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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
28 July-August 2024
Neither of us ws o
he fore when he UCD
rugby song “Yerr-wdi”
ws sung
I
first met Eamon Ryan in 1974. I was in
class with his brother whose party it
was. Balloons. Candles. Cake. Eamon
was two years older. The occasion was
delightful. The Ryans were like the
Brady Bunch but nicer and without the
complicated history. Mrs Ryan was friendly
and charming. His Dad, Bob, avuncular. For
a senior, at ten Eamon was uniquely open to
the social advances of boys two years
younger. As an awkward eight-year-old it was
as good a reception as you could get at a
party. And I won the pass-the-parcel twice.
I was closer to his brother, Robert, but I
remember Eamon as a very popular and
gregarious force in his class in Gonzaga up
the years. He has revealed that he only
learned to read and write when he was
around nine but I do not recall that as any
hindrance. He was an average student. He
did a course in ecology in Gonzaga College,
instead of the inter cert, which evoked the
inter-connectedness of the world, social and
physical/environmental, that everyone’s
security is a function of everyone else’s. It
was life-changing for him.
Eamon played Senior Cup rugby and was a
debater in the school’s ‘Chomhdháil’. He
could hold his own fluently despite a stutter
which he had mastered by the time he left
school. He has spoken about how the stutter
was alleviated in hypnosis which took him
back to an argument outside his bedroom
door which he felt guilty about not being able
to challenge verbally.
His father Bob was a hugely benign force,
the head of PR for AIB, an accomplished
painter and eventually the re-founder of
Dublin Opinion, a satirical magazine. He
drank with my father who was in advertising.
They both had a wry perspective on commerce
though it didn’t stop them living it every day.
Eamon completed a Commerce degree
while I did an unenthusiastic law degree.
I played a bit of rugby on UCD’s sixths
sharing a berth in the second row on occasion
with Eamon. Though foolishly big, neither of
us had the temperament for it though we
gave it a go. We were eco-scrummer time-
servers. Neither of us was to the fore when
the UCD rugby song “Yerra-wadi” ended and
we were required to shout ‘Trinity Shites’
across the Belfield prairie.
After College, and a year managing the
UCD Marketing Development Programme, he
spent three years abroad and a prolonged
period unemployed.
Eamon was becoming an unusually
Green
Gin
Eamon Ryn: he
nices mn in
poliics, sruggled
wih confronion,
nd ws needed by
his fmily
By Michel Smih
thoughtful young man, something of a hippy.
I remember his thing was that people
squandered their lives on work. It was around
this time that he was a “very occasional
recreational user” of cannabis., something
for which Marian Finucane ludicrously
assailed him on her radio show in 2004.
He set up a pioneering cycle-based
package holiday company, brilliantly titled
Irish Cycling Safaris, with Mary his bubbly
mother; and afterwards founded the UCD
bike shop. They both got extraordinary good
press and appeared to be lucrative. Eamon’s
personality was enough to drive considerable
success but Mary, more Fine Gael than
‘Green’, was shrewd and formidable also.
When he got into politics, his share in the
business passed to his sister.
Eamon became the chair of the Dublin
Cycling Campaign and then campaign
manager to future mayor and Green Leader,
John Gormley, in the 1989 Dublin City Council
election.
I mounted a campaign against a corrupt
rezoning in Cherrywood on the Bray Road
near where I grew up, in 1992. Eamon was a
friend of Fergus (now CEO of Fónua) and
Deirdre De Búrca (later a Green Senator),
neighbours of mine growing up. I roped them
all into the campaign. Eamon was the star
turn. I remember him wowing a vast hall of
the burghers of Dundrum at a public An
Taisce meeting, arguing for development of
the city not of green fields. I’d chickened out
of doing it myself. Sometimes he’d arrive late
when we were protesting due to late-night
excess but so would I, and he was giving
POLITICS
July-August 2024 29
generously of his time even though, unlike
the rest of us, he had no connection with the
Cherrywood area.
It was clear to me, as was subsequently
confirmed by the Mahon Tribunal, that the
rezoning was corrupt and that Monarch
Properties who were pushing it were as
dodgy as a fake Dodge pickup full of
dodgems. Eamon was reluctant to recognise
their vice, too much of a gentleman. When we
caught them binning a hundredweight of
survey forms that reacted negatively to their
rezoning roadshow, Eamon felt we should
ignore it.
He stood unsuccessfully for the Seanad in
1996/7, became a Dublin City Councillor, was
co-opted to replace John Gormley in 1998,
topping the poll in his own right the following
year. He was on a roll, and was elected a TD
in Dublin South in 2002. Around this time I
was chairman of An Taisce. He was always
supportive and available to speak at
conferences or help in any reasonable way.
