The Green Disease

If one was to assert in words or rhyme
that the greens are the cause of ecology's decline
The birds and the bees, the leaves on the trees
would undoubtedly declare one to be out of ones mind

Some months ago when I was a member of the Green party, I recall a meeting (one of many) with Trevor, a man whom I admire more than I dislike. Although he is not the leader of the Green Party, Trevor is undoubtedly the crown-less regent of the Irish Greens. He maintains a hold over the minds and the hearts of most green party members. Most within the Environmentally conscious community can readily recall how he quixotically resigned his ministerial post in the last government following allegations that he had interfered with due process. It emerged (or was leaked to the paparazzi)  that in his capacity as a Minister he had written to the Gardai in support of one of his constituents who was involved in a criminal matter.

Sargent is undoubtedly a man of high moral character, chances are it was the media who were interfering in a good process, and that the then Minister's motives were morally sound, if not politically misguided.  One cannot help but have an admiration for someone who might act with their conscience rather than the usual squint being focused on a political career.  A cynic might declare however that Sargent is more intelligent than he is moral, and that he was simply waiting for the first opportunity to end his own involvement in the illicit affair with the political prostitute that was once Fianna Fail.  That he wisely wished to get his trousers on and flee the crime scene before the inevitable pounding of an angry reality upon the bedroom doors of Lenister House.

A voting public might also recall how Trevor resigned the leadership of the party when the Greens went into government with Fianna Fail; keeping his word that he would 'never lead the Party into Government with Fianna Fail.  Sargent is either of impeccable moral character, or he is a shrewd and clever politician, who is not only capable of smelling rats, but of being the first to join them in jumping ship when the sea water starts to rush in.  Forever the optimist, I am inclined towards the former conclusion but am ever wary of the latter.

These days Trevor is noticeably absent from the top table at most Green gatherings. Although unwilling to lead the Greens into government with Fianna Fail, he has apparently chosen to join most of his former Ministerial cohort and quietly live out their lump sums in political obscurity. Unlike the bevy of bankers and Fianna Fail ministers who have chosen to float from stormy Irish political waters into the calmer climes of a Mediterranean yacht or villa, Sargent has taken the good counsel of Voltaire and has chosen to 'tend his garden'. To focus on his horticultural skills, gardening-publications, and the good work that flows from the National Ecology Centre at Sonnairte.

If there is any suspicion to be levelled at Sargent it arises from the fact that he has chosen to take a back seat and to watch as his party and the Green movement in Ireland slowly disintegrate and disappear from the political landscape.  His gardening and scribbling, calls to mind that familiar phrase of Moore, about the triumph of evil when good men choose to do nothing.  When the Party is in dire need of leadership that has some moral and ethical foundation, Trevor is pruning apple trees.

If  there is a lack of support for Sargent or the Greens in general, it is because the same political failures sit at top table and continue to preside over; the ongoing destruction of  Irish ecology and our worsening global ecological crisis. Seeking votes for the Greens with the same personalities at the helm, is akin to asking people to deposit their savings in Anglo with Seany Fitz as the CEO.  The Green Party's response to these unfolding tragedy's is not with contrition or introspection, neither do they give voice to the anger and despair felt by most of the ecologically aware members of Irish society; but rather with a closing of ranks and the same failed leadership at the helm of a rapidly sinking ship.

The on going consequence of this closing of ranks, this protection of the old school and old guard, of pensioned ministers and former MEP's; is the loss of many members of real calibre, and a million potential voters, who are not blind to the lack of accountability.  Sadly we witness the impotent fracturing of the Green voice into small ineffectual environmental factions. These small voiceless groups are scattered about the country, left to fight; Governments, Multinational Corporations, and vested interests, in doomed contests to; save our bogs, protect our beleaguered ecology from the horrors of fraking, of small and large scale pollution and the destruction of habitat, heritage and species.  In the midst of our recession, with the ongoing hunger for 'jobs at any price', the environment is now easy prey, it has no chaperon, no voice and little if any hope.

In conversation at this particular meeting, in recognition of the loss of many party members Trevor stated  that:  "the Green Party is bigger than individual personalities", and I persisted in my membership of the party because I believed him.

I am however, a realist and a pragmatist, I have always believed that the way forward is principally composed of the shortest distance between two points. If  I am guilty of romance it is in the love I have for great men and women who have passed, who have never known me, but have left an indelible mark upon the landscape of western culture, upon the landscape of science and literature, and upon the landscape of my own immortal soul, (what ever that is when its at home).

