on the canvass, the mayoral duties which had contributed to this recognition were now constraining him on the water issue, as he dutifully fulfilled his mayoral duties while his opponents continued to criticise him

280 Issues in Environmental Research nationally and locally: ‘As Mayor, I feel constrained in what I can say because I believe that the office of Mayor carries responsibilities and that I have to be careful in what I say’ (Galway City Tribune May 11 2007). The Mayor did receive some support from An Taisce, the Heritage Trust, who claimed that the construction of new housing should be frozen until the water crisis was sorted out. This moratorium should remain in place until ‘the essentials of life’ such as good drinking water, sewage treatment and waste disposal systems were sorted out (ibid). The fact that national polls were indicating that the Greens could become numerically viable coalition partners for Fianna Fáil after the votes were tallied seemed to increase the pressure on Ó Brolcháin. However, when Ó Brolcháin did choose to fight back, he targeted Fianna Fáil’s sitting TD Frank Fahey and the issue of the proposed city by-pass, rather than raising the water crisis. This tactic backfired on the Mayor, as the city’s traffic faced deadlock and the promise of a light rail system was also prominent in Fahey’s own campaign literature. Furthermore, the Green Party leader, Trevor Sargent, had also targeted both Fahey and party leader and Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, through investigations into their financial matters, which ultimately proved fruitless. In addition, the Greens left the PD’s Noel Grealish with a clear run in the Carnmore/Oranmore area which had seen a considerable population growth in recent years. Moreover, Fianna Fáil were always hopeful of regaining three seats in Galway West and were therefore unlikely to allow a second seat to be lost in the constituency, reducing them to one sole representative, Eamon Ó Cuiv, in Connemara. In these circumstances, it may have been more expedient for the Greens to target Grealish’s seat more keenly than Fahey’s, particularly as the Progressive Democrats were doing extremely poorly in national polls. In fact, Fianna Fáil appeared to anticipate the swing to the Greens over environmental issues such as climate change, with Michael Crowe’s election literature being devoted to green issues while party leader Bertie Aherne attempted to stake a claim for the young green voter when speaking at the Fianna Fáil youth conference in Galway during the election, a week after the Green Party’s own national conference was held in the city. Commentators claimed that Ó Brolcháin would have to receive enough first preferences to retain a chance of being elected, as the transfer of votes would be too unpredictable in Galway West. However, when the Greens held their main press conference of the election, Ó Brolcháin’s statement that the water crisis was due to bad planning and a lack of resources for the extra staff seemed to some commentators like a bureaucratic excuse, rather than presenting any solutions to the issue. For instance, the issue of climate change, which caused the initial problem due to the floods, wasn’t mentioned. In addition, his unqualified opposition to the Galway City by-pass seemed contradictory in comparison to his support for by-passes in Claregalway, Loughrea and Ennis. Reports that Galway City Council was considering water rationing and pressure reduction didn’t help with the public’s mood in the week of the election. The May 25th 2007 election results for Galway West were as follows: Electorate: 86,602; Total Poll: 55,627; Turnout: 64.24%; Quota: 9,183 Candidate 1st Preferences Ó Cuiv, Eamon (FF) 9,645 (elected)

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Higgins, Michael (Lab) 6,086 (elected) Fahey, Frank (FF) 5,854 (elected) Grealish, Noel (PD) 5,806 (elected) McCormack, Padraic (FG) 5,419 (elected) Crowe, Michael, (FF) 4,969 Healy Eames, Fidelma (FG) 3,904 Ó Brolcháin, Niall (GP) 3,026 Connolly, Catherine (IND) 2,006 Inevitably, the water crisis was one of the factors put forward by Ó Brolcháin as causes for his failure to win a seat in a constituency where many had thought he would be successful. The crisis was one of the key issues which damaged Ó Brolcháin’s chances, alongside the by-pass and the national swing to the mainstream parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. However, the success of the Progressive Democrat’s Noel Grealish left no room for Ó Brolcháin, as Galway West returned its five sitting representatives. Ó Brolcháin was one place ahead of fellow activist turned councillor and mayor Catherine Connolly, who polled well in her local ward but failed to make any inroads into the vote of longstanding Labour candidate Michael D. Higgins. The political opportunity structure surrounding both of these activists turned politicians had become constrained, as the formality and expectation of mainstream politics prevented them from campaigning on issues such as the water crisis with any effect. Charged with solving the problems of the bourgeoning ‘City of the Tribes’, neither Ó Brolcháin nor Connolly could distance themselves from the public’s own desire to play the ‘blame game’ in the aftermath of the water crisis. In many ways, this predicament displays the dilemma facing activists who become co-opted by the mainstream, where the potency of collective action is sometimes traded for the robes of office. Ó Brolcháin’s loss was heightened when the Greens struck a deal with Fianna Fail to enter a coalition government after the election. He claimed that holding the office of mayor and the negative campaigning on the water crisis had been part of the reasons for his electoral defeat: ‘Being the mayor while there is an election campaign on is probably more of a disadvantage…it meant I had to concentrate on being mayor and was not able to devote the sufficient time to campaigning…it (the water crisis) came at a bad time for me as mayor, because as one person put it on the doorstep, “well, logically we don’t blame you, but there is no one else to blame so we have to blame you”. Because there is a degree of responsibility being the mayor…I felt it was important to try and sort out a lot of problems rather than being overtly political about it’. (Connacht Sentinel May 29 2007).

While Ó Brolcháin waited for an offer to enter the Seanad, the original deadline of the 15 June for the reopening of clean water supplies for Galway came and went. As the summer tourist and festival season appeared under threat from the ongoing crisis, Galway’s newly returned TDs began a post election assault on the city management for failing to meet the target date for clean water in the region. With the election now over, no one was blaming

282 Issues in Environmental Research the mayor anymore. The Galway Safe Water campaigners called for the sacking of the city manager, a call which was welcomed by Ó Brolcháin: ‘I would welcome a prosecution; I think the finger needs to be pointed’ (Galway City Tribune June 15 2007). On Monday June 18th 2007, Labour councillor Tom Costello was elected the new mayor of Galway. Niall Ó Brolcháin, who had quit his job to focus up to eighty hours a week on his role as mayor, was left unelected and unemployed. His journey from environmental activist to Green representative had come full circle. The problem of cooptation for activists who embrace the political mainstream remains an outstanding obstacle for those environmental advocates now faced with negotiating with a government which includes a Green party Minister for the Environment.

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Chapter 10: Tara and the ‘Climate Change Challenge’:

As we have seen from the Stern Report and in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, climate change has become the most pressing concern of the new century. My book Green Nation (2006) has linked environmentalism and rural change in Ireland. This concept can be developed further, by linking debates about climate change on a global level with local concerns about heritage and Tara. In this way we can come to understand the links between the Tara campaign and ‘Shell to Sea’ in Mayo, or between Irish environmental campaigns and similar protests around the globe. Seen in this context, we can say that we are witnessing a new revolution, following on from the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial revolution. Following the American, French and Russian revolutions in the 1770s to the 1990s, we have witnessed the emergence of the Age of Rights, be they Human or Ecological. In the aftermath of struggles for human emancipation, be they worker, gender or civil rights, a new struggle is upon us. This is the struggle for ecological rights, the right to clean air and water and the right to have the planet intact and free from further degradation to land sea or ozone. Both ecomodernists and ecopopulists must rise to the onerous challenge of climate change and reach a point beyond policy and protest in order to create the conditions where communities and policy makers can begin to work together to tackle this most serious of issues which is facing Ireland and the planet. Let us first examine the institutional responses to climate change to date.

As the issue of climate change has come to the forefront of the political agenda, some consideration of the response to date is necessary. In order to facilitate a comparative study, the British response will be presented, with a focus on the Stern Report. This will be followed by an analysis of the Irish government’s National Climate Change Strategy for the years 2007 to 2012. However, in order to fully understand the politics of climate change facing both ecopopulists and ecomodernists, we will begin with an examination of the series of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which were issued throughout 2007. The IPCC was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) with the assistance of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Its remit includes undertaking an analysis of the impacts, vulnerabilities and potential adaptations surrounding anthropogenic climate change.

The series of IPCC reports issued in 2007 were part of the Panel’s Fourth Assessment Report. The first of the IPCC’s reports focused on confirming findings which suggest that human behaviour is very likely (i.e. more than 90% probability) the primary cause of climate change. The key findings of this first report confirm that anthropogenic behaviour is causing global warming with potential temperature rises of between 1.1 and 6.4 Celsius or 2 to 11 Fahrenheit with the probable figure being 1.8 to 4 Celsius or 3.2 to 7.2 Fahrenheit by 2999. As sea levels rise by up to 28 to 43 centimetres, Artic sea ice is likely (i.e. more than 60%) to disappear in summertime by 2050. An increase in extreme weather makes it very likely (i.e. more than 90%) that some areas of the planet will experience increased incidents of heat waves or tropical storms during this century (IPCC 2007). Clearly, the scientists have spoken. Now these issues need to be tackled in the political realm. Activists and institutionalists need to set aside their methodological

284 Issues in Environmental Research differences in order to create a united front comprising of all involved in environmental politics for the greater cause of the planet and humankind. The British government had acted commissioned a report on the challenge of global warming in anticipation of the IPCC’s findings. The Stern Report highlighted the need for major and immediate changes by all sectors of society ranging from families through to corporations and the state:

The world has to face up to acting immediately to confront the anthropogenic causes of climate change or face cataclysmic planetary consequences, according to the 2006 report compiled by Sir Nicholas Stern (the former chief economist of the World Bank):

Temperature • Carbon emissions have already pushed up global temperatures by half a degree Celsius • If no action is taken on emissions, there is more than a 75% chance of global temperatures rising between two and three degrees Celsius over the next 50 years • There is a 50% chance that average global temperatures could rise by five degrees Celsius Environmental Impact • Melting glaciers will increase flood risk • Crop yields will decline, particularly in Africa • Rising sea levels could leave 200 million people permanently displaced • Up to 40% of species could face extinction • There will be more examples of extreme weather patterns Economic Impact • Extreme weather could reduce global gross domestic product (GDP) by up to 1% • A two to three degrees Celsius rise in temperatures could reduce global economic output by 3% • If temperatures rise by five degrees Celsius, up to 10% of global output could be lost. The poorest countries would lose more than 10% of their output • In the worst case scenario global consumption per head would fall 20% • To stabilise at manageable levels, emissions would need to stabilise in the next 20 years and fall between 1% and 3% after that. This would cost 1% of GDP Options for Change • Reduce consumer demand for heavily polluting goods and services • Make global energy supply more efficient • Act on non-energy emissions - preventing further deforestation would go a long way towards alleviating this source of carbon emissions • Promote cleaner energy and transport technology, with non-fossil fuels accounting for 60% of energy output by 2050 Government Response • Create a global market for carbon pricing • Extend the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EETS) globally, bringing in countries such as the US, India and China

