The Greens negotiated a legally ineffective commitment in the Programme for Government and then, worse, changed their minds, all with the figleaf of Friends of the Earth support.
By Eoghan O’ Hairis.
Even in a post-truth age, the truth has a way of catching up with you. At least this is what we tell ourselves, as we campaign in the final weeks of the coalition Government to get accountability for a grave political betrayal. I am part of a campaign to stop the Shannon LNG fracked-gas import terminal. The terminal is being proposed for the Tarbert/Ballylongford landbank, just miles from my home town of Listowel in North Kerry. Since I joined the campaign in 2018, I have been part of a campaign wielding evidence and truth as weapons against an American multinational whose CEO is nicknamed the ‘sub-prime lending king’ and its supporters in my local area who pin the prosperity of north Kerry on the project. But it has not been the fossil-fuel industry or its supporters who have been our biggest difficulty in the campaign so far. Nor has it been councillors and TDs in Fianna Fáil and Fíne Gael, who admittedly are all too receptive to the manoeuvrings of this US multinational. Our biggest challenge, and the main reason why we could be out on the road blocking construction of this megaproject in the near future, is the environmental establishment in this country.
In November 2023, Minister Eamon Ryan published his new energy policy, the Energy Security Package. Action 17 of this policy mandated Ireland having a third source of gas, supplementing Corrib and imports via Scotland, in the form of an LNG terminal. This policy U-turn was a betrayal of the promise that Ryan had made to the environmental movement on entering coalition. He could not have accomplished this without the assistance and blessing of Friends of the Earth Ireland.
But before I talk about political betrayal and institutional capture, I must be honest with the reader about the wrongs and the mistakes of our campaign.
We never had a moratorium on LNG. If you were listening to us for the last few years, you could be forgiven for thinking there was one in place, but there never was.
In 2020, somewhere in the midst of the Greens’ negotiations with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, an idea arose in the campaign to pressure the Greens to make a promise to keep fracked gas out if they did go in together. This became known as the red line promise. What was agreed to in this Programme for Government was not in reality a moratorium, but a policy statement. Judge Richard Humphreys clearly defined this in New Fortress’s successful High Court challenge:
“It appears to be common ground between the parties that, contrary to the wording used by the Minister, the Government policy does not constitute a moratorium. It follows that the document constituted a policy preference only, which the board is in law free to depart from because Government policy has only a have-regard-to status and not a comply-with status”.
So this was an agreement based on a statement which had some weight for planning, but it was not a moratorium. The Programme for Government was a faith-based promise, basically. I knew very little about law or policy at the time, but I was part of the bailout generation and could have no faith in the party that helped sell us to the banks. My biggest regret from that time was not to be more assertive in my opposition. I let it slide and deferred to people who had been fighting this for much longer than me, one of whom had fought bravely for years in spite of local pro-LNG sentiment which at times descended into thuggery. But no matter how hard someone fights, our judgement can fail us when we smell victory and want to believe it.
Left to the judgement of one or two individuals who had in-depth knowledge of the Shannon LNG saga, the campaign at that time had no broader democratic mechanisms for collective scrutinising of evidence and desision-making; and everyone seemed to go along with this weak and legally flawed promise. Much of the action on the streets was carried out by Extinction Rebellion (XR) who disavowed political engagement. It took a lot of work and political education from one of the core campaign groups to get XR to even commit to focusing on Shannon LNG as a focal point at the time.
0n 29 October 2020, after the laborious formation of a government, the Programme for Government was published, stating that:
“We do not support the importation of fracked gas and shall develop a policy statement to establish that approach”.
Elsewhere the Programme for Government declared:
“As Ireland moves towards carbon neutrality, we do not believe that it make sense to develop LNG gas import terminals importing fracked gas. Accordingly, we shall withdraw the Shannon LNG terminal from the EU Projects of Common Interest list in 2021”.
Having the right people to advise us in getting a commitment to a planning Directive rather than a policy statement into the Programme for Government, could have saved us an awful lot of grief.
While the first statement had some breadth it was misdirected; the understanding from activists was that once a policy statement favoured stopping LNG terminals, then the Greens, who held the balance of power in government, would be able to implement a viable ban. It became evident to them once the Greens got into power, that a ban on LNG was not a priority for them. Minister Darragh O’ Brien notably did not issue, and was not called upon to issue, an appropriate planning Directive with which An Bord Pleanála would have had to comply. That makes sense now: this action, which would have been a real moratorium, hadn’t even been promised in the Programme for Government, which only agreed to a policy statement. Having the right people to advise us in getting a commitment to a planning Directive rather than a policy statement into the Programme for Government, could have saved us an awful lot of grief.
There is a suspicion that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, led by the Attorney General, and indeed New Fortress, now the owners of the Shannon LNG site, will have been high-fiving at this failure to address the real mechanisms to stop the LNG terminal.
