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The Green Party should be – and appear to be – this century’s equivalent to the trade union movement. By Councillor Oliver Moran. Protests against environmental taxes in Europe, farmers’ blockades in the Netherlands, urban unrest in France, and the water-charges movement here in Ireland should cast a long shadow for the Green Party in government. The Waste Action Plan for a Circular Economy launched last week contains much that is worthwhile, but an awareness of the political importance of avoiding an environmental transition that lacks social empathy should be visible in everything the party says and does. Climate change and ecological decline disproportionately punish the worst off. The systems of economics that underlie them are exploitative of the poor, both globally and domestically, every bit as much as they are exploitative of nature and the planet. The solutions not only should not add to that but must necessarily challenge the assumptions of ecologically and socially exploitative capitalism. This is not an easy balance to strike. System change, if not implemented well, is more likely to affect the most vulnerable first. The party has progressive values at its core. This is a party that has among its founding principles that (a) unrestricted economic growth must be replaced by an ecologically and socially regulated economy and (b) the poverty of two thirds of the world’s family demands a fair re-distribution of the world’s resources. But the Green Party has missed opportunities since entering government to speak in that sociological voice with the same conviction that it speaks about technocratic solutions for environmentalism. This shortcoming isn’t derived from any malice on behalf of my party colleagues in government but from a cultural reluctance within the party to publicly express these convictions in clear and unequivocal tones. One of the roles of the Just Transition Greens, an explicitly left-wing faction affiliated with the party, is to challenge the party in government. Demanding more of it. Time, both political and in the context of climate and biodiversity emergencies, does not allow us the luxury of waiting. The Just Transition Greens’ critique is evolving. Its end-point is not defined. What unites our members is not particular stances or policy demands that are very different to the rest of the party but a shared conviction. A conviction that it is the duty of the green movement in government to ensure that environmental solutions not only do not punish the exploited further but actively improve their conditions. A just transition For some this conviction is based in eco-socialism. For others it is faith based. One of the most acerbic criticisms of Pippa Hackett’s forestry bill was from the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. Others, like me, reach for the traditional green pillars of peace, democracy and social justice. This does not boil down to simplistic notions of “cycles lanes” vs “social justice”. It is about the lenses through which we see the world. Cycle infrastructure can and should be seen through the lens of social justice too, empowering communities through accessible and safe transportation. The unifying aspect is a philosophy that refuses to disentangle the social from the environmental. A just transition recognises that not everything that is good for the planet is good for people. If, in our rush to save the planet, we neglect the dignity of the poorest in our society, what kind of world will we leave our children? A just transition should lift up the horizons of all people, improving standards of living and protecting at risk workers and communities. Waste policy On 4 September, Eamon Ryan launched the new national waste policy. Justified or not, a far reaching policy that puts emphasis on the producers of waste was overshadowed by two bullet points in an 89-page document that seemingly lacked a nous for social justice. The irony was this drove some people to in effect defending exploitative capitalism. It was lost in some of the criticism that ‘buy one get one free’ on items like confectionery and fizzy drinks does not benefit the lower paid. It is itself a system of exploitation driving consumption and waste. The supermarkets and retail multiples are no friends of the left or workers and producers. They work actively to exploit the poor, labour, farmers and the environment. Neither is ‘fast fashion’ – as opposed to affordable clothing – a source of liberation for the poor. It too is exploitation, based on driving consumption, and it is a source of humiliation for people without the resources to keep up. The waste policy is very good at what it sets out to do. What it does, it does well on its own terms. Where it falls short is in addressing some of the greater social challenges with equal strength. It describes but doesn’t explicitly challenge the inherent wastefulness of capitalism. It lacks a sociological perspective. It doesn’t mention the income of households and how this affects consumption and waste patterns. Politically, launching a waste policy – that on the face of it would levy low cost clothing and ban cheap food offers – the day after a report had shown that 18% in Ireland are suffering deprivation is tone deaf. Not wrong, as I have described above, but tone deaf – and seemingly lacking in empathy and equal conviction for matters of social justice. A socio-economic lens Over-consumption and waste need to be seen through a lens that is socioeconomic every bit as much as technocratic. Tackling over-consumption and waste will only succeed if simultaneous efforts are undertaken to tackle income inequality, food sovereignty and human-rights violations. Our environmental policies should recognise the interconnectedness between economic development and environmental degradation. They should, as the UN Sustainable Development Goals demand, seek to reach the furthest behind first. That is why our policies include a Universal Basic Income and a commitment to transform the relationship between producer and consumer, bringing them closer together – without the mediation of the consumption-driven capitalism of supermarkets and retail multiples. Both