He was not, however, a natural campaigner,
eschewing the fractious protests of the time,
on heritage buildings, one-o housing,
balanced regional development and the like.
In 2004 he, briefly, stood for the
Presidency.
He was Minister for Communications,
Energy and Natural Resources (and later the
Marine) in the Ahern and Cowen government
of 2007-11. The government was dominated
by the economic depression, culminating in
the troika appropriating the government’s
financial powers. The Greens, and Eamon
with banking in the blood, did not oppose it.
In 2014 Ryan told me in an interview that:
“Before they went into government in 2007
he and Dan Boyle went into the Bankers
Federation with the sole purpose of drawing
its attention to its overexposure to
commercial loans”. That’s something they
should have trumpeted.
Before its entry into government, the Green
Party had been a vocal supporter of the Shell
to Sea movement, the campaign to reroute
the M3 motorway away from Tara and the
campaign to end US military use of Shannon
Airport. In the end Ryan oversaw the Corrib
gas project while he was in oce and the
other schemes proceeded. John Gormley had
said the Greens would go in to government
with Fianna Fáil in 2007 to deal with climate
change, even though the party was on
“Planet Bertie”. The Greens were in power for
three and a half years, and despite an
imploding economy failed to reach their
unambitious target of 3% annual emissions
reductions. They failed to get a Climate Act,
publishing a largely toothless bill that was
never enacted. I’ve been giving Eamon grief
for 16 years about this though I’m not sure he
really’s noticed.
I interviewed Eamon in 2014 about their
vanishing, ineectual bill. The interview
records that “oblivious, he suggested it had
targets – of 40% by 2030. In fact the bill was
a mess of unenforceable ‘have regards to’
overlapping with ‘comply’. I note if we were
serious about guaranteeing a reduction in
emissions a bill could have provided for
legally binding targets for dierent sectors
with penalties for breaches. He reacts with
some irritation. Ryan believes the current
Fine Gael-Labour government doesn’t really
care about climate change so any bill would
be an achievement”.
On PLANNING, a key Green agenda, a lot of
the legislation they introduced in 2007-11
simply added to the edifice of under-enforced
existing legislation. This enabled them to
claim credit for introducing legislation rather
than any actual REAL EFFECTS. So, for
example, various worthy Planning Acts and
regulations did little to stop the pattern of
sprawl of Dublin into Leinster and one-o-
housing. Then as now it would be better to
focus on making current laws enforceable.
That government introduced civil
partnership for same-sex couples, and
increased renewable energy though not
enough.
The Green party suered a wipeout in the
February 2011 election, losing all six of its
TDs. Ryan was the winner of the subsequent
Green Party leadership contest, beating
Malcolm Noonan and Phil Kearney who later
became chairman of An Taisce.
At the 2016 general election Ryan and
Catherine Martin gained two seats in the Dáil
while Grace O’Sullivan picked up a seat in the
Seanad. In 2019 Ciarán Cue and Grace
O’Sullivan were elected to the European
Parliament.
In the run-up to the 2020 general election
I put it again at a Green Policy launch that
they were in danger of introducing legislation
without teeth. None of them cared.
At the 2020 general election, the party had
its best result ever, returning 12 TDs. It was
a triumph for Ryan.
Policy
Climate
The 2020 coalition Programme for
Government states: “We are committed to an
average 7% per annum reduction in overall
greenhouse gas emissions from 2021 to
2030 (a 51% reduction over the decade)”.
According to the EPA, Ireland’s emissions
fell by just under 2 per cent between 2021
and 2022 (remember the target was an
average 7% annually). That generated a
shocking problem.
In late 2022, Ryan said: “There needs to be
a Green party in Government for climate to be
taken seriously…the main goal is getting the
State to commit to an annual emissions
reduction of five [sic] per cent. That’s the
metric I’ll be fixated on in the next two years.
If we succeed in that, we’ll succeed
politically”.
The figure is likely to be around half the
51% , for all the pretence that 7% is somehow
He ws no nurl cmpigner,
eschewing he frcious proess of
he ime, on herige buildings, one-off
housing, blnced regionl developmen
nd he like
30 July-August 2024
legally binding. Successive Attorneys
General and ideologues like Leo Varadkar
undermined any possibility of that. Anyone,
and there are many of the best, who claims
51% was legally binding stands sadly
discredited.
Climate Action Plan 2024s set out a
“roadmap” to deliver on Ireland’s climate
ambition. But it had to be revised on 21 May
as it was by then already out of line.
