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    Drastic Plastic Profligacy

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    For years, it was widely ignored, even as the evidence grew more and more overwhelming. Reports had been flooding in from some of the remotest places on Earth, from the middle of the Pacific Ocean to the North Pole. Researchers found its impact was hammering every ecosystem, disrupting natural processes and spreading havoc across the living world. Then, slowly at first, the message began to resonate well beyond the usual narrow circles of scientists and environmental NGOs. The public’s ears pricked up, the media began to look deeply into the story and politicians, ever eager to follow the crowd, jumped aboard and began to huff about taking action, stepping up to the plate, not standing idly by, etc. And so, slowly, after scandalous decades of neglect and indifference, the wheels of change began their inexorable shift. The task ahead remained Herculean but at least many societies could be said to be engaged, and from there, anything is possible. I would like at this point to claim the preceding paragraphs are a description of how humanity has finally – hopelessly late – begun to grapple with the existential ecological crunch of which emissions-fuelled climate change is the most obvious manifestation. Sadly, this is not the case. The belated public response is instead to the plague of plastic pollution that has reached such an epidemic point that even the usual defenders of the free market haven’t bothered to construct a phoney ‘alternative’ narrative to beguile the media and stymie political action. The extent to which a carelessly used and discarded by-product of global industrialisation has come to present such a potent threat to the web of life on Earth has been known in scientific circles for many years. Marine biologists in particular have been trying with little success to draw attention to the rising tide of plastic pollution and its deeply insidious effects. Perhaps it was only when it became obvious that the human food-chain is also compromised did the wider public really start to sit up and take note. Plastic marine debris is now described as: “one of the most pervasive pollution problems facing the world’s oceans and waterways”, by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Around a million tons of plastics, comprising tens of billions of individual pieces, is now produced globally every week. Perhaps a tenth is ever recycled. People come and people go, but plastics persist. Complex polymers, under the influence of UV radiation and sea water, break down into near-microscopic monomers that enter at the base of the food chain, being ingested in their trillions by the vast shoals of tiny organisms that support and underpin the entire marine web of life. As these creatures are eaten, ever increasing amounts of toxic plastic pollutants are concentrated in the next level of the chain, and so on, until creatures at the apex, from sharks, dolphins whales and sea birds, are carrying catastrophic levels of toxins. Consider that every square mile of the surface of every sea and ocean on Earth contains around 50,000 pieces of plastic debris and you begin to get a grasp of the scale of the crisis. And, with the equivalent of a full dump truck of new plastic waste entering the world’s waterways every minute, it is manifestly clear that nothing short of a radical, global response will suffice if we are to have any chance of stemming the toxic tide of plastic pollution before it is too late. Ireland’s response has been mixed. Back in 2002, the then government introduced a modest tax on the purchase of single-use plastic bags handed out in their millions at supermarket checkouts and elsewhere. Industry critics said it was unfair, too expensive to administer, would never work etc. etc. They were all proved wrong when, within 12-18 months of its introduction, the quantity of single-use plastic bags fell by some 90%. Even more unexpectedly, the public actually supported the tax, and this support was maintained when it was increased to ensure compliance. Ireland found itself, for a short time, in the unusual position of being a global leader on an environmental issue. Success would, however, be short-lived. In the intervening decade and more, ever more plastics have made their way into our lives. It’s not unusual to find apples being sold on a plastic mat, with cellophane wrapping and perhaps an outer layer of another plastic. Milk went, in the space of just a few decades, from being sold in reusable glass bottles to in recyclable paper tetrapaks to now being largely sold in heavy plastic jugs. Meanwhile, tiny plastic yogurt pots are sold with more wrapping than yogurt. The ubiquitous ‘take-away’ coffee cup is constructed with a plastic inner lining, making the entire cup (and its plastic lid) unrecoverable. Ireland is in fact the EU’s number one per capita producer of plastic waste. Irish people account for 61kg annually – this is nearly 50% above the EU average. Repak, the industry-funded recycling group, boasts of our high levels of recycling relative to other countries, but this begs the question: what exactly happens to all this material? The short answer is that, in 2016, 95% of all Irish plastic waste was shipped to China for ‘recycling’. Conveniently for us, far lower environmental standards apply in much of China, so quite what happens to our so-called recycled waste remains unclear (China has since shut its doors to western wastes, which will now have to be dealt with much closer to home). I was involved in a recent radio debate on the issue of plastics hosted by Newstalk. Repak CEO, Seamus Clancy explained in glowing terms some of the achievements of the industry. He instanced a decline of several grams in the average weight of a plastic drinks bottle as demonstrating the industry’s determination to reduce waste. What Clancy was less forthcoming was on the total number of plastic bottles in circulation. The weight of an individual bottle is almost immaterial when overall volumes continue to increase rapidly. An