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Named one of Time’s ‘100 Most Influential People’ in both 2004 and 2015, Irish-American Samantha Power served as US President Obama’s human rights advisor for four years and a further four as US UN Ambassador. She is famed for her achievements but also for her conscience. By Caroline Hurley. Samantha Power was born in 1970 to Dubliner Jim Power, a musical dentist and Vera Delaney, a multi-talented sportswoman and medical doctor from Cork, both dividing studies between London and Dublin. She was brought up in Dublin, living in Castleknock and attending Mount Anville school, sadly spending too much time downstairs in Hartigan’s pub while her father drank his health away upstairs. Her mother’s specialities took her to Kuwait in 1977 to set up the first kidney-transplant and dialysis unit. Power retained strong memories of visiting. An affair between Vera and her boss Eddie Bourke inspired their plan to emigrate to America. Vera sued Jim, whose alcoholism was worsening, for child custody. The judge’s comment opens the book: “what right has this woman to be so educated?” With no divorce and less than 10% of married women working, Vera’s confrontation of the Irish system for her rights was exceptional, and paid off. The new family resettled quickly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and never looked back. As a young adult, Power heard how her father’s decomposed remains were found in her childhood bed. Therapy in response to severe anxiety symptoms centred on this relationship. She suffers demobilising anxiety attacks and back pain: “lungers” is the term used by a former boyfriend who witnessed her struggling to breathe. Pathos aside, Power’s depiction of Irishness veers towards caricature, perhaps because although well-disposed she invests so much in the damage her father seems to have precipitated. She went to school in Atlanta, Georgia, obtained a BA in Yale and a JD law degree in Harvard. A trip around Europe in 1990 broadened young Samantha’s horizons, as did a stint as administrative assistant to Mort Abramowitz, highly-respected President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank. Abramowitz’s opinion columns, friendships and diplomatic efforts for the former Yugoslavia momentously drew Power away from a possible career in sports journalism and into the escalating ethnic conflict between Bosnian Serbs and non-Serbs. She became a war reporter there. On her own initiative, she drafted a chronology of events titled ‘Breakdown In The Balkans’. The hundred copies she self-printed quickly ran out due to the ‘hugely useful’ content, as American leaders struggled to comprehend and top officials resigned in protest at US inertia. Feistily forging a news pass at the Foreign Policy desk, Power toured the Balkans in August 1993, relying on UN papers and protection at checkpoints, meeting many tortured bereaved refugees and making new journalist friends. Back in Washington, US News published her eye-witness account. She returned to Zagreb, proceeding to Sarajevo, Srebrenica and beyond. Hazardously chronicling survivors’ experiences for nearly two years, demand grew for her reportage. She blames herself for not personally preventing the 1995 murder of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica: I was the correspondent in Munich while the bodies burned in Dachau. … I had power and I failed to use it. The book makes it clear that Samantha held herself to the highest standards, at this stage. To her indignation, loopholes in UN approval of the no-fly zone patrolled by US and NATO aircraft allowed slaughters to continue. Throughout her career, Power has repeatedly banged her head against such internal UN dysfunction, especially the veto system pitting the five permanent members at cross-purposes. A theme developed here too, of Russia’s reflex denials, accusations of fake news and weaponising social media, ploys aped by Russian allies. By now Samantha Power was being noticed, and she impressed. Declining a job from Richard Holbrooke who had brokered the Dayton peace accords on Yugoslavia in 1995, she decided to study law with a view to prosecuting human rights abuses. Three years later she became the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. In 2001 she wrote a piece in the Atlantic featuring exclusive interviews with scores of those in the US administration who had dealt with atrocities in Rwanda. It outlined countless missed opportunities to mitigate a genocide. Researching exhaustively, complemented by some human rights and teaching work, she grabbed a book deal. ‘A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide’ was published in 2002. Blending activism and diplomacy, she stressed the importance of recognising war’s human consequences and considering every non-military solution first, stopping short of embracing non-aggression and a global security system without war (see WorldBeyondWar.org/alternative). In the end she wonders why American leaders who vow “never again” repeatedly fail to halt genocides. It is an appealing message from the pen of a talented, and idealistic, future leader. And being Samantha Power, she won a Pulitzer for it. She went on to cover the 2004 massacres from Darfur, Sudan. Power’s first and latest books covers – “A Problem from Hell” and “The Education of an Idealist” As early as 2005 diplomat Peter Galbraith connected Power to then-Senator Obama’s team and in 2008 she moved onto his campaign group as he vied with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. In March 2008 she suggested, irritatingly for her boss but as it turned out accurately, that Obama would not be in a position to withdraw as quickly as he was promising in his campaign he would, from Iraq. A major hiccough a few days later was an interview about the campaign with The Scotsman, where she proclaimed: We fucked up in Ohio. In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win. She is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything … if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is