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• Set new target for EETS to reduce carbon emissions by 30% by 2020 and 60% by 2050 • Pass a bill to enshrine carbon reduction targets and create a new independent body to monitor progress • Create a new commission to spearhead British company investment in green technology, with the aim of creating 100,000 new jobs • Former US vice-president Al Gore will advise the government on the issue • Work with the World Bank and other financial institutions to create a $20bn fund to help poor countries adjust to climate change challenges • Work with Brazil, Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica to promote sustainable forestry and prevent deforestation (Stern Report on Climate Change 2006)

As Sir Nicholas Stern’s report indicates, an appropriate response to climate change requires a coordinated effort from all elements in the environmental political sector including grassroots groups, institutions and the state. There is no room for division at this point, due to the severity of risk facing everyone in Irish and global society. We are all stakeholders in this debate. And, just as we have campaigned against policies that threaten our environment, we must also bring pressure to bear on our policy makers about our commitments to the Kyoto Protocol. While Ireland signed up to Kyoto, we have not met our responsibilities. Once again our economic performance has been cited as a reason for this failure. However, the ultimate economic test will come in the aftermath of the ecological devastation that will affect all nations if climate change is not addressed. Therefore, we must reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, cars and motorways like the M3. This becomes the new economic imperative of the day, as economies will not withstand the global devastation that climate change will bring.

The second IPCC Report, published in April 2007, provided an apocalyptic vision of a future where all parts of the earth will be affected by climate change. Many hundreds of millions of the planet’s poorest regions would bear the brunt of first world greed and growth with increased scarcity in food, water combined with outbreaks of disease and displacement, visiting catastrophe upon those with the fewest resources or means of dealing with such threats. Sea levels would rise as icecaps melt, with coastal areas and islands facing the greatest threat. Extreme weather events such as droughts or intense storms would become more commonplace, with devastating effects. Up to 30% of species could face extinction as a result of temperature increases and their side effects (Irish Times April 7 2007). Scientists and political representatives staged all night debates as the second IPCC report was finalised in Brussels after six years of international research, with scientists threatening to walk out as their findings were watered down for presentation to the world’s media. Significant ecological sites such as the Barrier Reefs faces devastation due to climate change, according to the report. Oceans would suffer from increased acidity, wiping out plankton and other small species central to maintaining the oceans’ ecosystem.

Food and water scarcity could lead to resource wars in affected areas. Environmental nongovernmental organisations such as Greenpeace felt the time to prevent an

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‘apocalyptic future’ had almost gone unless the world’s economies embraced a carbon free economy (ibid). World Wildlife Fund’s climate change spokespersons called for an urgent response from the world’s governments, adding that ‘industrialised countries need to accept their responsibilities and start implementing solutions’ (ibid). Friends of the Earth stated that climate change is ‘a looming humanitarian catastrophe, threatening ultimately our global security and survival’ (ibid).

So, how can activists influence policy makers on this issue? In a political crisis, the leverage of social movements increases. Climate change is a form of conflict and conflicts can be overcome by clearly defining the issue, putting forward a concise argument and taking this argument to all relevant institutions of the state. We now know that the scientific community accepts climate change as a very real threat to our planet. The Stern Report and An Inconvenient Truth provide us with the clear evidence necessary to communicate our grievance to policy makers. As the diverse groupings that make up the Irish conservation and environmental movement begin to take up this cause, armed with conclusive scientific arguments, ‘consensus- building among policy stakeholders is tractable and the prospects for successful policy formation is enhanced’ (Dayton, 2000 p71). Nonetheless, ‘climate change’ has also become new media orthodoxy, with certain assumptions which cannot be challenged for fear of accusations of scientific heresy. Environmentalists must endeavour to maintain some ownership over the debate in order to prevent it becoming reduced to no more than electoral or media hype while actual opportunities to respond are missed. Opponents of the climate change issue will use the often frenzied and rhetorical debate on global warming and its consequences to downplay its factual basis. What is clear is that the philosophical and methodological approaches and understandings of both ecopopulists and ecomodernists must in some way converge to provide a new direction for the environmental sector.

The politics of climate change will have resonances all over the planet. One policy analyst, Lorna Gold of the Irish Aid agency Trócaire, has articulated concerns about the scale of the problem in Western African nations such as Kenya. The droughts of the Northern Plains are the worst experienced, reducing hundred of thousands to starvation and displacement. Other areas face the threats of flash flooding, while the nation’s infrastructure is destroyed due to flooding and the scale of the human catastrophe. If left unchecked, climate change could completely destroy the whole of Africa’s ecosystem (Gold 2006 pp 1-4). Gold highlights the discrepancies between the words and deeds of Irish policy makers who make newsworthy pronouncements on the seriousness of climate change, but devout only a half a page to the subject in their White Paper on Development (ibid). At the same time the state’s commitment to road building and inability to reduce emissions reduces any proposal on the subject from policy makers to ineffectual rhetoric at a time of global crisis.

How then has the Irish state approached the issue? The First National Strategy on Climate Change was published in 2000 and reviewed in 2002, with the 2007 to 2012 National Climate Change Strategy (NCCS) following on from an additional review which was titled Ireland’s Pathway to Kyoto Compliance (2006). The title is indicative of Ireland’s failure to meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol as part of the European Union.

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They included a commitment to limit the growth of carbon emissions to 13% above 1990 levels by 2012. Within the context of our EU commitments this figure will be reduced further. The NCCS 2007 – 2012 set out to demonstrate how Ireland will achieve its commitments to both the national 2012 and EU 2020 target dates for significant emissions reductions. While describing its goals of innovation, efficiency and personal sustainability, the NCCS discusses ‘lowering the carbon intensity of our economy without sacrificing competitiveness, economic performance or quality of life’ (NCCS 2007-2012 p7). Such economically fixated perspectives will be of little comfort to the tribesmen of Kenya and provide a clear example of the need for environmentalists of all kinds to work towards a change in attitudes to the overall issues surrounding development and alternatives to the growth at all costs approach which has been an endemic feature of Irish policy creation since the era of Lemass and Whitaker in the 1950s and 1960s.

While the NCCS 2007-2012 discusses measures which will reduce Ireland’s greenhouse gas output by 17 million tonnes during the next five years, nearly four million tonnes of this will come as the result of emissions trading with developing countries. This ‘flexible mechanism’ is central to the globalised remit of the Kyoto Protocol. However, in order for Kyoto to work, developed nations like Ireland must reach their emissions targets, something which hasn’t yet been achieved. Conversely, the state has adopted a negative approach, allowing EU fines to accrue in order to facilitate expansive growth rates unfettered by the Union’s ‘more challenging reduction targets of a 20% reduction by 2020’ (NCCS 2007-2012 p7). The Irish government has effectively ruled out the development of long term economic alternatives, proceeding instead with a plan for future growth that is still wedded to fossil fuels and carbon emissions, albeit with some scope for reduction. But in an era when the wisdom of carbon dependency has been questioned by many scientists and environmentalists, perhaps it is timely for a rethink on the future of Ireland’s economic growth ethic.

Clearly, the cycles of economy which spawned the multinational driven ‘Celtic Tiger’ have turned, as those who drive these patterns of investment seek out new and cheaper destinations for their industries. China and India are expanding economies that offer lees expensive and less regulated sites for industries which once found Ireland an attractive host. And while the threats of climate change and the economics of globalisation present nations like Ireland with new challenges, environmentalists must seize the opportunity to create new models of development to meet these challenges. The scientists and economists have had their say. Now environmentalists of all hues must be allowed to create the policy frameworks which will present Ireland as a beacon of hope on climate change in the same way that our ancestors kept the lamp of knowledge lit throughout the Dark Ages. As we encounter the potential for another dark age, we must articulate the policy frameworks that would provide a discourse for the modern age, one where the survival of the earth is paramount to all social and economic planning. This must go beyond the growth based economic mind set and embrace a green growth index, where success is measured in ecological rather than economic terms.

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In this way, a perpetual green economy can be developed, which prioritises the elimination of fossil fuels, emissions, pollution and private transport solutions. Bio- fuels, alternatives and public transport networks must become integral to this planning framework, rather than appearing as vague targets on the horizon. From these initiatives, a new socio-cultural discourse can be constructed, that goes beyond ‘sustainability’ but embraces responsibility in all aspects of development in Irish society, from the preservation of the past to planning for the future. To facilitate the perpetual green economy, all aspects of society including the institutions that plan and implement policy must advance wider agendas and contexts. This holistic framework would consider that ‘historical factors, values, one’s socio-cultural and economic location…..all influence the way in which policy problems are initially assessed and nested within particular frameworks of understanding’ (Dayton, 2000 p73).

Once this perpetual green policy framework is initiated, we will have a model for socio- economic planning that will provide a basis to accept the diplomatic concepts on climate change set out by Kyoto. We must go beyond our Kyoto measures and prepare an ecologically based framework for reduced or zero emissions for the near future. In order for this to be achieved, all new industries must comply, while existing industries would have to reconsider current polluting practices. Road and car dependency would be reduced, as fossil fuels are eliminated. By embracing the concept of zero emissions and bio-fuels, Ireland would send a strong economic and ecological message which demonstrates that successful economic performance will ultimately be judged not just by ecological compliance but by ecological innovation.

In order for the perpetual green economy to be developed, our notion of partnership must be widened to embrace a wider set of criteria. In the first instance, conservationists and environmentalists must play a leading role in developing ecologically strong policies. True sustainability must be rooted in the past as well while looking to the future. Barriers to green lifestyles must be removed, and alternatives such as wind and solar energies, bio-fuels and public transport placed to the fore of future planning. Science and technology must be redirected from conflict with the earth to preserving our natural environment, to create a new scientific enlightenment. Fair trade and globally equity and justice must become our main foreign policy, in opposition to supporting global war and hegemony to preserve our economic position. A balanced approach to growth must be at the core of our dealings with our European neighbours, as the injustices perpetuated by the World Trade agreement and the GATT are reconsidered. Demographic shifts must also be reckoned with, as uneven development will lead to future migration and global poverty. To address this, local development must become central to the next phase of globalisation.