I have a romantic love for my heroes, for; Joyce, Beckett, Freud, Marks, Tolstoy Dostoevsky, Nietzsche Kafka and others, and despite Nietzsche's understandable scorn for nationalism, I have a love for my country, and hence for Padraig Pearse whom I believe to have been a Christian, an Uberman, a saviour of the scant physical and cultural remnants of our Gaelic, Celtic, and pre-Christian philosophical heritage.

In a practical sense I believe that these things are important, they are important because humanity has lost its way.  Humanity has set itself upon a consumptive and materialist path that leads towards catastrophe and mass extinctions. A path that has the horrific side effect of rendering us more and more stupid as we proceed further down its yellow bricked paving.  In a practical sense whatever one thinks of  Pearse, of the rebellion of 1916, or of nationalism in general; the ideals that Pearse put to the fore of his particular struggle, were and remain the antithesis of capitalism and materialism.  They are the antithesis of what Ireland has made of her independence.

In essence my romance, my love for intelligent men and women, my love for Ireland, is contained within the rather pragmatic belief that within these things, within Joyce's Ulysses, within the environmental and cultural ideals that spurned Pearse to his execution; within the alternate world of of the Irish language, within the good counsel of Emerson and Thoreau, and buried within the archaeology of what separates pre-Christian philosophy from the capitalism of modern Catholicism; there can be found the seeds of hope, the seeds of a salvation not just Ireland, but for the human race in its entirety. 

What stands in the way, what bars us from seeing here, is ignorance and small mindedness, the intellectual contraction that accompanies globalisation. The stupefaction of the masses (Yes Lord Sugar!) and the increased materialism that accompanies this contraction in our intelligence.  That is not to say that the more materialistic one is the more stupid one is (although the point might be argued) from my own perspective I am of the conviction that the more materialistic one is in ones thinking, the less intelligent one is, the less philosophical one is, and as such the more stupid one is in ones behaviours.

We behave stupidly when we are ignorant of an alternative.  We must be kept in ignorance if we are to continue to be good consumers (that is the job of RTE) and consumption is at the heart of environmental destruction.  This ignorance of the alternatives that lie buried within our rich environmental, cultural and intellectual heritage, is the same entity that Joyce referred to as 'GPI' (General Paralysis of the Insane). Ironically, this ignorance is not blissful, but is instead the cardinal ingredient to unhappiness meaningless and superfluous consumption.

When the Greens were in government, the present party leader was the then Minister for Energy.  At a Green convention in Wexford this year, the director of the documentary Pipe Down, which follows the Shell to Sea campaign, the sale of our Natural Gas reserves to Shell, and the struggle of locals against the miles of pipeline that are to traverse their lands.  Rather than help arriving from the Green Party, it was the then Minister for Energy and present party leader who signed the eviction orders, turned the blind eye and did the bidding of Fianna Fail.

I am afraid that I have come to differ with Tervor's analysis, and must conclude that the Green Party is no bigger than a few personalities.  That the party is presently dominated by an old guard of  familiar faces who have moulded it into their own corporation, an entity that is primarily concerned about their careers, their pensions and continued aspirations for a political future.

And yet in terms of ethical policy and environmental ideals, the Green Party is perhaps the closest to the hearts and minds of a majority of decent Irish people.  There is (I believe), an ideological continuity  that joins a pre-Christian and Celtic respect for nature, with the ideals of  Pearse, and the core ideals of green politics.  The question the Green party must ask itself is, not how to get new members, but rather, how it has effectively alienated so many? That the 'Emerald Isle' should not be Green in politics is a rich and telling irony.

It is a tragedy that at a time when the environment appears to be haemorrhaging like never before, when the abuses perpetrated upon the Irish and the global ecological landscape are approaching the level of genocide, that this should be the time when the Green party should be upon the brink of extinction?  At the Party's Ard Fheis in Galway recently it was reported that the party may soon have to surrender its head office on Suffolk street.

There are many who might feel that this tragedy is simply 'bad luck' or 'bad planning'. I on the other hand believe that it is a collapse that is condoned by party leadership, by their lacking the honesty to declare that mistakes were made and by exercising some of the same accountability that the Greens have always pleaded for when on the opposition benches.

I suspect this type of accountability  will not be forthcoming, and that the Captains have decided that the ship must go down with both passengers and crew.

In it's present form, were the green party to be operating in the opposite direction, were its ideals and mandate to be the 'destruction of Ireland's ecology' rather than its preservation, it could only be accused of doing a fine job.  At present it's, absence from the political arena, its impotence and the loss of any cohesive environmental movement, translate into two equally unsavoury possibilities. Either the party exists only to serve the personal interests of those at the helm, or it exists to facilitate the ongoing and destruction of environment and the very ideals upon which both it and  the state were founded.