On 21 May 2024 Ryan said “the reality of
failure to reach carbon budget targets of a
4.8 per cent reduction of emissions annually
in the 2021-2025 period had to be faced up
to, though significant improvement during
2023 of 5 per cent was likely to be confirmed”.
All the heavylifting was being deferred.
But in May the EPA warned that Ireland is
set to reduce its total greenhouse gas
emissions by only 29 per cent by 2030, rather
than the target of 51 per cent. In the 2023
Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI)
Ireland’s actual emissions score was “very
low”, the worst in the EU, along with Poland.
Worse, we’re months away from an election
which may well result in abandonment of the
Greens’ (let’s be kind) well-meaning
legislation.
Biodiversity
The record on the second most important
agenda, biodiversity, is just as bad. Ireland
continues to experience accelerating
biodiversity loss — “a very disturbing picture
of losses and declining trends” over the past
five years continuing unabated, and
inadequately monitored, even under a Green
Environment Minister.
According to the National Biodiversity
Centre: “Around 31,000 species are known
to occur in Ireland, yet the conservation
status of only about 10% has been assessed”.
As to mammals, it has been alleged that
the weight of humans is greater than the
weight of all other mammals on earth but the
methodology of National Parks and Wildlife
Service surveys seems complacent. In 2019
it recorded: “Of the 27 species assessed, one
was found to be Regionally Extinct (grey
wolf), one achieved a threat status of
Vulnerable (black rat, Rattus rattus), and the
rest were of Least Concern”. There don’t seem
to be surveys of actual numbers. There’s a
crisis but the reaction is lackadaisical, even
in an ocial emergency.
BirdWatch Ireland surveys show the status
of 63 per cent of Ireland’s 211 regularly
occurring wild bird species are categorised
as in moderate to severe declines.
Three of our iconic fish, the Atlantic
salmon, European eel and angel shark have
suered catastrophic population declines.
At 11 per cent (770,000 hectares), Ireland
has one of the lowest levels of forest cover in
Europe – 2 per cent of the country is covered
by native or semi-natural woodland.
Planning
And there’s no space to get into planning.
Little progress has been made on the sprawl
of Dublin into the rest of Leinster or on one-
o housing, a taboo.
Sadly in terms of policy, the Greens do not
like big solutions (vast oshore windfarms
rather than small domestic or community
windmills) and are not focused on the need,
in pursuit of key environmental agendas, to
survey what remains, set targets for their
sustainable management, and above all to
make the targets legally enforceable i.e.
justiciable. Beyond rhetoric and even targets
the only thing that matters is results: good
planning, reduced emissions, a better
environment and quality of life.
Philosophy
In the 2014 interview in this magazine Eamon
said he had a libertarian orientation. He told
me his political philosophy was set when he
was 15 after the ecology course. He said he
was a Green Christian Social Democrat. He
said he was a radical AND a conservative,
probably. “Christ was radical. Protecting
things for the next generation isn’t
conservative”. He said John Moriarty was a
hero to him. “He’s a Green philosopher, the
brightest man I ever met. Amazing,
thoughtful, radically, mind-blowingly
creative”.
Eamon was a subscriber to smart growth
for years and the power of one, a powerful
message which in the end let government o
the hook. He has always been reluctant to
promote environmental measures that might
force in people’s way of life, even if they were
necessary; or to proselytise for them.
Cycling is much easier to promote than
prohibitions on car use or aviation, though
Ryan has been impressively strong on
curtailing large new road projects (though
wait for the backlash). Attacking slow-
moving agriculture has been anathema in the
Green Party, much good it has done them.
Partly because of this, targets in agriculture
and transport have been missed for years and
make us one of the world’s worst emissions
delinquents.
Consensus
Eamon is wedded to consensus and has
always been against confrontation, which is
ironic since latterly he has been subjected to
stinging criticism that he is autocratic. There
were weird allegations of internal Green
bullying but you can be sure Eamon himself
never participated in it, He is the antithesis
of a bully. He was also always approachable
and like all the Greens has never rated the
baubles of office, as opposed to the
importance of holding it.
On his resignation on 18 June, his greatest
accolades came from the people he worked
with in government, especially his coalition
colleagues. He even said it was “a pleasure
to work with the civil servants”.
It is an indictment of the system that after
his resignation, this gentlest, most
unconfrontational man told Claire Byrne, “I
remember the first time I ran for the Seanad,
about page 90 in some newspaper there was
The Greens should now be
looking for chrismic,
policy-guzzling ruh-eller
wih he common ouch.
Emon mos offered
hese chrcerisics
The Future
July-August 2024 31
The Greens should now be
looking for chrismic,
policy-guzzling ruh-eller
wih he common ouch.