And, in order to save the planet, this local development must embrace the concept of a perpetual green economy globally. Only then will we be able to consider a future planned with the wisdom of the antiquaries. The future of our planet will not be won in the mountains or on the seas of this earth. It will be won in the hearts and minds of humankind, and environmentalists, be they modernists or populists and must begin to transform people’s thinking and consciousness accordingly. The ongoing fuel crisis,

289 Issues in Environmental Research debates about energy alternatives ranging from wind power to nuclear energy and the moral issues of waste flows and emission trading all remain contentious issues for the Ireland of the future. It remains to be seen whether or not Ireland will live up to its image as an island of unspoilt natural beauty, populated by communities rooted in the soil. The environmental campaigns that have contributed to this debate may be based on an instinctive concern for community and hinterland but they have also increased our knowledge of the issues surrounding a rapidly changing Ireland. By reconsidering a community based engagement with the landscape which characterised the past these campaigns have become a movement that may hold the key to our environmental future.

So how can environmentalists link local issues with climate change? The example below demonstrates an example of how this may be achieved. The ‘Save Tara’ campaign was primarily focused on preventing the state from building a motorway on the site of Tara of the High Kings in County Meath. Led by Vincent Salafia alongside many archaeologists and antiquarians, this campaign brought together the politics of the heritage of the past with the politics of the future as represented by the perils of climate change. This innovative development allowed the Tara campaigners to link the roads issues with oil consumption, fossil fuels and climate change, bridging the span of history while simultaneously exposing the state’s position on the issues of emissions as one which lacks credibility.

The Climate Change Challenge Survey Results Reveal Political Party Positions on Transport Policy and Spending (source: www.tarawatch.org).

Results of a survey of political party’s views on climate change were received on Friday 24th November, revealing divergent views of transport related issues. A 10 question, Climate Change Challenge, survey was sent on Monday 20th November to all political parties and Oireachtas members, as well as members of Meath County Council and the National Roads Authority. The responses revealed unanimous agreement that climate change is a very important issue but highlighted crucial differences between the political parties in their approach to meeting the climate change challenge, particularly in the area of transport spending. Questions included issues of green taxes on motorists, new legislation, toll roads and whether there should be a new cost-benefit analysis of Transport 21 and the upcoming 2007 National Development Plan in light of the new data on the effects of climate change on the economy. Answers to the survey were received from Fiona O’Malley, TD (PD); Eamon Gilmore, TD, (Lab); Cllr. Eugene Regan (FG); Ciarán Cuffe, TD and Dr. Liam Leonard of NUI Galway. They are provided after each question below. Sinn Fein would no doubt have given their views at the conference and Fianna Fail did not send a response, nor send a delegate to the conference. It is hoped that they will respond to a more comprehensive survey that will now be sent to all parties in advance of the rescheduled conference (ibid).

The Climate Change Challenge was initiated by NGOs campaigning on transport and environment issues in County Meath and that county will be used as a case study for analysing government policy and spending on transport. However, it is hoped that it will

290 Issues in Environmental Research create a forum for all political parties, NGOs and the public to join in ongoing debate on how to tackle the climate change challenge in Ireland.

According to one of the Climate Change Challenge organisers, Joanne Corbett:

“Climate change is the most important issue currently facing Ireland, and unlike most other countries, we have not yet begun our national conversation on how to address it”..

‘This is about real and immediate choices being made now, particularly in Government spending on transport, in response to a clear and present threat to our way of life, both in Ireland and around the world’ (ibid).

The results of the Climate Change Challenge have been included below. What becomes clear from an analysis of the answers to the questionnaire is that while Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats favour growth over all other consequences (with the PD’s reduced to a single answer ‘NO’ by the end of the survey, and Labour keeping one eye on costs and efficiency, it comes as little surprise to find Liam Leonard (author of this book and lecturer in environmental politics) and Ciarán Cuffe of the Greens providing the most considered responses. Of course, both Cuffe and Leonard had links with ecopopulist campaigns, with Cuffe associated with anti roads protests at the Glen of the Downs, Carrickmines Castle as well as Tara, where the Greens had been prominent. Ultimately, the linkage of issues as diverse as heritage and climate change had provided the Tara campaigners, environmental academics and the institutional Greens with a degree of shared concern which provides a possible direction for an environmental movement newly focused on the overriding issue of climate change.

CLIMATE CHANGE CHALLENGE SURVEY & RESPONSES (Source: www.tarawatch.org).

1. Do you agree with the basic premise of the October 2006 Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change, which warns of catastrophic costs for the world economy if industrialized countries fail to take immediate action to stop global warming?

FG: Yes Labour: Yes Greens: Yes PDs: Yes Dr. Leonard: On Stern- Yes.

2. Do you agree with 66% of respondents to The Irish Times survey (Nov 18, 2006) that the UN Climate Change has not done enough to help prevent global warming?

FG: Yes Labour: Yes Greens: Yes, there is a huge amount that could be done without destroying our economy

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PDs: Yes Dr. Leonard: On UN: Yes. UN must address ethical as well as sustainable development.

3. Do agree that the European Union is falling woefully short of its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and will need to take radical measures to achieve them, particularly in Transport which accounts for 22 per cent of EU emissions?

FG: Yes Labour: Yes Green Party: Yes, the EU needs to go further but so do the rest of the world. We want to EU to show the internationally and we want to Ireland showing the way in the EU PDs: Yes Dr. Leonard: On EU- Yes. Increase spending on public transport especially Rail networks.

4. Do you agree with the finding of EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas, (corroborated by the 2006 findings of German watch which placed Ireland 33rd out of 55 nations on the climate change index) that unless Ireland takes radical action, we will fail to meet our national emission limits, which are binding under EU law?

FG: Yes Labour: Yes Green Party: Yes, and I have been pointing this out to Dick Roche for some time. I don’t think buying out way out of this is meeting our requirements as Dick Roche does PDs: Yes Dr. Leonard: on Limits to Emissions-Yes We need to go beyond our Kyoto commitments to provide an extensively environmentally based economic basis for Ireland’s future.

5. Do you agree that in light of the new data of the enormously detrimental effects of transport on climate change and the economy that a new cost benefit analysis of Transport 21 (which will cost approximately €30-40 billion) should take place?

FG: Yes Labour: Yes Green Party: Yes, I would go further than that. All transport investments should be reappraised to be climate change proofed. It is very frustrating to see an EIS for some regional road project which makes no reference to climate change. But you cannot separate planning and transport so I would like to see county development plans and local area plans climate change proofed PDs: No Dr. Leonard: On the descent from ‘Agenda 21 to Transport 21′ disaster-Yes. Costs benefit analysis and prioritisation for rail & public transport is paramount.

6. Do you agree with Danny McCoy, Director of Policy with Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC), who said that “Prior assessment of capital investment projects is inadequate. Detailed cost benefit analyses must be an essential

292 Issues in Environmental Research component of projects in the upcoming National Development Plan (which is set to cost €70 billion)?” [‘Improving the Efficiency of Public Spending’ Opinion -The Irish Times, 16-11-06]

FG: Yes Labour: Yes Greens: Yes PDs: Yes Dr. Leonard: On Cost/Eco Efficient NDP- Yes. Planning must include all considerations including ecological, community and efficiency issues.

7. Do you agree with Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Dick Roche “taxing vehicles on the basis of the emissions” should begin in order to reduce carbon emissions and pay Kyoto fines or would you recommend that the Government follow the UK lead and bring in legislation to limit traffic congestion and set up a Climate Change committee that sets carbon targets and can enforce limits on emissions? [Irish Examiner 31-10-06]

FG: Yes Labour: The focus of Ireland’s efforts should be to reduce carbon emissions. Labour favours the U.K. Government’s approach on this. Green Party: I would see a role for both emission’s charges and congestion charges. I think that something we need to do first is to highlight that ordinary taxpayers are already paying a climate change tax as the Government is already preparing to pay our way out of Kyoto with tax payer’s money. New charges or taxes are never popular but in this case people are going to pay one way or another (and are already paying) so it is more a question of making those charges as fair and equitable as possible PDs: Too long and detailed for yes or no elements I agree with Dr. Leonard: On Traffic Limits & Emissions Limits- Yes. State priority of growth at all costs will cost all in time.

8. Do you agree that the private multi-national companies, currently building and operating tolled motorways in Ireland should pay taxes on the basis of carbon emissions produced by their operations, and should be prevented from passing these penalties onto the motorist through increased toll charges?

FG: No. Let the polluter pay Labour: The Labour Party is opposed to the tolling and/ or privatisation of public roadways. Green Party: I agree that they should pay but it is very difficult stop companies passing on costs to consumers PDs: No Dr. Leonard: On Carbon Emissions Taxes for Multinationals- Yes. It’s the ‘Polluter Pays Principle’. All Multinationals should incorporate reduced pollution costs from planning to implementation.

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9. Do you agree with the Economic and Social Research Institute that investment in transport should remain a priority, but current targeted spending found in the Estimates should be reduced to €3.4 billion from €4 billion and in order to avoid having to raise taxes to pay for it?

FG: Yes Labour: Investment in Transport should remain a priority. Labour considers that the recent ESRI Report is recommending cuts in public capital expenditure, which will impact hardest on low income families. Green Party: It is not about how much we spend so much as about what we spend it on. We simply need to put more of the resources we have into public transport. Progressive Democrats: No Dr. Leonard: On Reduced spending for private/increased spending for public transport- Yes. Public transport & BioFuels will bring us to the next eco-econ age.

10. Do you agree that public money should not be allocated to the M3 until a new cost/benefit analysis occurs, because the current one is very outdated in that: (a) The current estimated cost of €600 million is based on year 2000 prices, (b) It does not take the new climate change data into account, (c) It does not factor in 3 other motorways running in close proximity (M1, M2, and M4), (d) It does not factor in the Dublin to Navan railway being opened, and (e) It does not take into account the fact that tolls be paid by citizens for 40 years and the profits will go out of the economy to Spanish multi-national investors.

