Eamon Ryan has shuffled off the political stage, but not before telling us that he “regrets none of the climate policies” the Green Party pushed. Owen McCormack takes him to task and argues that the environmental movement and climate activists urgently need to move beyond the Green Party’s neoliberal illusions.
Eamon Ryan wrote his own political eulogy this week and had it published in the Journal. Unsurprisingly, it follows the same self-serving line that we have come to expect of the Green Party and their backers: The “kamikaze” Greens did the noble thing by going into government for the sake of the planet and are being punished for implementing their policies. It is the Greens’ great tragedy – and ours – that the ignorant public didn’t recognise and appreciate their crusading approach to climate action.
There is a basic problem with this argument. The exit poll showed that 51% of people believe the Government is not doing enough on climate change. 3% voted for the Greens. Either there has been a monumental failure on the part of the Greens to “show their work”, or people simply don’t think what they did was good enough.
The reality is that the disastrous Green performance in the general election was a predictable outcome after four years supporting Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. They will try to spin the defeat as noble; of principled politicians willing to take the hit for their great achievements in tackling climate chaos and biodiversity loss. In fact, the four years are a calamitous failure on many fronts and a disaster in demobilising the climate movement. Young climate strikers’ mass mobilisations in 2017/19 were cynically misused by many groups to support the Greens entering a neoliberal coalition which could never tackle the causes of climate change.
You could fill a library with the various betrayals and outrageous votes that Green TDs lined up behind during the four years: from Mother and Baby home survivors, to Debenhams workers, to student nurses to asylum seekers; all were thrown under the bus with the justification that the greater goal had to be their focus; their eyes were on the prize of climate action and saving the planet. In return for these sell outs, we got the Climate Act and Action Plan mixed in with a great deal of hype and self congratulations about cycle tracks and public transport. Far from a worthy return on their betrayals, the Greens achieved nothing of substance.
The Climate Act and Action Plan
The Climate Act and the Climate Action Plan are supposedly rock solid legal frameworks which will see the state’s emissions fall and the various targets and carbon budgets implemented as there are now legally binding targets that any Govt must adhere to. This is a fantasy which is failing now and will fail in the years ahead. The targets are to cut emissions by half by 2030 and reach “net zero” by 2050. Neither will happen, while the very notion of “net zero” has been exposed as an accountancy fraud by many scientists and commentators.
At the heart of the Climate Act is the acceptance of the state’s need for economic competitiveness as a consideration on any climate action; The Climate advisory council used this to justify opposition to any curb on data centre expansion. The Act is full of vague and carefully worded “get out” clauses; including protection for big Agri interests and the promise of future tech as a saviour. The nasty business of reducing actual emissions now is elided with lovely future targets and budgets. The hope is for a future technology which might one day magically remove carbon and store it somewhere. Globally, hopes for a future form of Carbon sequestration is used to allow fossil fuels companies continue to profit today and destroy the planet. The Greens’ great legislative achievement was to put this into a state law; in future tech we trust.
The Action plan similarly disintegrates if looked at too closely. The Greens spent years pretending that 1 million EVs by 2030 was a miracle cure for climate ills, while seaweed feed for Goodman’s and Dawn meats ever increasing herd numbers were offered as palliatives elsewhere. Even their “ambitious” retrofit plans simply regurgitated targets from the previous governments and continued to leave most ordinary workers with little prospect of any retrofits that could make a difference to the actual amount of energy needed to heat homes.
The Greens pinned their hopes on private development of offshore wind, hoping that renewable energy will provide 80% of the state’s energy needs. However, even if corporate offshore wind farms are built, the energy they produce will simply feed the ever-expanding data centre sector and will not replace the oil or gas currently being used.
In his piece in the Journal, Eamon Ryan lauded the 6.8% reduction in emissions the Greens supposedly achieved last year. However, the only reason that year saw any overall decline in emissions has nothing to do with the Greens, the Climate Act or their precious carbon taxes. It is essentially an accountancy trick. By increasing by 87% the amount of electricity it imported from the UK and by not having to account for the emissions embedded in that imported energy, the state could claim a 17% fall in its energy generated emissions.
In other areas such as nitrate use, any reduction seems to have been driven by war and price fluctuation in raw materials. It certainly isn’t driven by a planned reduction in dairy herd numbers. The Greens avoided any conflict with business interests and the insane policy of creating markets abroad for dairy and milk products continued to grow under their government. Instead they supported the fantasy pushed by bodies like the IFA and Teagasc that new innovations in technology and science, such as seaweed feeds for cattle, or smart use of data in using fertiliser, could miraculously reduce emissions from agriculture. They won’t.
Climate Action, Corporate Action – What’s the difference?
The Greens like to lament that they were a junior coalition partner and therefore couldn’t insist on bolder or more radical action lest their FF/FG partners ditch them. But tellingly, it was a Green party minister, Pippa Hackett, who pushed a wholly unsustainable and damaging forestry plan; one which from the start understood what was acceptable to FF/FG business interests and had complete disregard for biodiversity or any real intention of seeing forests as anything other than possible commercial opportunities. Not only did the Greens fail to deliver any meaningful increase in the state’s abysmally low forest cover, but their plans will further incentivise mono plantations of sitka spruce, creating ecological dead zones which may actually turn out to release more carbon than they sequester in the long term.
Everywhere, Green ministers were the most enthusiastic about marrying climate action to corporate needs and market solutions.
