General

Even in the climate emergency the Greens are all carrot and no stick.  By Michael Smith. I attended the Greens’ manifesto launch last Saturday in the Radisson Blu hotel near Dublin Castle.   I did it because, more than for any other party, their agenda – Green – matters. Being well-disposed I wanted to assess their fitness to deliver it. The media were there in force and about a hundred fairly presentable Green activists were on hand.  There would be internal training afterwards.  On the podium were three leaders of the party.  The first two spoke mostly about particular sectoral issues, reading from scripts.  Then Eamon Ryan gave a bit of a framework to it, some vision, an aspiration to ten areas where the Greens wanted more ambition, and an ambition to 15 seats which everyone seemed especially excited about.  He said something, again, about senior hurling.  There didn’t seem to be many hurlers in the crowd.  Nearly half of the candidates in Dublin went to rugby-playing Gonzaga which brings its own biases.  Then there were questions, led by Brian Dobson and the Irish Times‘ Green Party person, Harry Magee.  The questions were mostly what a non-Green would ask, with a fiscal bias.  Harry asked about insulation, and the budget for it. Eamon Ryan said if Ireland was to reach its emissions reduction goals it will need to spend a total of €50 billion over 20 years to retrofit 750,000 houses to improve energy efficiency. I asked what they’d do about implementation of their agenda bearing in mind the problems with that the last time they were in Government.  Eamon Ryan – an almost pathologically benign optimist – said what he always does, that you can achieve a lot in government (they didn’t) and that half the reduction in carbon in the period after they entered government was due to their efforts – the other half due to the fact the imploded economy meant fewer people needed to get to work.  He didn’t mention that any incursion on the soaring emission figures was highly temporary, and the energy improvements around that time were forced by the EU.   I asked what they would do about sprawl.  The answer was delegate more decisions to the community level.  That is the right answer to nearly all questions.  But not to this one.   The answer is ensure the already-agreed National Planning Framework is implemented not just referred to.  Indicatively, actually the Greens’ manifesto doesn’t even refer to it…or scandalously, outside of transport and climate, even refer to Planning. Nobody addressed my question on quality of life. It is elementary that environmentalists think quality of life should be measured, across a range of indicators, so it can be advanced instead of pursuit of a simple economic GDP metric. This is one of the biggest features of a green agenda. But there’s no reference to it in the manifesto. They didn’t advance it the last time they were in government, and clearly they won’t do it this time if they’re elected. The Green candidate in Dublin Central, Neasa Hourigan, often an impressive presence, mistook my question about introducing a constitutional referendum to reduce the power of property rights in order to promote a general pro-planning agenda for a question about housing.  They seemed to be improvising on central policy issues. This would not matter if it were not probable the Greens will shortly be in government and if they had not achieved so little last time out.  For it proves they have not learnt their lessons.  When asked about what the Greens had learnt from being in government the last time out, and the question wasn’t particularly directed at the environment, then-aspirant-MEP Ciaran Cuffe stated that it was not to go into government in the worst depression in generations.  That was not the right answer to give.  Remember, this is the party that justified going into government with dodgy Bertie Ahern on the basis that the climate imperative necessitated it, and yet which failed to pass a climate act in three and a half years, leaving only a toothless climate bill as their legacy. The Greens needed, indeed still need, to be tougher and more strategic.  They need to plot out want they need to achieve in government, in particular policies;  and to monitor its success.   Just as you can monitor economic growth month to month they should be monitoring, quality of life, air quality, mortality rates and development patterns month to month; and adjusting policy to achieve clear strategic goals.  The Greens’ manifesto is fairly thin – by comparison with Sinn Féin’s magnificently unwieldly one for example – but imaginative and progressive.  It’s great to see a proposal for an 80% tax on windfall rezoning profits and the Green Party is serious about a site value tax. Implementing the Kenny Report on public compulsory acquisition would be exciting.   I would find it difficult to argue with almost any of it as far as it goes.  Though unfortunately it is not always entirely clear that it is a party of the Left, or that it favours radical redistribution.  Though they support the radical measure of a universal basic income, their section on ‘Equality’ illuminatingly doesn’t mention income or wealth equality.  It’s not even that detailed on the environment.  There’s nothing on architecture or design. Or on urbanism; or on curtailing sprawl and one-off housing. There’s a bit on density but nothing on high-rise. Nothing from the Greens on Planning. It just doesn’t figure in the manifesto. Ciarán Cuffe must have been asleep. The Greens aren’t going to stop one-off housing – as that would generate an unholy row.  And their approach to the suckler herd is likely to be as gentle as that of the Polish government to coal-mining.  It’s an exception where we have a competitive advantage after all. And the lobby is frightening.  Anyway, it calls for a 7 per cent per year fall in emissions to reach the EU CO2 reduction target of a minimum 50 per cent by 2030. The current government target is a 2 per cent annual reduction. The Greens also want net zero