FG: No Labour: No. Labour believes that the M3 should be constructed in 3 sections. The section between Navan and Dunshaughlin should be re-considered and re-routed to avoid impacting on the historic Tara/Skryne Valley. Green Party: I am not in favour of the current M3 proposal for all of the above reasons. I want to see the N3 upgraded and I want to see the people of Meath provided with top class public transport links Progressive Democrats: No Dr. Leonard: On a Cost Benefit Analysis before more spending on M3- Yes. Move the M3 & Save Tara with efficient planning. Heritage and Place

Understanding Heritage as an Environmental Issue:

In attempting to understand heritage, many competing elements of nature and humanity may be evoked in an attempt to capture its underlying meanings. As with other cultures, Irish heritage contains a host of meanings and contexts carried through the portal of time as an inherent folk memory is rooted in the land or streetscape. While it is often stated that Ireland has a rich natural and built heritage, it can be difficult to find consensus on where this may be found, or what this heritage actually represents. What seems to be

294 Issues in Environmental Research important is a sense of place and time embodying the natural beauty of God’s creation or human endeavour, whether these are represented by buildings, battlefields or bogs.

Writing in 1996, David Brett presents an interrogation of the ‘concept of heritage’ whereby meanalities, locations and processes have come to be understood through history (Brett 1996 p1). Throughout the evolutionary patterns of societal engagement with our natural and built hinterlands, we have come to represent and define ourselves as an autonomous group by way of undertaking a reinvention of the norms and ways which have emerged throughout the course of Irish history. We can further examine these themes by applying an analytical framework to the advocacy networks which have emerged from campaigns of collective action during the modernising phase in Irish history which has occurred between the 1960s and the first decade of the new millennium. Within this time span, the priority of the ruling elite of the state shifted from a concern with a self-sufficient economic model that emphasised agriculture and tourism to that of multinational-led development. One result of this new economic direction was an increased antipathy towards our natural and built environment as polluting industries and multinational or state infrastructure began to impinge on communities, landscapes and antiquities throughout the nation (Leonard 2006). Furthermore, Hilary Tovey (1992b p275) has indicated that there has never been a period where a significant prioritisation of institutional conservation at any phase of Ireland’s post-independence self rule. It was as if the new state wished to erase the memory of the past by eradicating the cracked fanlights and facades of the nation’s built environment while paving over its natural beauty and historical sites.

Of course in the early decades of independence there was little or no industrial development of note in the country, leaving hundreds of thousands to seek work abroad in the industrial cities of Britain or North America. Undoubtedly this harsh economic reality assisted the onset of a preoccupation with growth which has followed in subsequent decades. When combined with an underlying hostility towards the ruling elite of the Ascendancy class from the Act of Union in 1800 until the formation of the Free State in 1922, a sense of antagonism towards aspects of our heritage emerged at a time when an incoherent form of populist nationalism became prevalent. Unfortunately, those elites that did inherit control of the state in the years subsequent to independence have displayed a propensity for destroying large aspects of heritage deemed to be inappropriate at certain moments in history, such as some of the ‘big houses’ of the Ascendancy during the War of Independence or the destruction of Georgian Dublin and the Woodquay Viking site during the 1960s and 1970s through to the assaults on the Carrickmines Castle and Tara sites in 2005 and 2006. What becomes clear from these historical circumstances is that in Ireland, heritage has always been a most contested issue at various stages of Irish history.

As the sometimes tragic and tortuous history of this island reaches another epoch with the onset of a new political settlement in Northern Ireland, it is both timely and correct to reconsider the battles which occurred throughout Ireland in the defence of all aspects of heritage on the island. As Tovey (2003) noted, heritage groups such as the Irish Georgian Society took on the mantle of the ‘moral entrepreneurs’ (ibid) of Dublin’s built

295 Issues in Environmental Research environment when the destruction of sections of the southern section of the city began in the 1970s. Ireland’s heritage groups had invariably been closely connected with their British counterparts and in some cases predated partition. Essentially, conservation emerged in the late 19th century as an aspect of colonial mapping of local heritage and wildlife and in postcolonial Ireland a residue of unease has tainted many conservation debates due in part to its imperialist origins. Faced with a hegemonic concern for development combined with attempts to wipe out unwanted aspects of the past, conservationists became the curators of a living history that was under threat from political elites and developers alike.

Thomas Farel Heffernan sets the inception of this curator’s vigil around the time of excavation of the east-end of the cross block in Dublin Castle in 1961 (Heffernan 1988 pp 5, 6). In the era of John F Kennedy’s presidency, Ireland’s architectural heritage had been revealed in ‘an exciting glimpse’ (ibid). Dublin’s origins could be traced back to their ancient Viking and Norman past, with visible links to Celtic neighbours also evident (ibid). This discovery provided visible confirmation that the remains of Viking Dublin contained a site which could represent the past. For Duncan (1993 p 39), ‘sites of representation’ present a dualistic signification of place. However in postcolonial Ireland, this representation was contentious, as the disputes about Woodquay and Georgian Dublin would later prove. In many ways the heritage of the past in Ireland became a version of Saids’ ‘the Other’ in an Ireland gripped by a modernist zeal for state building. In such cases the Other can be reclaimed from past representations by providing a ‘familiar and useful’ (Duncan 1993 p39) utilisation for a contested site. Without doubt the destruction of the sites of Georgian Dublin, Woodquay, Mullaghmore or Tara over successive decades fulfils this modernist fantasy of remapping through destruction of the natural or historic. In post colonial Ireland, culture time and place were reclaimed from ‘the invaders’ in an attempt to forge a modern state, a process which has led to a conservation movement charged with protecting nature and the antiquities from a Talibanesque destruction in the name of the fundamentalism of economic growth.

These sites of contested heritage provide us with what is essentially a ‘cultural production’ (Duncan 1999 p54) which has come to be perceived in a variety of contexts throughout history. Moreover, this cultural production is at once linked to both structure and agency as society comes to comprehend culture and heritage through its potential uses rather than through any inherent value. This form of deterministic consumption lies at the heart of heritage disputes as the worth of such sites is interpreted by concerned individuals or communities with the assistance of expert advocates who facilitate the shaping of a cultural framing process. Collective mobilisation facilitated by issue framing has allowed institutional agendas to be challenged by conservationists in a process of social mapping and redefining. In an era when planning scandals became a prominent feature of Irish politics, this mobilisation developed a wider concern with the corruption and democratic deficit which had come to bedevil the planning process in Ireland.

Essentially, a set of competing ideologies emerged from this era as social reformers and conservationists came to oppose narrow minded modernists and other supporters of ‘development’ who had formed new elites in post colonial Ireland. In addition, the

296 Issues in Environmental Research technocratic approach of local authorities has been shaped by these elites, creating a corporatist approach with reductionist tendencies. These characteristics have shaped institutional responses to heritage disputes at every stage of our recent history as sensitive conservation sites were reduced to the sum of their utility. Local authorities have been described as having certain methodologies which hamper any further valuation of heritage as all sites are invariably reduced to a set of uses such as ‘production or consumption related activity….private property or public service etc’ (Saunders 1986 Pickvance 1990). What follows is a utilitarian hegemonic order which re-classifies heritage within the cultural assumptions of corporatist elites. This hegemony can only be challenged through the presentation and cultural project of conservationist movements.

In many ways Irish conservationists have become marginalised by corporatists as part of a process David Lloyd (1999 p77 79) describes as ‘the subalternity effect’. Following on from Gramsci, Spivak and Homi Baba, Lloyd locates this effect within the contours of ‘historiographical discourses’ (ibid) as part of the project of postcolonial cultural restructuring. From this perspective counter hegemonic cultural production can be attributed to these curators of heritage based on ‘non-elite histories: histories of agrarian movements, local histories, social histories of the complex intersections of class and colonisation in rural Ireland, women’s history…and social history’ (ibid). It is within this array of conservationists, archivists and antiquarians that we can find the curators of heritage, a disparate group who have rescued our heritage through vigilance and activism. For Tovey (1992b p278 280) the contestation of heritage in Ireland is an ‘ideological conflict’ (ibid) with problems on all sides of the divide. For instance, the project of modernisation involves a debate about historically derived meanings surrounding built or natural environments. The fact that Irish heritage is part of an ‘official’ environmentalism with links to British conservation initiatives became problematic in the post colonial era. The demolition of Georgian Dublin was also part of a contested modernity (ibid). Tovey quotes MacDonald’s account of a government minister on the destruction of Georgian buildings in Kildare Street as claming ‘They stood for everything I hate’ (Tovey 1992b p279 from MacDonald 1985 p12). The fact that much of Dublin’s tenements were no more than slums in pre independence Ireland added to the sense of ambivalence about the city’s architectural heritage.

When dealing with the natural environment the nation’s elites have fared little better. Despite an early concern for agriculture and tourism the ruling elite in post colonial Ireland has had a mixed record in relation to preserving sites of heritage. Increased use of chemicals and the scientisation of agriculture have created increased threats to wildlife and their hinterlands. While rural based developers provided threats to Dublin’s built heritage, the emergence of an agricultural industry with little regard for traditional interaction between farmers and their hinterlands emerged during the 1960s. In the years when Ireland attempted to measure up to the requirements of core economies within the European Economic Community (EEC), the state’s emphasis in relation to agriculture shifted from smallholders to a new form of ‘agribusiness’. In the years since Ireland joined the EEC in 1973 agricultural production has had to compete with multinationals, leading to the growth of major food groups in Ireland and abroad. With the emergence of a post ‘Celtic Tiger’ consumer society, agriculture has become fully industrialised and

297 Issues in Environmental Research scientised. The combination of a waste management problem in the wake of rising rates of consumption during this period has increased the pressure on Ireland’s environment as the rural landscape has come to be threatened by careless agricultural practice, multinational pollution and ambivalence on the part of the authorities (Tovey and Share 2003 Leonard 2006 Flynn 2007).

The restructuring of rural areas has been a feature of European societies since the end of the Second World War. In the era of globalisation, the World Trade Agreement has opened markets through deregulation. For farmers and fishermen, the process of agriculture has become more expensive. An erosion of the traditional rural lifestyle which was rooted in the landscape has followed. New forms of capitalism now view rurality and heritage as a commodity, and processes such as tourism are also understood through these different perspectives. Affluence has also placed a strain on rural areas as landfills and sewage treatment plants reach capacity in the wake of an economy which is driven by construction. Tourism has become marginalised in this development led economy, in an era when tourism has become part of ‘the leisure industry’ and part of ‘the rural experience’ (Marsden et al 1993). The outcome of this restructuring of the agricultural sector and increased reliance on multinational led development has been further ecological degradation, with Ireland facing fines for non compliance on a series of European Union (EU) environmental directives. In addition, the state has applied the industrialization approach to tourism.