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    Pervasive effects of precarious work

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    Employment in Ireland is often spoken about in terms of the economic recovery and falling unemployment rates. However, the real issue that needs to be addressed is job quality and the types of jobs that are being created. There has been increasing recognition that for many workers in Ireland and Europe employment has become insecure, with temporary and casual work increasing. The FEPS-TASC Report, ‘Living with uncertainty: the social implications of precarious work’, sets out to map precarious work in Ireland, and the impact this type of work has on precarious workers’ lives. This research involved 40 in-depth interviews with men and women living in Ireland, aged between 18 and 40, who work or had worked in temporary employment, were employed on a part-time basis with irregular hours and/or were hired on a self-employed basis. There are many definitions of precarious work, as no agreed definition exists. However, for the purpose of this report, we are focusing on employment that is contractually insecure, which includes part-time with variable numbers of highly skilled people are now being locked into insecure employment. A number of sectors of the Irish labour market have a disproportionate share of precarious work. Eight sectors scored higher than the national average. Transportation had high levels of solo self-employment, human health was characterised by a high level of part-time work, and education had a high level of temporary work. The remaining sectors (construction, wholesale and retail, accommodation and administration and support) had two or more dimensions of precarious work at relatively high levels. “Other NACE sectors”, which include occupations such as hairdressers, sports facilities workers and artists, scored high on all three dimensions. To understand the effects of precarious work, we need to look at life outside of the workplace, like the house-hold situation and access to social supports and services. We need to examine the consequences of precarious work for quality of life because, even though the basis of contractually precarious work might be similar in different countries, the experiences differ as a consequence of the availability of public services and state subsidies – for example, universal healthcare or child-care. The following are our main findings in the report. Precarious workers did not choose to be precarious First, the report found that none of our participants chose to be in temporary and “part-time with variable hour” employment. Much of solo self-employment was also not entered by choice but interviewees were forced into this arrangement as a condition for their employment. Importantly, we discovered that many people are unaware that they are working precariously; there are many workers who are working without a contract, or who assume a rolling contract to mean permanency. This finding points to the need for employers to be up-front about contractual status. Precarious workers cannot afford to be sick The report found that precarious working conditions can have a negative effect on physical and mental health. On top of that, the majority of participants cannot afford to be ill. The burden of expense is felt in two ways: through no paid sick leave, and as well as the expenses of paying to see a GP and for medication, tests and follow-up appointments. This lack of support can result in having to make hard decisions such as whether to first buy food, or pay bills or rent. Medical cards and GP cards are means-tested and most precarious workers do not fit the eligibility criteria to obtain them even though they are not able to afford primary care services. Precarious workers have difficulty finding stable housing The housing crisis in Ireland affects families and individuals with very different backgrounds. However, the difficulties that people in non-standard employment encounter are even more pronounced, as they lack economic stability. Precarious workers are not left with any other choice but to rent, or if the option was available to them, to live in the family home. With tightening mortgage regulations, (which followed the economic crash), and soaring property prices, people working in non-standard employment are unlikely to be approved by any lending bank. At the same time, renting in the private market has become prohibitively expensive in the last number of years. This has resulted in bouts of ‘hidden homelessness’ for many of our participants, situations during which they have nowhere to live and are forced to sleep on friends’ couches or stay with their parents. Precarious workers postpone having families It emerged from our interviews that having children was often challenging for precarious workers. While some decided to have children regardless, the majority of our participants continued to postpone childbearing. Postponement of childrearing amongst precarious workers is often not a choice based on individual preference. Instead, while precarious workers want to have children, their financial insecurity, directly related to their contractual insecurity, prevents them from becoming parents. For those who already had children, maternity leave and childcare are the most important issues that they face. It became clear through the interviews that maternity leave is challenging for women in precarious employment, especially for those who are on temporary contracts. First of all, the contract may be shorter than the actual leave. Likewise, for those who were on temporary contracts, maternity leave is a possible obstacle for the continuity of their employment. Formal childcare is too expensive for participants who have insecure incomes and thus alternative arrangements are often necessary. In the most extreme cases, one of the parents has no other choice but to quit their job. Such a decision is usually not based on traditional gender roles, but on employment status. Based on the interviews, precarious work does not appear conducive to having a family. Precarious work leads to insecure lives Contract insecurity and wage unpredictability lead to workplace insecurity and create insecure and unpredictable lives. The lack of independence that precarious work entails often creates a situation in which many people must live with their parents and thus are unable to develop independent lives. Public benefits and support services, such as state access to free primary care services, accommodation,