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The revelation that the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) has failed to disclose “relevant material” to the Commission of Investigation into its controversial sale of its 11.5 billion (£1.24 million) Project Eagle loan portfolio in the North in 2014 will not come as any surprise. Many NAMA watchers have been wondering how the Commission, headed by retired High Court judge, John Cooke, has been progressing given that it is now more than a year since it was established. It took the previous two years to convince the reluctant former Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, and then Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, to concede to a formal inquiry into the portfolio sale to US fund Cerberus despite the dramatic and shocking allegations of corporate and political corruption that first emerged in July 2015. At that time, Independent TD, Mick Wallace, told the Dáil that a sum of £7m had been lodged in an Isle of Man bank account in connection with the sale and that it was intended for political and business interests associated with Project Eagle. NAMA executives were not exactly forthcoming about the background to the loan disposal and rejected out of hand the conclusions of the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG), in September 2016 that the agency had incurred a loss of a potential €223m (£190m) from the sale. The C&AG, Seamus McCarthy, resisted intense pressure from Noonan, the Department of Finance and NAMA executives and board to withdraw his damning report which then formed the basis of an inquiry by the Public Accounts Committee in late 2016. Its report was even more damning of the agency and of Noonan’s role in permitting the sale to proceed despite knowledge of questionable fee payments relating to it. The finance committee at Stormont carried out its own investigation in 2015 to which many of the parties to the deal gave evidence – although the NAMA chairman, Frank Daly and chief executive, Brendan McDonagh declined an invitation to attend as did the senior staff and advisors of the agency most intimately connected to the Project Eagle sale. Although it was essentially a ‘value for money’ exercise the C&AG report highlighted serious conflicts of interest in the sale process, not least relating to the role of Frank Cushnahan, the former member of the Northern Ireland Advisory Committee of NAMA. The C&AG reported that NAMA underestimated the value of the loans, applied too high a discount and had failed to act when it discovered details of some £15m in “success fees” promised to Cushnahan, US law rm Brown Rudnick and Belfast solicitor, Ian Coulter of Tughans by US fund PIMCO before it withdrew from the sale in March 2014. Since then Cushnahan, Coulter and a former head of asset recovery at the agency, Ronnie Hanna, have been questioned by the National Crime Agency in connection with the deal while former first minister, Peter Robinson and his son Gareth, have also come under scrutiny for their role in the extraordinary Project Eagle affair. Hanna and Cushnahan were arrested in May 2016 while Coulter, a former head of the Confederation of British Industry in the North who was responsible for transferring some £5 million to the Isle of Man in late 2014 after the sale to Cerberus was completed was also subjected to a grilling by the NCA team. Property developer John Miskelly who admitted to the BBC some years ago that he had legitimately paid large sums of cash to Cushnahan, and had secretly taped his exchanges with the business consultant, was also arrested in 2017 as part of the NCA probe. Last month, it emerged that charges may now be brought against two of the nine people under investigation and there is intense speculation as to who, if anyone, will finally be brought to account over a property disposal that helped to Enrich Cerberus and associated accountancy, legal and other professionals at the expense of the public purse. Also intriguing is the recent decision by the DPP to withdraw charges against a former NAMA official who was accused of disclosing confidential information from the agency. In this case, NAMA executives made the complaint which led to the arrest of its former staff member Paul Pugh in 2013. Pugh was charged with intentionally disclosing loan and other details relating to builder, John McCabe and his UK company, McCabe Builders. Pugh was accused of sending the information to Gehane Tew k of London based Connaught & Whitehall Capital UK in June 2012. When the case came to court in recent months the DPP and investigating gardaí said that they were not proceeding with the prosecution for reasons that were not fully explained to the judge or the public. It appears that the NAMA executives whose complaint prompted the arrest of Pugh in the first place are now less than enthusiastic about pursuing the case, despite the five-year investigation into the matter. Not for the first time, NAMA has failed to disclose its reasons for not pursuing this case to conclusion. Frank Connolly