Emon mos offered
hese chrcerisics
one tiny comment about me, and I hardly
slept for a week afterwards because I thought
it was unfair. 30 years later, it doesn’t really
upset me”. It is sad that politics would have
this eect on anyone, though his comments
resonate ubiquitously.
On his resignation Eamon Ryan gave an
insight into his current worldview:
“Divisive politics will not work if we are to
see the scale and speed of change that has
to be made. Our approach is to start listening
to people, ask for help instead of telling them
what to do and speaking to the heart and not
just the head”.
That approach would not be favoured by
this magazine. Clearly the Greens have to
decide if they are about the heart or the head.
Mistakes
Eamon is an unusually good improviser —
speaking without notes. Sometimes this has
proved a mistake as when he called for
people to paint walls and plant window boxes
with lettuces: “we’ll have our salads ready to
go!”, as a defence against Covid isolation,
when he used the N word in the Dáil, and
noted that the Greens were “only warming
up” on climate change He fell asleep in the
Dáil (to be fair, his regime is punishing).
Earlier this year, as part of an ongoing
vendetta against Ryan, Ryanair’s boss,
Michael O’Leary, called him a dunce and he
didn’t seem to have the energy to attack
back. Instead he unpersuasively
complimented O’Leary on his moves towards
sustainable air travel.
Greens in trouble
At the 2024 Local Elections the Greens lost
almost half their council seats across the
country but led the poll in four local electoral
areas in Dublin City. Ciarán Cue and Grace
O’Sullivan lost their seats in the European
Parliament.
Family man
Eamon was always popular: in particular,
good boyfriend material. His mother taught
him how to behave and his father taught him
gregariousness. In the end he married the
feisty journalist, Victoria White. The couple
met at set-dancing club, Brooks Academy, at
the Pipers Club on Henrietta Street, in the
mid-1990s, though Victoria
said when she saw him first she
“immediately ruled him out because I just
thought he looked like a really cocky, self-
assured, good-looking man and he was a
brilliant dancer.
I just got the impression he’d be really into
himself, and I also got the impression that
he’d be thick. But once I had exchanged two
words of conversation with him, I realised he
wasn’t thick and then I became interested”.
They make a very strong, model couple and
are devoted to each other. I recall his fiftieth
birthday party when they made successive
speeches and were practically finishing each
other’s sentences.
Victoria became arts editor at the Irish
Times and had a column with the Irish
Examiner until her husband became a
Minister. She wrote “I don’t like being a
Minister’s wife but I like the possibilities this
Programme for Government brings. The
couple both take family and carer
responsibilities very seriously (Ryan’s
mother devoted decades to the care of her
mother in law). Eamon, for example, is not in
favour of deleting the reference to the role of
the mother in the home from Bunreacht na
hÉireann. The balance they envisage
between their civic responsibilities and their
family live is estimable.
Their son Tommy now spends his days at
Gheel Autism Services’ daycare centre in
Dublin.
But Eamon told the Ciara Phelan podcast
that he will never live independently, adding:
“There’s no respite. One of the upsides is we
will never stop parenting, one of the
downsides is we’ll never stop parenting. You
always have that responsibility”.
By mid-June it was too much. Eamon
delivered on his longstanding family
commitment to recalibrate away from his
punishing career:
“I cannot continue to work the long hours
that being a public representative involves,
which is why I’m not standing again in the
next general election”, he said.
He noted the “relentless attacks” on the
party and on him, on social media.
They make almost any politics that is not
sectoral, selfish and vested, short-termist
and banal, impossible. They make the green
agenda almost impossible.
The future for the Greens
His departure has exposed a dearth of talent
in the Greens.
They should be looking for a charismatic,
policy-guzzling truth-teller with the common
touch. Of all the people in the Green Party
Eamon most oered these characteristics.
Now the Greens are facing a choice
between two far less charismatic figures. On
the one hand is Roderic O’Gorman, a brave
and clever man who has achieved a lot in
government but who lied about the advice
he was receiving on the care referendums.
On the other hand is Pippa Hackett, the least
charismatic woman in the Oireachtas, with
no significant record of achievement in her
forestry ministry, no particular articulacy, no
history of electoral viability and no common
touch: she will not cut it, she will not hack it.
Thoughtful, measured, dignified
Miriam Lord in the Irish Times caught his
departure well: “As would be expected –
because it has never been any dierent with
Eamon Ryan over 30 years in politics at all
levels – his resignation announcement was
thoughtful, measured and dignified”.
But look at the toll. Sustainability is the
unyielding Green agenda but life as a
leader of the green movement is not
sustainable.