In the case of the Mullaghmore Interpretative Centre in County Clare, the authority’s plans to develop tourism through a series of visitors’ centres across the island led to a significant campaign to protect the rare flora and fauna of the Burren in that County during the 1990s. In order to understand the Mullaghmore dispute further, it is necessary to explore the dichotomy between cultural and economic evaluations of the landscape. Both are part of a wider representation of heritage and landscape; both are interchangeable and yet remain ‘bottom up’ interpretations of the institutional or community sectors. In an era characterised by high unemployment tourism was prioritised by the state as providing 10% of GNP with revenues of over IR£1,000 million (McGrath 1995 p. 27). As the tourism industry developed it came to be associated with certain environmental impacts as the infrastructure of tourism – hotels, camping sites, holiday homes and marinas – began to dot the landscape. Further impacts were created from the increased road building, traffic and waste or sewage plants associated with such developments (Kousis 2002 pp. 451, 452). Interpretative centres were seen as a necessary part of that infrastructural development in order that better understandings of Irish history and culture would be provided for visitors – ‘creating interpretive “gateways” into our heritage’ (O’Toole 1994 from McGrath 1995 p. 29).

One such ‘gateway’ chosen by the Office of Public Works (OPW) was Mullaghmore. It was the OPW’s view that the interpretative centre should be located within the heart of the Burren rather than in a nearby village such as Corofin, to facilitate greater visual access for tourists in order to provide a ‘first-hand experience of the park’ (EIS Statement 1994 cited in McGrath 1995 p. 57). The result of this decision would lead to a sometimes rancorous dispute which impacted on both sets of local groupings that were

298 Issues in Environmental Research for or against the project, and lead to a series of legal challenges at national and European levels. The state’s emphasis on an individualised consumer culture has also to the commodification of transport, as public rail networks were allowed to diminish while private car ownership and motorways were prioritised. Over time, the focus on the Irish state’s increased road building capacity has led to three significant anti-roads protests either side of the onset of the new Millennium. These heritage campaigns occurred at the Glen of the Downs in County Wicklow, Carrickmines in County Dublin and at Tara/Hill of Skryne in County Meath. All three protests emerged at a time when the state was attempting to develop the commuter hub around Dublin city. The case of Tara/Hill of Skryne would lead to a heated debate about the manner in which heritage is dealt with in an age of rapid growth as the ancient site of Tara came under threat from the state’s Critical Infrastructural Bill. This Bill which was introduced in the wake of a series of environmental campaigns has been seen by many as an attempt to prevent social movement based collective responses in the future.

More recently there have been a number of conservation campaigns emanating from disputed infrastructural projects of multinationals or the state. A series of anti-incinerator campaigns have broken out nationwide, in response to the state’s regional waste management plans. One area where plans for an incinerator have been resisted has been in Duleek in County Meath. Here, local campaigners have set out their heritage based arguments by highlighting risks posed to the area’s wetlands and special areas of conservation by highlighting problems such as visual intrusion impact on tourism and impact on ground water (Leonard 2006). Similarly, the ‘Shell to Sea’ have raised conservation issues as part of there campaign of resistance to the Corrib gas pipeline. Protesters have raised concerns about ecological damage to local cliffs, drumlins and boglands as part of their campaign. The area surrounding the Rossport site is in line for designation as a Special Area of Conservation and Scenic Importance (Connolly and Lynch 2005). The state’s own conservation plans have also drawn criticism from heritage advocates in recent years. Writing in Heritage Outlook (2000) Liam Lysaght called the Government Strategic Plan on forestry ‘one of the greatest threats to our countryside’ (Lysaght 2000). The plantation of non-indigenous trees has become a contentious issue with serious consequences for landscapes and habitats. Local community infrastructure such as schools and health services has also had negative impacts on indigenous heritage. In Kinvara, a picturesque seaside village with a significant maritime history, the local nineteenth century school is faced with closure despite having a nationally favourable record of education. As in many such cases economic rationalisation is the determining factor in the closure. Nonetheless, the local community has mobilised a nationwide campaign against the closure, with the heritage of both the school and its environs being a prominent aspect of the community’s framing of the issue.

The Significance of Advocates in Heritage Campaigns:

Without doubt, any attempt to mobilise collective responses to perceived threats to conservation or heritage sites requires the intervention of an advocate or interest group who contribute the levels of expertise necessary to bring a campaign together. In Ireland, heritage advocates have played a prominent role in Irish social and political life. Figures

299 Issues in Environmental Research such as Mary Robinson, David Norris, Marian Finucane and Vincent Salafia have become national and international figures, and have gone on to become presidents and presidential candidates, senators and media presenters. Even that most outspoken of advocates Sir Bob Geldof has made a contribution to the heritage debate. ‘Dublin is being savaged’ he wrote in his introduction to Frank Mac Donald’s book Saving the City (1989) ‘with an almost methodological municipal vandalism’. For Geldof, progress through development was pointless if directed by ‘the greedy, the corrupt, the stupid, the uninspired, the mediocre, the cheap, the tawdry, the vulgar-but mainly the indifferent’ (ibid). He felt the contempt visited upon Dublin’s built heritage was similar to that displayed to its inhabitants who were corralled into a featureless suburbia, with its artists driven into exile. As an advocate, Geldof has few peers. However, its is the book’s author who must be recognised as perhaps the most articulate and erudite advocate of conservation in Ireland over recent decades. As the author of several books on the subject, in addition to his pivotal role as Environmental Editor of the Irish Times, Frank MacDonald has fashioned an understanding of heritage protection that has provided a framework for the wider dissemination of conservation as a significant indicator of cultural capital in a country where the past has many meanings.

MacDonald (1989 pp. 17 19) has argued that the blame for much of Dublin’s ills could be laid at the feet of rural and suburban developers, managers and planners who lacked sufficient empathy with their surroundings. Conversely, the same lack of empathy could be said to be characteristic of many planners and developers when dealing with rural conservation sites. Essentially, he has articulated an understanding of the need to see cities, towns and villages as living entities rather than commercial zones. In his books and editorials, MacDonald has consistently argued that planning and development needs to be undertaken with a sympathetic understanding of both place and hinterland, within an overall context which incorporates the history and ecology of an area. He remains a significant voice in Irish environmental and conservation circles, one who has had the vision to claim heritage as ‘a cultural asset of immense importance’ (ibid). This understanding of the value of heritage is echoed in the discussion of ‘the ideology of planning’ (Harvey 1985 pp165 168).

Here, a view of planning as an ideological process is based on deterministic concepts of ‘spatial ordering’ (ibid) is presented as part of a process of functionalist utility that promotes ‘production, circulation, exchange and consumption’ (ibid) within a city or region. Seen from this perspective, planning must therefore reflect the concerns of the ruling social elite and their derivative interest groups and supporters. At the heart of this equation is a capitalism which promotes private property and free market industry as two of its main tenants, foregoing other concerns about equity of distribution, race and gender or culture and heritage, all of which belong to altogether separate ideologies. Nonetheless, heritage has an inherent value which shapes cultural expression. Our understanding of heritage as a source of contextual meaning has been informed by David Brett’s (1996) discussion of heritage as ‘a representation of the past’ which provides an overall perception of how a nation ‘views themselves and is viewed by others’ (ibid). As Ireland is blessed with a rich heritage and environment, our valuation of heritage should adequately represent the degree to which this very heritage has been instrumental in

300 Issues in Environmental Research shaping local and global understandings of Ireland and Irish culture. As with so many nations, we perceive ourselves and are perceived by others through a cultural filter which is itself bound up by its setting and historical contextualisation. However, when understandings of this past are contested within wider debates about ownership of history by rival elites, the production of culture can produce localised meanalities that come to be distorted when viewed through the refracted perspectives of ideologically derived framing processes.

Conservation movements:

In order to better understand the contested heritage of Ireland, this book will apply a theoretical framework to existing literature surrounding this issue. This will be achieved through a methodological approach which incorporates social movement theories to the campaigns of collective action which have emerged as a result of perceived threats to the natural and built environment nationwide since the 1960s. Each dispute will be analysed through a series of key points in that campaign’s lifespan. Essentially, these key moments are as follows; inception, mobilisation, creation of networks, wider politicisation, attempts to gain leverage through political opportunities and outcomes. Of course, not all campaigns follow these patterns in an exact manner. Social movement campaigns are invariably influence by internal and external dynamics. Internal dynamics include the availability of aspects of economic, social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986 Putnam 2000), leadership and consensus building (Klandermans 1988 1989) and the availability of empathetic professionals with appropriate levels of expertise (Leonard 2005 2006). The occurrence of structural re-arrangements in societies such as urbanisation and industrialisation promotes collective action as a result of perceived democratic deficits. While participation in new social movements is sometimes met with repressive measures from the authority of the state theorists such as Klandermans (1984) have developed the ‘rational choice’ theory which argues ‘that the anticipated benefits outweigh the expected costs of participation’. While these benefits may be related to an improvement in lifestyle or culture for social movement members some political or ideological advancement may be at the heart of those aims central to the social movement’s organisational core. These political motivations may differ to the stated aim of the social movement but the use of such movements for anti-social or ideological purposes may meet a similar agenda to that of a previously existing political group.

Outcomes:

As each movement has its own desired outcomes in relation to the fluctuations involved in each campaign it is fair to say that social movement outcomes are largely dependent on the parameters defined by any original set objective. In most cases the achievement of movement objectives is relative to effecting a change to the relevant area of policy. This change must be then measured in relation to the situation prior to the existence of the social movement. Nonetheless, the effects of a particular social movement campaign may not be immediately known as the central movement’s activities gain mainstream acceptance over a period of years eventually making once radical social or cultural changes seem timely or overdue. Social change is often effected on a cultural level as

301 Issues in Environmental Research certain injustices become intolerable. The immediate impact of directly changing policy on an outstanding issue of grievance is an altogether rarer occurrence. In this regard the likelihood in achieving social movement outcomes has been identified as being dependant on the existence of certain characteristics within a movement. Any social movement success is dependant on the challenging and changing of perspectives in the process of effecting structural changes either through their immediate campaign or through any subsequent cultural repositioning of society. As such, social movements must contend with deeply entrenched social perspectives regarding the legitimation of authority. Challenging the perceived legitimate authority is according to Gamson ‘a formidable task’ Ultimately, a campaign’s aims may come to be realised through the galvanising of political support through a widening of a movement’s parameters to as wide a range as possible without losing the focus of the issue at hand. This task proved to be a most challenging one for Ireland’s heritage advocates and campaigners, one which they rose to courageously over many years.