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By Ronan Burtenshaw In late September 2009 I was walking through Dublin as the city prepared for the rerun of the Lisbon Treaty referendum. Outside Dublin Castle I ran into canvassers from Generation Yes, a young, liberal, pro-Europe group established early that year to campaign for the passage of the treaty. Drawing them into conversation you could feel the passion of their arguments. They were the erasmus generation – students and graduates who saw the European Union as an engine of progress for Ireland and a liberator that had broken us from our bleak, parochial past. Rather than the ‘Yes for Jobs’ vacuities many of the main political parties ran with in the campaign, Generation Yes spoke to direct experience living and working in Europe or for European businesses in Ireland. Many of its best advocates came from the tech sector and saw the EU as a vanguard project of a globalising world, breaking down borders, encouraging innovation and providing opportunity. Generation Yes played a crucial role in the landslide victory of 2009. More clearly than any other organisation involved they developed an identity for the Yes camp. The European Union represented a young, modern, idealistic cosmopolitanism. The No camp, as I remember now-Senator John Crown saying on my local radio station, were the past, “Trotskyite communists and right-wing zealots”. So, Lisbon II passed, Ireland’s political elite celebrated, and Generation Yes disappeared. But less than a year later the European Union, so long considered a benevolent actor in Irish politics, imposing human rights with a pat on the head from the continent, came to wear a quite different mask. 2010 brought the Troika. Just five years after its arrival on the scene, the creditors’ union of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund has come to dominate the popular imagination of the European Union. For the peripheral states they made their home their policies have inextricably linked the project of European integration to falling living standards, crumbling welfare states and debt servitude. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that a Generation Yes for 2015 is almost impossible to imagine. A group of the same name might intervene in a referendum, it might even attempt to use a similar message, but it would have to reckon with the fact that the sickly-sweet vision of Europe it once sold has been indissolubly mixed with the bitterness of austerity. It would also have to reckon with a rival identity. Not the eurosceptic Right, a nationalist opponent it had always comfortably beaten in Ireland. But, since 2011, a rival, pro-European identity has emerged which is highly critical of the Troika and the increasingly undemocratic apparatus of the European Union. Last month, in Greece, this movement was given a name: Generation No. The vote in Greece was striking in its breakdown. The average No voter rejecting the Troika’s ultimatum was young, working-class and held increasingly left-wing views. The percentage for ‘oxi’ under 25 was 85, under 35 was 78. These were a new generation, living in conditions of over 60% unemployment, often having to stretch out their studies over many years to afford to complete them, relying on cash from their parents to survive. But also, it is a generation increasingly willing to challenge the shibboleths of our societies – to experiment in unorthodox relationships to the economy, to housing, to politics. The price of building up the reputation of the European Union as an arena of opportunity for Europe’s periphery has been the weight of frustrated expectations when this turned out not to be the case. As a result not just in Greece but in an increasing number of states it isn’t Generation Yes which represents the future but Generation No. This shift in orientation towards the European project is not down to a turn against Europe. In fact, the Greek No vote enjoyed enormous support from across the continent – marches, direct actions, statements from social movements, trade unions, NGOs, academics and intellectuals. Instead what has happened is that the European Union has been stripped back to its essence as a neoliberal economic project. Gone are the pretences of internationalism or a social element – the Greek crisis has demonstrated that bonds of solidarity stretch only as far as is profitable. To understand why this disconnect between growing internationalism of European peoples and the European Union exists, we have to explore its economic basis. The idea of a ‘social Europe’ has never been at the heart of this market-oriented project of European integration. At the same time as Jacque Delors was seducing Europe’s social democrats into this myth in the 1980s, he was trapping them into arrangements they would never agree to without it. First in 1988 the directive mandating for extensive free movement of capital and then, in 1992, the Maastricht Treaty. These arrangements provided the foundation for the euro – a currency which was to drive the stake of neoliberalism into the heart of the European Union. The money in our pockets is the most right-wing currency ever designed, with a central bank that doesn’t care about unemployment and won’t act as a lender of last resort, modelled to work only in the free-market utopias predicted to arrive at Francis Fukuyama’s end of history. It was also forged in two stages of class warfare. On its inception the policies of Agenda 2010 forced wages and conditions down for German workers to create optimal conditions for its export industry. On the occasion of its first crisis the same has been done to workers in peripheral Europe. These divisions – between core and periphery, capital and labour – are key to understanding why the European project has ended up where it has. If we are mystified by the results of the recent negotiations in Greece it is only because so many stories about the euro haven’t been told. Another hidden story takes place in the late 1990s, when German banks took on huge exposure in states like Greece by investing in high-yield bonds. For the business class this meant
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Nothing left to lose?