The second statement in the Programme for Government used strange evasive terminology — “we do not believe that it makes sense” — and committed only to one action: “withdrawal from the EU Projects of Common Interest”. A commitment to one specific action can imply no further commitments. To activists negotiating this at the time, the perception was that if European priority status and funding was taken away from the project, it would be a significant blow to its prospects.
This perception was proven wrong when, after the Greens failed to take it off this list in 2021 as promised, the company voluntarily took it off when it was time for renewal in 2022. This puzzled activists at the time. Perhaps it makes sense now in light of Eamon Ryan’s actual policy U-turn in 2023 in favour of a “State-led” LNG. His new plan would be for the Irish taxpayer to subsidise the terminal instead of for Europe to.
So the Programme for Government worked on the assumption that the Greens were in some way in touch with the electorate, that they would not want to commit political suicide by failing to use their hold on the balance of power in government to stop an unpopular megaproject with critical climate and human rights implications. The reality was that the Greens did so well in that election because they had custody of the right brand at a heightened time of climate activism. But many of the people, young and old, who voted them did not have the political education to see that this was just branding and that a great number of their members and representatives live in an elite, institutionalised bubble, away from the pressures of ordinary people.
Still, I cannot fault the campaigners who obtained this deal. The Greens were determined to go into coalition no matter what, and if it were not for the intervention of two people with the support of many other groups, they would have gone into government without any pledge on fracked gas imports. It triggered changes in parties’ policies so that in the end even Fianna fáil and Fine Gael were supposedly against fracked-gas imports.
Meanwhile, the Green Party in government was teeing up for a sell-out. In 2021, it blocked a bill by People before Profit to amend the Planning and Development act which would have banned LNG import terminals. Also in that same year, Eamon Ryan as Minister for Transport, signed off on the sale of the publicly owned landbank in north Kerry to New Fortress Energy.
When Ryan did issue a policy statement in 2021, it was contingent on the outcome of a review of energy security.
The Greens developed coping mechanisms to signal to their supporters and themselves that they were fulfilling their promise. Without a Directive from Darragh O’Brien, Eamon Ryan was left to helplessly write to an Bord Pleanála stressing the importance of his policy preference. To the initial annoyance of her party leaders, well-meaning backbencher Neasa Hourigan proposed a private members bill, which went nowhere in the end and served as a distraction for those in the environmental movement who didn’t know what was going on or how to achieve what they wanted.
In September 2023, this policy ban on LNG terminals was — surprisingly — successful in preventing Shannon LNG from getting planning permission. However, while An Bord Pleanála for once deferred unduly to the Green agenda in refusing this permission, New Fortress lodged a challenge in the High Court. It eventually won its challenge on 30 September 2024 and the project was remitted for new consideration by An Bord Pleanála. It has just been announced that the Bord is to appeal this. Unfortunately, under the next government, the Bord will probably deploy an approach which features an acute awareness that Ryan’s updated energy policy favours the construction of an LNG terminal against the background of the notable ongoing failure to publish a countervailing Directive.
The Greens’ crowning achievement in this regard came in November 2023, Eamon Ryan removed his energy policy statement, and published a new one which mandated, in Action 17, the construction of an LNG terminal under accelerated implementation. After the policy was published, New Fortress reapplied for its gas-fired power station and at the time of the High Court decision to remit the previous planning application, was in fact in pre-application discussions for another application for an LNG terminal in line with Ryan’s new policy. If anything, the High Court decision brought a bit of accountability back to the Greens as Eamon Ryan was all set to ride into the sunset benefiting from plausible deniability, while laying the policy groundwork for permission to be applied for and granted under the next government.
How did he manage to get away with the U-Turn on their already inadequate policy?
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the bombing of the Nordstream pipelines, Irish media were gripped with hysteria about looming energy shortages. Ignoring unchecked data-centre expansion and the fact that domestic energy use is falling, journalists and politicians pointed to gas supply as the chief cause for concern and drove home the case for a third source of gas. This is despite the fact that the findings of a joint report by the Energy Department and CEPA throw those fears into question.
The report (see page 19) examined five shock scenarios and found that Ireland was indeed energy-secure and able to meet requirements in all instances other than if the two interconnectors were taken out of action for extended periods at the same time.
Moving from mere ineptitude to the full-on policy about-turn, the Greens gave in to a contrived war narrative, and set about creating their own false narrative of an LNG terminal which would be controlled by the State and only used in case of emergency. They said in Dáil exchanges, email correspondence and on live television that this terminal would not import fracked gas. This is in spite of the Department’s Security of Supply Technical Report saying that it would import fracked gas.