Analysis of Events: We will provide an analysis of certain key moments in the process of mobilisation of heritage campaigns. These moments will provide the basis for a discursive or protests event analysis which will combine the accounts of protests in media and literature with an examination of the historical contexts and cultural or political outcomes of each campaign included in this study. This ‘issue history’ (Szasz 1994) allows for a wider analysis which goes beyond a social narrative, and facilitates a fuller understanding of the consequences emanating from the framing and reframing of heritage within a context of a society where an obsession with history has been displaced by a zealous predilection for economic development. While this transition from traditionalist concern to modernist utility has placed great strain on the environment and heritage of the nation, it has also created opportunities for widespread political mobilisation in successive decades from Woodquay in the late 1970s to Tara or Rossport in 2007. These outbreaks of collective action have provoked widespread debate and coverage in the media as several thousand people have taken part in heritage based protests in Ireland over this period. These participants are not all members of heritage advocacy groups such as An Taisce.

Nonetheless, a significant section of the Irish public have mobilised in response to threats to local environmental or conservation sites during a phase in history where people were supposed to be obsessed with financial gain and property. These sporadic outbreaks of collective action are a reminder that in Ireland as in most cultures, there are deeper concerns with space and place that go beyond material concerns or economics. Communities and individuals have come to understand themselves through their hinterlands and homes. Migrant and immigrant groups share this concern for spatially derived representation, rendering heritage as a most contested and culturally charged element of social construction. An instinctive or reflexive conservationalism has emerged from this historically derived series of heritage disputes. These reflexive movements represent the articulation of indigenous monologues of communities who are embedded in the streets or landscapes of their forbearers. Their rootedness may not always require a contemporary presence at the point of concern as the ‘practical consciousness’ (Giddens 1984) formed in the memory inculcates an inherent compulsion to protect spaces rendered sacred through memory, loss and shared expression. When such localities are

302 Issues in Environmental Research threatened, a mutuality of concern for collective folk memories and meanings in the guise of a shared heritage emerges as a significant grievance in the mobilisation of common cause. In many ways we are indoctrinated into a concern for heritage and environment through the psychological socialisation processes of family and community. This reflection provides society with a conservationist impulse in the face of barbaric mammon, and occasionally fuels episodes of dissent when the degradation of ecology or destruction of heritage is deemed to have gone too far.

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Chapter 11: The Rise of the Greens: From Protest to Power:

With the establishment of Comhaontas Glas from the Ecology Party in 1986, the environmental movement’s political party embarked on its first tentative steps towards representative politics. This process culminated in the Green Party taking its place as a junior partner in the Coalition Government in the aftermath of the 2007 General Election. The contexts which shaped this transformation of the Greens from a party of protest to a party of power will be examined in this article, outlining the contours of a journey which represents a success for the pragmatic ‘relos’ over the emotive ‘fundis’ at a time when the wider environmental movement has moved in the opposite direction. The paper details the political opportunities and constraints emanating from the exclusion of environmentalists from neo-corporatist partnership arrangements, concluding with an assessment of the impact of participation in government will have for the Green Party and the environmental movement it purports to represent.

The rise of the Greens in Ireland has occurred in direct proportion to the opening of political opportunity structures surrounding mainstream political frameworks in the course of the Green’s own transformation from a party of protest to a party in power. This transition has had an impact on internal and external perceptions of what it is the Green Party now represents. Furthermore, the tendency in neo-corporatist systems to focus on ‘technocratic criteria’ (Offe 1987 in Scott 1990: 142) creates difficulties for political parties who wish to represent the concerns of the environmentally concerned professional middle class, creating a form of democratic deficit between the electorate and the political mainstream. This void can be filled through the campaigns of environmental movements as public sector professionals, such as academics and those with alternative forms of expertise, mobilise and challenge the structures of political frameworks which would otherwise proceed through established neo-corporatist arrangements. A critique of closed political systems applied to European states such as Sweden, Germany and Austria can be applied to Ireland’s own system of neo-corporatist closure, echoing Scott’s question: ‘What is it about neo-corporatist arrangements that have stimulated the development of Green movements in those countries (Scott 1990: 144)’?

Those voters who voted for the Greens in 2007 tend to be new middle class professionals who live in newly built suburbanised areas where urban sprawl can be seen to impact upon the surrounding hinterland. These middle class groups may use their education and professional expertise to organise in response to their lack of political representation, together with local environmental concerns (ibid). Through a combination of perceptions of democratic deficit and environmental grievance, the momentum for forms of green politics emerges, something which has assisted the Green Party and local campaigns in recent years as communities of mobilise in response to perceived threats from the infrastructural projects of the state of multinational sector (Leonard 2006, 2007). As white-collar public sector workers, these professionals are not as dependent on industrial growth as private sector professionals. They can oppose industrial development without facing the costs of such opposition. In this way, some new professional or middle class members can afford to take on challenges to industrial policy in ways not open to other

304 Issues in Environmental Research social groups included in corporatist arrangements. This has provided the Green Party with an autonomous voter base which has provided the basis for gradual electoral success in recent campaigns.

While the Irish Green Party began to make some impact on the national political scene, winning its first seat in 1989, the state’s prioritisation of multinational-led development continued to be subject to challenges from ‘locally based indigenous groups’ (ibid). Local debates about the economic benefits of having a multinational sited in a community as opposed to the potential risks to health and the local environment often led to ecopopulist campaigners being met with hostility within their own community where they have been perceived as anti-development and anti-industry. There was already a consensus between the agencies of the state, local authorities, corporations and unions which pre-dated the social partnership ethos that became prevalent in the later 1980s. With the trades unions on board, the only effective opposition to neo-corporatist orthodoxy was found in local community groups, who began to protest about the potentially harmful effects of the pollution emanating from multinational plants. This original consensus, which emerged as the model for the neo-corporatist partnership in the later 1980s and throughout the 1990s, also led to the creation of political opportunities for community groups with concerns about the environmental degradation caused by multinational plants. Environmental movement responses to the state’s industrial policy began in the 1970s. Objections to toxic industry occurred at Pfizer’s in the early 1970s, Akcan in 1974, Schering Plough in 1974 and Beechams in 1977. Baker has claimed that the focus of these disputes challenges directly the very foundation of Irish industrial policy: development through the attraction of direct foreign investment in Ireland (Baker 1990: 76).

The overriding policy agenda of the state since the late 1950s had been aimed at creating a successful economy through multinational led development. Throughout subsequent decades, successive governments tried to kick-start the Irish economy by attempting to entice transnational corporations (TNCs) to locate in Ireland. One of the features of the state’s sales-pitch to TNCs was a low corporate tax regime combined with ambivalence, at local authority level, to pollution at source from newly located industrial plants. Local authorities were also hindered by the lack of funding for regulatory surveillance and lacked the necessary expertise for the monitoring of pollution (Taylor and Murphy 2002: 81-82). The phase of economic growth experienced in Ireland in the last decade came after three decades where government policy was primarily focused on industrial development and job creation. By opening the Irish economy to globalised market forces, a period of intense economic growth was achieved, often referred to as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ (O’Hearn 1998). One result of this growth in industrialisation, urbanisation and consumerism can be seen in the emergence of a waste management crisis across Ireland. The Irish government also had to operate within the constraints of the wider political demands of the European Union. This led to directives and legislation on pollution controls, which changed the nature of environmental disputes in Ireland from a focus on health risks to one which was concerned with the waste management crisis that resulted from rising consumption rates. Rates of affluence and consumption increased in an unparalleled manner throughout the 1990s (Allen, K. 2000: 68). Ireland’s waste-

305 Issues in Environmental Research management infrastructure (which consisted in the main of municipal landfill sites) was unable to cope with the increased rates of waste being produced. At the same time, the demands of European Commission directives on waste management called for new approaches Ireland. Article 5 of the directive says that member states should aim for ‘self sufficiency in waste disposal’. This placed landfill at the bottom of the scale and greater emphasis was placed on reducing, reusing and recycling materials. Incineration was also an option according to the waste hierarchy. In 1992, the government established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate waste disposal. Its remit has been criticised for not focusing on environmental degradation and for its subordinate role to the IDA and the project of industrial development (Taylor 2001). As the demands of EU directives and the state’s own legislation dictated that landfilling alone was no longer acceptable waste management practice, the state was faced with a new problem as communities began to protest about the siting of dumps in their areas.

The Green Party Emerges:

Faced with a less than decisive body of legislation from the EU and an absence of any real environmental planning in Ireland, future Irish governments will have an opportunity to introduce a positive and visionary environmental agenda to the domestic and international body politic. Ireland still retains a less than deserved image as a place of unspoilt natural landscapes and a still-developing industrial and economic infrastructure. By introducing the holistic structures that will produce an environmentally minded society Ireland could provide a model of how successful economic management can be achieved by working on all the different levels of policy which have an environmental dimension and by bringing consensus to planning and industry ion relation to all ecological obligations. Thus far Irish administrations have relied on EU and British innovation to apply any form of environmental legislation, so the likelihood of a major ecological breakthrough on the domestic political scene remains distant. However, a far reaching environmental agenda remains as the best political strategy yet to be fully exploited by the Irish political parties.

At a time when left-wing parties around Europe have moved to the centre, activist and ‘militant’ groups were seen as a threat from within by party leadership, in advance of an overall shift to the centre. While this shift has come as world politics was in the grip of neo-liberal dominance, a gap between political activists and Green Parties occurred throughout Europe. With the emergence of the anti- globalisation movement, this dichotomy between parliamentary politics and collective action has become a cultural as well as a political issue. Furthermore, while neo- liberal politicians have grappled with ‘Green’ issues since the 1992 World Summit, Green Parties have not made the major advances that may have been possible at that time due, in part, to a disillusionment with the rigidity of mainstream politics that left a chasm between grassroots ecological movements and European Green Parties. This gap has equally affected the growth of the Irish Green Movement and can be seen in the distance between the position of the activists in the Wicklow Glens and the attempts by the Irish Green Party to attract votes from the professional classes and young urban voters during the 1990s, despite the involvement of local greens in the roads campaign at that time. Equally significant is the

306 Issues in Environmental Research fact that the Irish Greens do far better at European elections than in Dáil and Local elections. For instance, they received 7.9% of the vote in the June 1994 and 3.5% in June 1998 as compared to 2% in the 1997 General election. Mullally has outlined the Irish Green Party’s gradual shift from a ‘party of protest’ towards a group that has had ‘more pronounced success on the European level’ (Mullally 1999: 166). The Irish Greens, who were known at their inception as The Ecology Party of Ireland, had gone through a process of splits and realignments from more radical ecological factors, on a par with other European Green Movements. In adopting the standard ‘Green Party’ title ion 1986 while retaining the Irish language suffix of Comhaontas Glas the party ‘signalled a commitment to electoral politics’ (Mullally 1999: 167).

