Eamon Ryan announced his retirement this week and a leadership context to replace him is under way. Owen McCormack assesses Ryan’s significant service to the neoliberal State and argues that the Green Party’s coalition with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael has been a disaster for the climate movement.
Eulogies came thick and fast for Eamon Ryan last week as he announced his retirement from both the Ministerial office and the Dáil. Many of the flowing praises looked at the PR campaign against Ryan by Michael O’Leary and Ryanair, Ireland’s largest single fossil fuel emitter. If corporate polluters like the obnoxious O’Leary are attacking Ryan, it follows that he must indeed have been doing something right?
O’Leary and various deniers and far right attacks aside, Ryan and the Greens have been a disaster for the climate movement and for addressing the escalating climate crisis.
Under Ryan’s leadership, the Greens have ditched any pretence of being a left party and have reneged on a plethora of progressive policies; from neutrality, direct provision abolition, endorsing CETA, running over student nurses and the Debenhams workers, ditching mother and baby home survivors, to lifting an eviction ban with devastating impacts on families and thousands of tenants.
Their participation in a neoliberal regime has emboldened climate deniers and the far right here as it has allowed them to point out the obvious contradictions between policies which impact ordinary people most while corporate polluters get an effective free ride.
In return they have offered piecemeal reforms whose utter ineffectiveness is starkly highlighted by EPA carbon emission figures. The Greens in Government are the physical embodiment of their middle class constituency which while concerned with the environmental crisis, can never question the systemic causes driving it. They offer cycle tracks and pedestrianised streets for some. Unfortunately, while these things are good, they work best on a habitable planet. The Greens wholehearted embrace of free markets, techno optimism and corporate rule books makes a livable planet unlikely in which their bike lanes can operate smoothly.
The price paid for coalition included turning their back on a raft of other campaigns and groups over the 4 years of government. Their defence was that doing so was the only way to tackle the climate crisis. They were the adults in the room and history will judge Ryan and the Greens as brave visionaries prepared to make unpopular decisions to get the job done on the number one issue facing humanity.
This self-serving narrative is complete hokum and derided by the simple facts.
Under Ryan, the Greens have firmly identified themselves as neoliberals with the same fervour for free market policies as any conservative in Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. Gone is any pretence that they understand that the climate crisis is driven by the very dynamics of capitalism and free market policies.
Ryan’s legacy
The jewel in their crown is claimed to be the Climate Act.This law supposedly compels the Government to reach specific targets of Co2 emission reductions. It set targets of 51% cuts in Co2 emissions by 2030 and aimed for a “climate neutral economy” by 2050. Neither target is adequate for the crisis and neither will be achieved by the Greens or their successors under present trends. The EPA figures show how glaring is the gap between the flowery rhetoric of the climate act and the reality of emissions.
But the failure is deeper. The Climate Act specifically spells out how the State’s “competitiveness” must be a consideration in any climate policy. It also highlights that attempts at Co2 reductions can look to promised future technology that might develop more cost effective ways of cutting emissions in the future; don’t do today what can be put off for tomorrow. While inventive in an accounting sphere, such techno-optimism is useless in the face of the geo-physical processes that drive climate chaos.
Built into the very law the Greens eulogise to justify countless betrayals today are opt outs and cop outs to allow for business as usual in the future. Failure to address emissions is built into their crowning achievement.
Nor is it a matter of words. The Act’s mention of “competitiveness” has been used by the Climate advisory council to justify a continued policy of data centre proliferation. Ryan and the Greens have steadfastly refused to countenance any limits to this sector’s growth and the insane growth of these centres (all at the behest of corporate tech giants ) makes reaching emission targets an impossibility.
Instead they have tried to tie data centre growth to expansion of renewable wind and solar energy.
Effectively, renewable energy is being privatised in order to facilitate continued data centre growth and any objections to specific projects are derided as climate sabotage.
Land, Wind and Sea: All for Sale
Allied to data centre growth has been the Greens offshore wind policy. Over 20 years since Fianna Fáil first issued licences to companies to develop offshore wind energy, the Greens have copper fastened the neoliberal policy of effectively privatising the offshore energy sector. Justified again on the basis of attracting inward investment from private global multi nationals, the auction scheme and facilitation of private for profit development means the state is completely on the hook to private investment decisions in its hopes to unroll offshore renewable energy.