have absolutely nothing left to lose. Being told to vote responsibly is likely to goad them into a further radical response. They have had their fill of being patronised. Socialist Party leader, Joe Higgins, knows better than anyone the galvanising effect of the water-charges issue. The water-charges campaign not only helped to get him elected in 1997, but also forced the Labour Party into a climbdown on the issue in 1996. The same pattern is about to re-emerge. The election of Murphy will force the Shinners into adopting a much more hard-line approach, if they are not to be outflanked on the left. This in turn will exert enormous pressure on Labour Party rank and file, who will let their individual TDs know that they can’t take any more. It would be interesting to know how many of those who marched on 10th October voted for Labour the last time. The rebate concessions on the water charges made in the budget are unlikely to satisfy people who now feel that they have the Government on the run. This demonstration was not a one-off. The next one in November could be bigger, increasing the pressure on beleaguered backbenchers. Those protestors who have talked to Joe Duffy on ‘Liveline’ have spoken about their sense of ‘empowerment’, ‘solidarity’ and even ‘elation’, feelings that they haven’t felt for quite some time, least of all in their contemplations on the Labour Party. Now that they can sense victory, they won’t give up easily. They know that the water charge is not primarily about water conservation but about increasing the profits of Irish Water, a company that will be privatised in the future. If Labour really want to win back some credibility on this issue, they ought to give consideration to the proposal made by the Greens. Éamon Ryan has suggested inserting a clause in our Constitution to prevent our water resources falling into private hands. Joan Burton, if she has any survival instincts left, should ask Máire Whelan, the Attorney General to start drafting a suitable amendment immediately. The referendum could be held on the same day as the Marriage equality vote. It could be a double victory for the Labour Party. Just a thought, spared for the Labour Party. As it a mere co-incidence that the election of Paul Murphy took place at the same time as the biggest ever anti-water charge demonstration; or was it just a case of Jungian synchronicity? Jung’s theory on the ‘collective unconscious’ can sometimes be a better guide to understanding history than a description of events. How does the historian analyse a mood at a particular time? It’s still difficult, for example, to understand what was happening in the German psyche in 1933/34 when democracy was abandoned. Now, I’m not for a moment comparing the anti-water charge protests with the end of the Weimar Republic and subsequent events. But on Saturday the 10th of October, something very significant happened, a mood change that is hard to define. It was as if the vacuum – the gap between the rhetoric of economic recovery and harsh reality of people’s lives – was filled by an air of outright defiance. And it was those most in touch with this feeling who triumphed in the by-elections. The more nuanced anti-water charge message of Sinn Féin was swept aside by the visceral soundbites of the Anti- Austerity Alliance/socialist Party: ‘Axe the tax’ and ‘can’t pay, won’t pay.’ No complex neurotransmission required there, but that’s the essence of good communication, and the newly elected Paul Murphy is, if nothing else, an excellent communicator. As one of the most effective MEPs, Murphy was very unlucky to lose his seat in the european elections. The publicity he garnered on that campaign stood him in good stead for the by-election in Dublin south West. He now joins his comrades, higgins and Coppinger to form a solid trio of political predators who will mercilessly hunt down any Labour Party stragglers. Just watch as the Labour Party herd is thrown into confusion. It’s unlikely that Joan Burton, who is now seen as the bête noire by protestors after her insulting gaffe about smartphones, can provide them with any extra protection. Those within Labour who believe that her personal popularity can help save seats are badly mistaken. It may not even be enough to save her own seat. Certainly, there was no sign of the ‘Burton bounce’ in Dublin south West with the party vote declining from 36 per cent to a mere 8 per cent. It does not augur well for the General election in 12 months time (my prediction). Murphy will be re-elected and Labour lose both seats here. Again, the political cognoscenti will tell you that these by-election results are nothing but an aberration and that people, when push comes to shove, will revert to sensible voting patterns. But why would they do that? Right now with the mood veering from indifference and desperation to anger and defiance, the disenfranchised feel they The Labour Party needs to address national defiance with radical action on water charges defiance triggers hunger