Initial gains by the Irish Greens were soon countered by a process of adaptation of Green issues by the major centrist parties, in particular, the Progressive Democrats. The business oriented thrust of the EPA Acts, drawn up the PD’s Mary Harney, is an indicator of how Green issues were co-opted and manipulated by government parties in order to facilitate job development. Despite this, electoral successes for Trevor Sargent in the Dáil, as well as for Nuala Aherne and Patricia McKenna in successive European elections, have given the Irish Greens an established position on the Irish political scene. Other successful campaigns, such as John Gormley’s tenure as Mayor of Dublin, pushed the Green agenda onto the national political scene. These advances are tempered by the stilted nature of Irish politics where shifts in EU policies are adapted in a gradual manner while local issues and agendas take priority. All major Parties have converged towards the centre and have adapted pragmatic ‘catch-all’ policies, including whatever is seen as relevant in regard to the environment. In light of this it is perhaps unusual that the Irish Greens have also staked a claim for the suburban and middle class voter. However, this can be seen as part of an overall European trend away from early ecological ‘survivalist’ agendas and a move towards adapting a ‘green lifestyle’ centered on middleclass, suburban concerns such as recycling, retaining green areas such as forests and the spread of genetically modified foods. Like their European counterparts Irish Greens have adopted many issues to suit the increasing trend towards suburbanisation rather than advocating any real alternatives.

This has left some theorists questioning whether the Greens are, as yet, ready for government and how much of a truly ‘Green’ agenda they can maintain in the pursuit of this aim. The question remains open as to whether ultimate goals of environmental communion, species cohabitation and universal non-violence are attainable through the political structures of Western Liberal democracies and if not, how can realistic alternative structures be realised. In this respect, Irish Green Party Policies such as Gormley’s Mayoral Commission on Cycling and the McKenna court case taken to force equal funding for the divorce referendum in 1997 can be seen as campaigns geared towards the suburban voter, policies which the Greens introduce alongside plans for a fully structured and far reaching plan for an environmental future. For instance, how would a Green Minister for Justice, in a future ‘Rainbow Coalition’ government, deal with an event like eco-activist protest? Power provided its own dilemmas yet the Irish Greens, like all other Green Parties, must pursue power through existing political channels. Nonetheless, the Greens have performed well when elected to office and both

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John Gormley in Dublin and Niall Ó Brolcháin in Galway proved to be effective and popular civic mayors.

In essence, Green Party campaigns of urban recycling and consumer consciousness rely on a high degree of civic responsiveness and responsibility. Any major challenges to the existing status quo cannot, therefore, be too extreme or rooted in civil disobedience as this could challenge the structures needed to highlight the domesticised Green agenda. This leaves legal action as the only recourse left to Greens who wish to challenge existing structures. However, the legal approach remains problematic for those pursuing a ‘rural discourse’, according to Peace (1993). In other words an over reliance on legal actions and challenges to planning permission, while maintaining a legislative presence and ‘watchdog’ image for the Greens, can ultimately cause a gap to open up between party and grassroots. Civic participatory groups are needed to back up any advances in parliamentary politics for the party. These tensions may have lead to a breakdown in communications between the bureaucratic central party structures of the Greens and their activist support-base, leading to a further distancing of the general public and the Party, as a whole. To avoid this, the Irish Green Party must maintain its activist base with moves towards a sufficiently politicised agenda outside of the increasing trend towards challenges to the legal framework on planning process. Older ecological issues, based on conservation, could be revisited rather than exclusively working towards a ‘greening’ of the suburban lifestyle. There is also a need to bridge the gap between forms of public protest that verge on civil disobedience and a plan of action which alienates both activists and the wider public through excessive legal parameters. In the roads dispute in the Glen of the Downs, local Greens were very involved, and this has continued at Carrickmines and Tara. There remains a need to open up the channels of protest between the Greens and the activists who support the party, both tacitly and directly, for the party to maintain its ideological authenticity. The events surrounding the 2007 General Election would challenge the party faithful in a manner which many had never anticipated.

From Protest to Power:

The May 2007 General Election in the Republic of Ireland resulted in a familiar post- election scenario: the majority of voters chose Bertie Ahern’s centrist/ populist party Fianna Fáil to form a coalition with one of the many smaller parties which flourish due to the electoral system of proportional representation (PRSTV). However, after ten days of intense negotiations, the Irish Green Party entered government for the first time on June 10 2007. The Greens ascent to power was no overnight success however; rather it was something of a ‘tainted triumph’ (Manning and Rootes 2005). One major casualty was the party leader Trevor Sargent, who resigned his position on a point of principle at the party convention as the membership voted to enter government. Sargent, the Green’s first elected leader, had stated during the election campaign that he would resign on principle rather than lead the party into government with Fianna Fáil, due to that party’s association with many of the political scandals that had charachterised Irish politics in recent years. For many party members, the idea of a coalition with Fianna Fáil was unacceptable; one of the party’s successful candidates and government programme negotiators Ciaran Cuffe had referred to this outcome as ‘doing a deal with the devil’.

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The Irish Green Party or Comhaontas Glas had many ‘breakthroughs’ throughout its twenty year history. The party gained their first elected members of parliament in 1989. In 1994 the Greens won two of the eighteen seats in that year’s European Elections, in the same year that party councillor John Gormley became Mayor of Dublin. Despite a history of rural based disputes against multinationals in the 1970s and 1980s (Leonard 2006), the Green Party’s successes in 1994 were located around Dublin city and its immediate vicinity. It is interesting to note that Sellafield’s nuclear threat was the main focus of the party at this point, dominating their posters and broadcasts during the election (Holmes and Kenny 1994).

The fact that the party’s electoral gains were attributed to their presentation of ‘a broad agenda beyond environmental issues’ (ibid) indicates a world still unfamiliar with the threat posed by climate change at that point. In addition, one the party’s key arguments (shaped by candidate and author Richard Douthwaite) was that of a basic income, an idea first put forward in his seminal book The Growth Illusion. The 1997 General Election saw the party double its share of the vote and its number of parliamentary representatives (Mullally, 1997: 165). The ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy of the 1990s brought an increase in consumption and waste, creating disputes about sewage, waste management and water quality, which elevated Green representatives such as Ciaran Cuffe and Dan Boyle into the public eye during campaigns about incineration or roads (Leonard 2005, 2006). The issues raised during the election indicate a shift in environmental strategy since 1994; sustainable development had replaced concerns about Sellafield’s radioactive waste as the key issue of the campaign (Mullally 1997: 168-171). The pragmatic wing of the party had come to the fore on the issues of broadening both the party’s appeal with the wider electorate as well as its viability as a potential coalition partner. Having retained their two MEPs and local authority presence in the 1999 European and local elections, the Greens went into the 2002 general election with hopes of forming an alternative coalition with Fine Gael and Labour. While this didn’t occur, Dan Boyle did take the party’s first seat outside of Dublin, in the southern city of Cork. The 2002 election also gave rise to a post- materialist ‘floating’ voter (Taylor and Flynn 2002: 225-232). Increased interest in green issues were reflected in the 2004 local elections, where the party made its second electoral ‘breakthrough’, gaining 26 local authority councillors as the mainstream parties witnessed a dramatic decline in their electoral share.

This ‘green tide’ gave rise to a sense of optimism in the party as the 2007 general election campaign began. The success of Brian Wilson in winning a seat to the Northern Ireland Assembly represented a significant political moment for the by now all-Ireland Green Party and for key figures such as John Barry and Peter Doran who had driven the merger. With early polls putting the party as high as 8%, the Greens opted out of either of the pre- coalition pacts, in order to maintain their independent stance. This was picked up on by Fianna Fáil, who introduced a range of environmental policies designed to attract voters as much as the Greens. Ethics in politics were a key issue for the Greens, a concern directed at some of the more unsavoury elements within Fianna Fáil. Party leader Trevor Sargent stated that he would resign rather than lead the Greens into coalition with Fianna Fáil, despite the fact that, numerically at least, this outcome was beginning to look

309 Issues in Environmental Research increasingly likely in the weekly opinion polls. Sargent also claimed that ‘it will be a Green Party mandate’ which would force Fianna Fáil ‘to implement eco-friendly policies’ (Sunday Times April 29 2007).

Many environmental issues came to the fore during the election. As well as debates about carbon taxes and emissions trading, local issues such as protests about the Corrib gas pipeline in the west of Ireland and a dispute over plans to run a motorway over the ancient site of the High Kings at Tara continued to feature in the headlines throughout the election. These campaigns had attracted considerable national and international attention, while senior Green party personnel had been prominent in their support of these campaigns (Leonard 2006). Launching their economic manifesto Fairness and Prosperity: A Green Approach to the Economy in May, the party bridged the gap between their grassroots membership and its targeted young urban voter by presenting ‘carefully costed and designed’ economic programme which offered ‘fiscal prudence’ (Irish Times May 2 2007). The main points in the manifesto included carbon taxes, bank levies and an unchanged personal tax rate alongside a rise in capital gains tax, while retaining Ireland’s corporation tax at 12% to protect current rates of economic growth. Investment in public services, including transport and the crumbling health service were included alongside increases for alternative energy sources such as wind and wave energy, an approach which was described as ‘both innovative and challenging’ and ‘prudent yet cohesive’ (ibid). Party leader Sargent also pursued senior Fianna Fáil figures (including their popular leader Bertie Ahern) about perceived financial irregularities, something which larger opposition parties avoided due to fears about an electoral backlash from voters weary from a decade of political scandals and tribunals of inquiry. Running under the confident slogan ‘Its Time’, the party faithful canvassed in hope throughout the spring sunshine. This rosy picture was soon blighted as the larger parties began a sustained attack on the Greens both nationally and locally, as concerns about potential seat losses were heightened by successive polls. Moreover, gloom laden headlines about an end to the property boom and rising interest rates began to resonate with electorate. Innovations in energy and climate change were swept off the agenda while locally Greens were forced onto the defensive when faced with questions about issues such roads and property development by the mainstream parties.