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    Independence in a Vassal State

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    In his 1976 poem, ‘A Part of Speech’, Joseph Brodsky says Russian narratives of the future and of history are informed by language, not facts. “… and when “the future” is uttered, swarms of mice rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece of ripened memory which is twice as hole-ridden as real cheese”. Current events in Ireland import his observations to our own milieu. March and April mark the peak of the Centennial celebrations season in Ireland – the months of remembering, interpreting and occasionally re-writing the already troubled historical narratives of the nation to reflect the distant 1916 Easter Rising. The ripened memory is hole-ridden by interpretations and narrations, though the factual history of the event could easily be explained in simple timelines. Thus the focus of many analysts has drifted from the original Easter Rebellion to the future. The culmination of this was a rather simple, yet far-reaching, observation by President Michael D Higgins that modern Ireland is a society that has yet to achieve the core perceived objectives of the Rising: the story of Ireland is still being told. This notion of Irish sovereign incompleteness, one hundred years from the Rising, is an important and complex one. To some, extracting relevance from the Rising means projecting historical myopia into an evolving future: the ideal of national independence defined by physical boundaries. Nationalist rhetoric, historically apt, but backward-looking, has been one of the significant themes in the Centenary. For others, including myself, relevance is less about the ideals of the original Rebellion, and more about the nature of the Irish state and its elites within the context of the modern reality, framed forcefully by the memory of the Global Financial Crisis. Put simply, irrespective of the wishes of the 1916 leaders and the generations of Irish national leaders who followed them today’s Ireland is, economically-speaking, a vassal state, dependent on fortunes, choices and policies determined well beyond our shores. Perhaps the saddest part of this truth is that this state of affairs is the direct outcome of the willful co-opting of Irish elites by our external masters: the technocracies of Europe and the Multinational Corporations. As in 1916, today Ireland has little control over its own destiny. And just as in 1916, there is only a small minority of the Irish people willing to confront this reality. No matter what the Irish President declares about the ‘Irish story’ being a continuing saga, we are subjects of the world order that our leaders, aided by the silent majority of us, have not the will to alter. Still less the capacity. Over the hundred years that separate the Easter Rebellion and today, Ireland has travelled an impressive path of economic growth – a path that is still new but which is celebrated today as our major achievement. However, attributing the economic success of today to the struggle for independence in the past is a false narrative. Apart from the fact that on average Irish citizens were doing well before the Rising, asserting Ireland’s economic independence from the UK required a period of painful and exceptionally protracted misery that stretched from the Rebellion into the early 1970s. When we finally did get growth to ourish, we squandered its fruits. And though we have growth it has not yielded independence. The economic renaissance after 1973, attributed to TK Whitaker-promoted economic openness and FDI-focused development, did not mark meaningful economic sovereignty for the country. Rather it represented a shift in Irish economic dependency from reluctant participation in UK-centric trade, investment and labour markets to an enthusiastic embrace of the EU as an opportunity for the beggarthy-neighbour model of tax arbitrage policies and to comprehensive prostration to corporate markets, first represented by the ‘civilised’ foreign direct investors, lately – by the blackmail-wielding bondholders and vultures. The overall outcome was belated prosperity, but also atrophying leadership. Economic growth came with policy de a- tion through Social Partnership, the perceived and real demands of FDI, and reliance on the importation of social, cultural and economic ideas (and institutions) from the EU. A nation once subjugated to the UK found itself subjugated to a virulent blend of nationalism and religion and, finally, to yet another set of hegemonies.By the end of the 1990s, the Irish model of commerce, traditionally defined by the triumvirate of the local councilor, local priest and local bank manager presiding over economic resources gave way to the Social Partnership model where those three agents were supplemented by a motley crew of social and business groups and state bureaucrats whose sole preoccupation was to make sure that the wishes of the MNCs and Brussels were not trampled by mere local selfishness. The fruits of 100 years of striving for independence is an economic culture of dependency. Which, in cold and impersonal language of economic statistics, looks like this: In 2014, Ireland spent more than the EU and euro-area average as a percentage of GNP – 0.87-0.88% – on social housing, against the Euro area’s roughly 0.72%. In return, we got a spiralling homelessness crisis and a ratcheting length and duration of social housing queues. We posted the second highest GDP per capita figure, based on EU purchasing power parity, but only average (for the euro area) levels of actual real individual consumption. We got the fastest growing economy in the EU, with OECD-topping investment figures. But we also have average or below average growth rates in construction spending (+3.1% in the first nine months of 2015 compared to the same period of 2014) and our companies’ investments in machinery and equipment was down almost 18%. In fact, January- September 2015, total investment growth, excluding intellectual property – domain of smoke and mirrors generated by the tax-shifting MNCs – was down 9.5%, just as official total investment figures for the economy were up 26.8%. Consider the following simple exercise. We used to believe that the true state of the Irish economy was described by our Gross National Product (GNP) because, unlike GDP, it ‘accounts’ for profit