Loth in their campaigns to address minority issues, the mainstream parties have left all the momentum on immigration to the intolerant right. By Stacy Wrenn. For how long can something be ‘next’ before it’s allowed to become ‘current’? Direct provision has been referred to, in some variation, as ‘our next great shame’ in the mainstream media for years without experiencing this elevation. Working groups have come and gone, minor reforms have been made that benefit some asylum-seekers over others, and little has fundamentally changed.  Although it was established as a temporary measure for housing asylum-seekers awaiting refugee status in 1999, direct provision — or direct provision and dispersal as it is more accurately referred to — has remained constant in contrast to its perceived attention-worthiness. This fleeting public shame appears in bursts, often for months at a time, sparked by major events that essentially serve as reminders that the system still exists. In 2019, there were at least seven co-ordinated anti-asylum seeker protests in response to proposed accommodation centres, not including arson attacks on some of the properties themselves. On the morning of October 28th, the car of Sinn Féin TD for Sligo-Leitrim Martin Kenny was set alight in what was widely accepted to be a response to statements he had made in the Dáil the previous week condemning such protests. For weeks the Irish mainstream media had the direct provision system as their primary topic of conversation, with multiple discussions in the Dáil chamber after months of silence. With powerful addresses from Brendan Ryan, Labour Party TD, and Catherine Martin, Green Party TD, among others, it felt as if a meaningful national conversation had begun. A swathe of documentaries, think pieces, and media exposés followed on the history of direct provision, the experiences of various sub-groups, with the Joint Committee on Justice and Equality report finding it “no longer fit for purpose”. The fifth-anniversary conference of the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland [MASI] saw greater engagement from wider civil society than any outreach event in previous years. Then Christmas came, the election was called, and it was as if none of this had happened. An argument could be made that it was difficult to maintain such momentum over what is traditionally a lull in the political calendar. However, this was also the optimal time to develop a coherent position to make direct provision an election issue, yet no left party sought to do this. Instead, the debate has focused on health and housing with little nuance — such as consideration of the experiences of those granted refugee status who are forced to remain in direct provision because of the shortage of affordable housing. With The National Party and Anti-Corruption Ireland running thirteen candidates between them on explicitly anti-immigration tickets, this is negligence that no progressive party can justify. The momentum on immigration in general and direct provision in particular, at election 2020, has all been with the intolerant right.  There is no doubt that the candidates on the right feel emboldened by the protests of last year:  it’s clear in the openness of their messaging. Standing with two thumbs up and a broad grin, the National Party’s Longford-Westmeath candidate and deputy leader James Reynolds unveiled a large roadside poster with the message: “There are too many immigrants. Enough is enough!”[1]. At the start of the election, one columnist in The Irish Times had the optimistic take that this was not something to be concerned about, explained by some ‘attitudinal trends’ from European Social Surveys between 2002 and 2018. He claimed that the general public has reached the point of being so positive about immigration that any party that advocated for increased controls would be at a disadvantage: “Indeed, political parties both small and large that aim for broad-based support across Irish society would stand to lose more votes from adopting an anti-immigrant platform. While there is possibly some room for Independent political candidates to gain votes from playing the immigrant card this is likely to remain localised and context-bound – at least for the present time”.[2]   This would make sense if we were in a different political climate. Alongside the manufactured struggle for resources that is the housing crisis, the threshold of what is publicly considered racist is consistently raised higher and higher – the increasingly frequent debates about ‘culture wars’ online and ‘snowflakes’ testifies to this. This has enfranchised voters on doorsteps across the country, according to canvassers, to raise the need to ‘house our own first’, apparently generating heterogeneous responses across the political spectrum.  It’s likely that if Fine Gael are to remain in government, they will continue with their cycle of working groups and consultations, and the occasional rehashed press statement about Albanian and Georgian immigrants. And in an interview with JOE.ie the leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin who knows the importance of care in language when dealing with issues of tolerance, seemed to be taking the side of both the protestors in Oughterard and Rooskey and those who criticised them by saying that while some groups did exploit the “fear of the unknown”, only “some” of it was “completely unfounded”.[3] Although their candidates have been actively organising under the banner of United Against Racism and their track record is good we may take People Before Profit as an exemplar of how even the progressive parties do not have thought-through policies in in their manifestos though they do briefly state that they would “end Direct Provision and give asylum seekers the right to work”. This is a slogan, not a policy. There are no commitments to alternative accommodation or allowances, or indications on how they would implement this in practice.[4] Although election manifestos are predominantly communications exercises, the absence of detailed policies in relation to accommodation, welfare, and education, suggests that implementing their limited policy could leave many asylum-seekers in a worse position than now. One party to directly address the sensitive topic of asylum-seeker accommodation in its manifestos is the Green Party, which in the ‘Migrant Integration’ section aims to end