Grassroots environmental activists from the anti-fracking movement in Ireland and Northern Ireland met Minister Roderic O’ Gorman, who replaced Eamon Ryan as the Greens’ leader, about the urgent threat of fracked gas entering the Irish energy mix and what they could do to stop it. When confronted with this evidence by us on 30 October 2024, Roderic O’ Gorman and his advisers confirmed that they were familiar with this evidence and did not dispute that it would use fracked gas. Green Party Councillor and adviser David Healy talked about multiple LNG tankers coming into Ireland many times a year to replenish Eamon Ryan’s State-led gas-import terminal. They were conceding the betrayal of their pre-2020-election stance, of the watered-down Programme for Government and of their attempted policy.
Central to the misdirection and distraction, was the support that Eamon Ryan received for legally illiterate ineptitude and subsequent policy U-turn from Friends of the Earth (FOE) Ireland which failed to challenge the false Security/War narrative. Instead it welcomed and endorsed the Energy Security Package on the same day that the government published the document. Minister Ryan is quoted as saying “he had flagged ‘the State-led strategic store’ to his party and to environmental NGOs and there was no issue about it”. FOE wrote in its press release that the policy “builds on significant Government commitments and developments, including: In 2020 the Programme for Government pledged to reject fracked gas imports through LNG”.
In fact, the Energy Security Package supersedes and replaces this pledge, and makes it very difficult to keep fracked gas out of the Irish energy mix. The Attorney General had advised the government that the only way to keep fracked gas imports via LNG terminals out of our energy mix was to ban all LNG terminals.(see footnote, Page 83) FOE’s public position up to then had been that “a u-turn on LNG would be a fatal betrayal of the climate movement“.
So the Green Party survived a policy U-turn on LNG politically thanks in no small part to FOE’s endorsement and misrepresentation of government policy. In a much more insidious way, Friends of the Earth has used the Green Party. The support for Eamon Ryan’s U-turn is only one part of a much bigger picture of institutional capture of environmental activism. FOE have been working with the Department on energy security. It also brought the wider umbrella of NGOs which form the Stop Climate chaos coalition into this web of complicity, whether other member organisations knew about it or not. FOE may now be looking to separate itself from Stop Climate Chaos. It has been very happy to team up with Eirgrid, the state utility company which is shouting for new data centres to be built, as part of a collaboration called ‘Our Energy Future’. It received €105k from Renewable Grid Initiative last year, which would have been part of the project with Eirgrid. For the last number of years it has received money from the NTR foundation, a trust set up by NTR, a renewables company which enters into power-purchase agreements with data centres.
In our final meeting with FOE staff in which they were told that they had lost our confidence, its CEO claimed that FOE is not trying to protect the Greens and is working with all “social democratic parties, even Sinn Féin”.
We didn’t pay much heed until we saw recent email correspondence from Sinn Féin TDs. When you get past the first paragraph which lambasts the Greens for the planning bill, their emails are an exact mirror of Eamon Ryan’s.
Friends of the Earth has been the real kingmaker in all of this. It has used the Greens in government to get a seat at the table of permanent government: to almost become an unofficial part of the operations of government. It has supported a policy which will allow fracked gas in, without consultation from the wider grassroots environmental movement.
They talk about stopping something called “commercial” LNG, and instead propose a terminal that would be “state-led to avoid lock-in. It must not increase gas demand, it must be temporary”.
Friends of the Earth has been the real kingmaker in all of this. It has used the Greens in government to get a seat at the table of permanent government: to almost become an unofficial part of the operations of government. It has supported a policy which will allow fracked gas in, without consultation from the wider grassroots environmental movement. Now the Greens are going into the political wilderness, and FOE doesn’t need them anymore. But FOE still needs the environmental movement that it sidelined and betrayed— its legitimacy and credibility depends on it. Forgetting this will be FOE’s undoing.
Our calls for the Greens to revoke action 17 in the final days of this government have been fruitless. The campaign has made some mistakes, but we vocally tried to hold the Greens to account at every step of the way. Unfortunately, at times our numbers were small because many succumbed to wishful thinking or thought we had already won.
In these circumstances we were outmanoeuvred and our movement divided by the reluctance and outright resistance by some to go after Friends of the Earth, who worked with Eamon Ryan’s Department on the energy security review on which the watered-down 2021 policy was contingent.
But I will not give up hope of stopping this. We owe it to our many supporters in Pennsylvania, whose children continue to bear the cancer and birth defects of fracking, The climate crisis is unrelenting and the evidence of the harms of fracking is not going anywhere. Thousands were mobilised against Shannon LNG in 2018-2019, and can be again, An environmental movement which has been growing ever since Rossport, believes in people power and will fight Shannon LNG tooth and nail. This is a movement that has transparency and does not see environmental issues as separate from class, capitalism and imperialism.
We have slowly been improving our faculties for collective political engagement and decision-making and we try to hold each other accountable to the movement. Strategically worse even than trusting Eamon Ryan and his neoliberal Green Party to follow through on a promise, our biggest mistake was not holding FOE accountable early enough. We are still in action but we have learnt an awful lot.