Ryan was always willing to go to bat for the continued proliferation of data centres on the basis not only of the state’s competitiveness and need to be utterly subservient to the demands of multinational corporations. Yet, while Ryan reassures us that the offshore we need to power them is just around the corner, the new demand for energy from data centres continues to outstrip growth in new renewable energy.
The Greens also ensured that any growth in offshore energy will boost the profits of various multinational corporations and private interests involved while the state will remain completely dependent on the investment decisions of private funds and companies to realise any growth in this energy. Effectively they signed off on the privatisation of the country’s renewable energy. Various companies used their dominance to push against any planning restrictions or concerns with the possible damage done to fragile marine environments when the turbines eventually do get built.
Even more disastrously, the Greens and Ryan specifically have left open the door for both LNG terminals and new oil and gas wells to be exploited. It was Ryan who killed Bríd Smith’s Climate Emergency Bill which would have stopped dead any attempt to extract oil or gas in already licensed areas off the coast; a decision that is likely to see 1.5 trillion cubic feet of gas from the Inishkea pumped into the atmosphere. It was Ryan who raised the fictitious spiel that a state built LNG was somehow different from a private one, and again left the door open for Fortress Energy and others to build new fossil fuel infrastructure at a time scientists are screaming of the need to stop all new developments.
It is true that despite their utter failure to tackle the vested interest in agri business, fossil fuel infrastructure or the data centre sector the Greens have earned the unremitting hostility of some sections of the wealthy and elite.
While they may claim this is proof of their success, it is actually the opposite. O’Leary and others like Independent Ireland head Fitzmaurice can target the Greens and rubbish the mildest proposals because they know how removed the Greens are from most ordinary workers and small farmers. They make an easy target, and defenders of business as usual and outright climate deniers hope to scare all others from any meaningful climate action. In fact, the Greens and Michael O’Leary have cultivated a mutually beneficial fake animosity over the past few years. O’Leary attacks the Greens as a way of promoting plane ticket sales. The Greens use Michael O’Leary as an example of the worst kind of climate villain that we need them to protect us from. All the while, they refuse to tax aviation fuel, refuse to ban private jets and uphold the tax haven economy that enriches him.
Climate vs. Imperialism
Eamon Ryan and the Greens went into government on the back of a mass movement on climate. He now explains how, “the tide of public interest in climate breakdown receded as Covid and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza filled our screens.”
Of course, Ryan doesn’t accept any responsibility for the deflation of the Irish climate movement, nor does he acknowledge the connection between the Greens’ failure on climate and their subservience to US and EU imperialism. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Ryan was quick to call for Europe to stop buying Russian fossil fuels – anti-war action and climate action going hand in hand, perhaps? Of course not – at the same time, Irish Green MEPs voted on a resolution on Ukraine which included a call for the expansion of LNG.
When Israel began its US-backed genocide in Gaza, the Greens had nothing to say as the US military, one of the largest polluters in the world, continued to pass through Shannon airport. Moreover, as Minister for Transport, it was up to Eamon Ryan to give permission to aircraft to carry weapons through Irish airspace. 1,185 applications were made in 2023. 910 were approved, 38 were cancelled by flight operators and only 8 were refused.
In 2024, it appears that these permissions are no longer being sought, but flights continue to transport weapons and ammunition through Irish airspace to Israel. Ryan was an enthusiastic support of the sanctions against Russia after invaded Ukraine, but has not done a thing to target the airlines providing the material being used for a genocide in Gaza.
The Ryan and the Greens cannot bring themselves to take action against genocide for precisely the same reasons that they are allowing our energy to be gobbled up by data centres and our housing to be hoovered up by investment funds – they are utterly subservient to western imperialism and corporate power, and cannot even imagine the possibility of challenging them.
We need class politics
The Greens’ class base meant ignoring the struggle of ordinary people while offering only carbon taxes, unaffordable retro fits and costly EVs as a solution. What was never on the agenda was targeting the profits of Ryanair or Goodman, or offering workers free and frequent public transport and retrofits paid upfront by the state. The Greens could never envisage a coalition of small farmers, workers and climate activists confronting the corporate elite behind climate chaos.
The Greens will laud their spend on public transport and cycle tracks, but in reality for an economy that had such surplus funds, the scale of investments in badly needed services such as public transport were no great achievement. Even FF/FG understand that a functioning economy needs buses and trains.
For Ryan and Co. there is no conflict between climate action and the imperatives of capital accumulation or the prioritization of profits. In their view everyone is responsible for climate chaos, so personal behavioral change takes precedence over any need to question systemic causes of environmental destruction.
The Greens’ failure has zero to do with Dáil numbers and their junior status in a coalition; it is built into any government based on acceptance of market forces, competition and neo-liberal rules. Such a government is incapable of addressing the causes of climate chaos or biodiversity loss as both are caused by the very system they commit to defend and grow.
Four years ago groups like Friends of the Earth marshalled luminaries like Mark Ruffolo to push for the Greens to enter the coalition; they and other environmental groups urged all those concerned with the climate crisis to support the Greens’ participation as Climate concerns trumped all others. “We don’t have time for your revolution because the climate needs action now” they screamed at us. The endorsement of these groups has meant a complete demobilisation of the climate movement and the betrayal of the young climate activists’ hopes. The lesson of four years of Green treachery in government is that the climate movement and humanity does not have time for fantasies of tech solutions or working within a neoliberal paradigm that doesn’t challenge the wealthy elites or their profits but actively tries to shoehorn all climate actions to meet their needs and protect their economic system.
The climate, and the future of the planet and humanity doesn’t have time for more Green illusions in capitalism.