What gets built, when it gets built, who profits from it – none of this will be in the control of the state and reaching climate targets or replacing fossil fuel use will be relegated in favour of a private multinational’s bottom line. Again, any objections on grounds of safety or of the potential damage to precious marine environments are derided as nimbyism and stalling climate goals. Private offshore wind companies know they have the state on the hook and are pushing for a wish list in terms of planning and development rules whose chief goal is not to address the climate crisis in a timely manner but to ensure maximisation of their future profits.
Recent history suggests that this privatisation of wind energy will be as catastrophic as the Broadband privatisation but with even more profound impacts.
Ryan, with other Greens like Pippa Hackett and Brian Leddin has variously gone to bat for some form of LNGs as a potential solution to an energy crisis almost wholly driven by the growth of data centres, or justified massive commercial Sitka tree plantations as a solution to Ireland’s woeful forestry cover. In every area and every policy their dearth of imagination or ability to think of any policy which doesn’t rest of private for profit actors has meant capitulation to the demands of the market and ultimately to utter failure to reign in Co2 emissions. Nor have Ryan and Co been dragged unwillingly into this neoliberal sphere. In every area they have been the most trenchant advocates of market and tech fixes and derided opposition or People Before Profit’s moves to, for example, limit data centre growth, ban outright LNGs and new fossil fuel infrastructure, or even advocate for free public transport; dismissed by Ryan for leading to “useless” journeys.
Class Blindness
For Ryan and the Greens, class doesn’t really exist. Personal behavioural change in a neoliberal state must apply to all. From the privileged urban professional who can get €50,000 in grants to match their own funds for a deep retrofit or a new EV, to a low paid worker struggling to pay energy bills or fill their petrol car, all must make sacrifices for the future.
This blindness to class means two things. First, all the Greens policies will fail to address the drivers of climate chaos as it leaves the very economic system and its insatiable need for growth intact. Hopes of some technological fix mixed with appeals to corporate businesses to switch to “clean” energy will come to nothing. Secondly, the inability of the Greens to build a movement that attracts workers, small farmers and those who will suffer most from climate chaos has opened the door to the right and outright climate denialism. If all that is on offer is carbon taxes and demands for costly personal behavioural changes for ordinary people while Ryanair, Goodman, Amazon or Google can continue to profit from business as usual and the continued use and production of fossil fuels and Co2, the glaring contradiction will allow for the right and others to deride all climate actions.
Shifting the Deck Chairs
As Ryan prepares to shuffle off the political playing field, we should not expect any change of direction from the neoliberal Greens. It looks as though the leadership contest will be played out between Pippa Hackett and Roderic O’Gorman, which will guarantee more of the same. Under Hackett’s watch as the Minister for Land Use and Biodiversity, Coillte made a deal to facilitate an investors’ land grab and sell off up to 123 acres of land to a fund, Gresham House. Hackett has rejected the idea of a “progressive alliance” of centre left political parties, saying instead that she will “work with any political party that is prepared to facilitate real environmental action”. We already know this means a continuation of the status quo that keeps Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in power, punishes ordinary people, and more tinkering around the edges when it comes to real climate action.
Her opposition in the leadership race is Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth of Ireland, Roderic O’Gorman. O’Gorman came into power promising to end direct provision, quickly modifying this to a promise to “take the meanness” out of the system, and at this point could justifiably have his ministerial title changed to Minister for Tents, as his department ever increasing levels of cruelty on asylum seekers. O’Gorman also oversaw the Mother and Baby Home Redress Scheme which excluded 24,000 survivors and required survivors to have spent more than 180 days in a home to be eligible for redress. He represents a textbook example of the chasm between what the Greens say before elections and the depths to which they will stoop to in government.
Prior to the Greens’ entry into government and before Covid struck, the climate movement was growing here and globally. The Greens co-option of many environmental NGOs has seen a sharp dip in climate protest numbers and in influence. Even as the crisis escalates globally, the movement here seems stifled as many environmental groups are caught between defending the piecemeal reforms offered by Ryan and the Greens in government (especially when confronted by far right and corporate denialism) and attacking their utter failures. The most pernicious legacy of Ryan and the Greens may not be their actual policy failures but their co-option of the climate movement to effectively serve as a justification for coalition with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. With Ryans departure and the Greens failure more evident with each day, the left needs to rescue the climate movement from those who would tie it to techno fixes and free markets.