In the week of the election, Fianna Fáil received a boost with a 5% surge in the polls. It now appeared that the outgoing coalition would be returned, with the support of a few Independents. Concerns about a downturn in the economy were seen as the main reason for this shift, as voters seemed prepared to stick with an experienced government. The Green’s campaign ended as it had begun, with the party polling at 6%. The election results provide a similar result, with Fianna Fáil getting first preferences of 41.1%, (78 seats) Fine Gael 27.3%, (51 seats) Labour 10.1%, (20 seats) Sinn Fein 6.9%, (4 seats) Green Party 4.7%, (6 seats) the PDs 2.7% (2 seats) with five Independents (Sunday Times May 27 2007). The Greens lost one seat (Dan Boyle in Cork) but gained with deputy leader Mary White in rural Carlow/Kilkenny. With their usual PD coalition partners reduced to 2 TDs, Fianna Fáil began to sound out Green party sources about a coalition. A period of shadow boxing was followed by ten days of intensive negotiations between the parties. However, the Greens were somewhat constrained as Fianna Fáil had

310 Issues in Environmental Research the numerical advantage of being able to form a government with the two PDs and Independents.

By June, negotiations between the parties had commenced, with senior figures maintaining a disciplined silence with the media. Manifestos were exchanged, while negotiations were claimed to be ‘cordial and constructive’ by both sides. The media rehashed many of the two party’s electoral criticisms of their potential partners as the talks went on for a week. With the Greens needing to have the agreement passed at a special convention of members and the Dáil set to go into recess on June 14th, the pressure was mounting. Then late on Friday 8th of June, the news of a Green walkout broke. Senior negotiators John Gormley and Dan Boyle were unhappy with the deal on offer, claiming it wouldn’t be passed by the membership. Sensing the Green’s dilemma, Fianna Fáil gave ground on a few issues and on June 13th the party’s membership gave coalition a resounding endorsement, with 86% of the attendance at the special convention in Dublin’s historic Mansion House approving the deal. The main aspects of the deal on offer were a gradual carbon tax, a reduction of 3% per annum in emissions, commissions on climate change and taxation, increases for wind and wave energy, reform of local government and 35 million euros for education. Key areas where the Greens failed to achieve their aims included the motorway at Tara, the use of Shannon Airport as a stopover for the US military, the banning of corporate political donations and the use of public land for private hospitals (Irish Times June 14 2007).

The convention had also witnessed the resignation of party leader Trevor Sargent, who remained true to his word about not leading the party into coalition with Fianna Fáil. His actions were rare in a country were resignation for even the most serious allegations of corruption was unheard of. The Greens did gain two Senior Ministers, with John Gormley taking the Environment portfolio and Eamon Ryan becoming Minister for Energy and Resources. Sargent was named a junior Minister with responsibility for Food and Horticulture (with an additional junior ministry promised during the government’s lifetime), while the party also gained two nominations to the senate. The Greens began life in government with its two ministers cycling to work rather than taking the ministerial Mercedes, with John Gormley (tipped to be the next party leader) facing a row over the Tara heritage site on his first day in office. The electorate’s view on the Green’s play for power will be revealed at the next election. One initial achievement for the party has been John Gormley’s announcement to the European Council of Ministers that Ireland would be declared a genetically modified free zone. However, the party can feel a sense of achievement as it reflects on its slow ascent into government, looking forward to the challenges which will invariably result from its time in office.

Conclusion:

The Greens have emerged at a time when Ireland has undergone a period of accelerated growth, transforming the natural and political landscape. As societies undergo such periods of transformation, increased discord can create what theorists have come to describe as ‘political opportunity structures’ that facilitate movement responses. This concept, first put forward by Eisinger (1973), describes the contexts in which patterns of

311 Issues in Environmental Research political opportunities emerge and decline. The ‘biases’ of the political landscape must therefore be negotiated. If the political structure displays a degree of responsiveness towards new political parties such as the Greens, the opportunity structure for such groups remains open. Influence can be brought to bear by small parties in this case. However, if power is over-centralised, opportunities may be limited, as interests are superseded by political expediency. In the Irish case, both Sinn Fein and more latterly, the Green party, have benefited by replicating the patterns of both social movements from which they emerged and political parties which provided a vehicle for both to enter government in Belfast and Dublin.

Small parties such as the Greens can create further conditions for opportunities to surface in response to factors such as the profligation of niche issues such as climatic change, exploiting emergent environmental networks and concerns about political accountability. If participation is widespread and effective on green issues to the point where a successful outcome is possible, political opportunities may result. In addition, repressive or undemocratic responses by the neo-corporatist core may create further opportunities for niche parties such as the Greens to exploit. The external features of a political opportunity structure include aspects of the political system that affect the public, through government policies. These are enduring but informal with an uneven distribution, yet are utilised by every level within the political process. The varied levels of political interaction provide the dimensions of opportunities which frame the political landscape from which a small party like the Greens can prosper electorally from time to time.

Another feature of the political opportunity structure that can be exploited is the existence of political instability, resulting from electoral difficulties, uneasy coalitions and political realignments (Tarrow 1998). The existence of political divisions within the ruling elite encourages niche parties like the Greens to act upon these ‘windows of opportunity.’ Electoral success in marginal constituencies and internal political disputes provide instances where opportunities have been seized upon by the Greens. The existence of cleavages within existing political coalitions presented further opportunity for the Greens to be seen as a coherent and independent party by the electorate. By refusing to participate in the pre-election pact with Fine Gael and Labour, the Greens presented themselves as an independent voice, allowing the party to voice criticisms of senior Fianna fail figures at a time when the main opposition parties feared an electoral backlash for doing the same. The strategy also provided the Greens with the most obvious access to power when they were asked to enter into post election discussions about forming a government with Fianna Fáil. Some features or variables of a political opportunity structure may act as both a resource for and a constraint for the Green Party. Relevant literature (McAdam McCarthy and Zald 1996, Rootes 1997) has built upon the original understandings created by Eisinger and Tarrow, by focusing on the manner in which political opportunity structures are established through the alliances and interactions that are formed by integration with the political mainstream. In other words, the very opportunity for gaining access to power (coalition with Fianna Fáil) may in time prove to be the Green’s political undoing in future elections. This external political environment contains a shifting array of variables from which political alliances are shaped. Nonetheless, these variables may not exist in future, or may become problematic for the

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Greens in a political system which is characterised by tendencies towards centralised power, clientelism and neo-corporatism. For instance, when the nature of government is weakened by coalitions, politics, internal competition and neo-corporatist arrangements, the resultant over-centralisation of power leads to reduced or closed political opportunities. Neo-corporatist structures may lead to the exclusion of environmental interests from partnership arrangements that focus on industrial and economic growth. As a result, the Greens may be seen to lose touch with their activist base, something which has occurred in the case of the campaign to protect the Tara valley for instance. It is worth exploring the system of neo-corporatist ‘partnership’ which provides the Greens with such opportunities and constraints in the Irish political system as it has evolved over time. Nonetheless, the Greens have come to be seen as rational political actors, facilitated by their independent stance during the 2007 election campaign and the disciplined democratic process which allowed the party membership to debate and vote on participation in government at a historic gathering at the Mansion House after negotiations for government were completed. The party has established an elementary ‘polity’ model depicting themselves as legitimate participants in government, participating in the collective decision making process of the Cabinet with relative ease. This successful participation in a coalition government with Fianna Fáil provides the Greens with the political experience which will allow the party to present itself as a viable partner for both of the main coalition groupings after future elections. Political credibility will be established through the party’s ability interact with representatives from both the coalition parties and the wider political sphere, including the unions and business lobby. Tilly (ibid) describes such political opportunity structures as being comprised of ‘power’ or the favouring of interactions to the benefit of one side of a dispute. Political power for the Greens will result from their ability to interact with the agencies of the state, including the civil service. The degree of power lost or gained will be equated with the ability of the Greens to have their policies introduced. This has led to a strategic distancing of the party from the Mahon Tribunal debates, with the party claiming that they are not in government to be the watchdog of Fianna Fáil. However, the Greens must balance this with the concerns of the middle class electorate who originally voted for the party due o their record on highlighting the culture of corruption over recent years. The party’s somewhat ambiguous stance on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty in June 2008 was offset by the determined campaigning for a ‘No’ vote by leadership contender and former Green MEP Patricia McKenna, who highlighted concerns about the potential for wider military cooperation as a result of the referendum being passed by Irish electorate, as the only member state voting on treaty. Nonetheless, the emergence of the Irish Green Party from a protest coalition into a coalition partner in government is the most momentous mainstream political event in the history of the nation’s environmental movement. There is a risk that this may lead to a dichotomy between the party and its activist support on certain issues. The grassroots movement has certainly had its share of success and failure. Nonetheless, Irish environmental campaigns have repeatedly displayed the ability to mobilise internal resources and exploit external political opportunities providing campaigns with the momentum to challenge state policies, with temporary and contingent increased access leading to mixed results for the overall environmental movement across the island of Ireland.

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About the Authors:

Liam Leonard received his PhD in sociology and political science from the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2004. He is the Founder and Senior Editor of the Ecopolitics Online Journal www.ecopoliticsonline.com and author of three other books on environmental issues; Politics Inflamed (2005), Green Nation (2006) and the Environmental Movement in Ireland (2008). He has worked as a journalist and has been active politically with the Irish Labour and Green parties. Having worked as lecturer in Social Movements and Environmental Politics in NUIG, he now lectures in Criminology and Sociology in the Sligo Institute of Technology, Ireland.

Michael O’Kane received his PhD in anthropology from Monash University, Victoria, Australia in 2004. He then worked with remote area Indigenous communities in Australia’s Northern Territory from 2004 until 2006 and as a Senior Anthropologist in cultural heritage management in South Australia. From 2007 he has worked with the Innovation and Change Management Group in the Faculty of Land and Food Resources (now the Graduate School of Land and Environment) in the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Published by Irish Greenhouse Press 2008 as a special edition online book for the Ecopolitics Online Journal ISSN 2009-0315

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