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    UNrealistic

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    At the end of last September, under the shadow of the glimmering New York skyline overhead, the world celebrated the dawn of a new era. The UN Summit on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) concluded with a massive party in Central Park, graced by the presence of superstars such as Ed Sheerin and Beyonce. The party was sponsored by Gucci, Citi, Unilever, Google and others. Many of their super-rich executives could well have been watching the party from their high-rise apartments in that most elegant part of the planet. Some people had paid upwards of $10,000 for VIP passes to the party. All proceeds went to charity, of course. There was no whiff of a world on the brink of collapse, threatened environmental destruction and violent extremism, the one that had been so eloquently articulated by Pope Francis in his landmark address to the UN General Assembly the previous day. The gap between the optimistic, almost euphoric atmosphere in some UN quarters and the pessimistic, almost despairing perspectives of others, including Pope Francis, was palpable at the Summit. On the one hand, famous business moguls, UN officials and many states, including Ireland, lined up to hail the goals as a new beginning. On the other hand, many wondered whether yet more goals would make any difference at all or even whether they would take us in the wrong direction altogether. Whatever your perspective, the SDGs are now a universally agreed UN document. For the most part, they set out important objectives for the world, 17 in all. They point to all the critical areas of human development that must be addressed if we are to tackle inequality, poverty and environmental destruction. They set 167 indicators of progress which are to be monitored and followed up annually. Importantly, for the first time ever, they promise to “leave no-one behind” and put a deadline of 2030 on achieving that goal. While as individual objectives the SDGs are desirable, as a global policy framework they are deeply flawed in at least four ways. Firstly, the sheer number of goals agreed and the lack of real interconnection between them has turned them into a shopping list. Everything becomes equally important. Yet the truth is that global imperatives exist. There are critical enablers which everyone needs to address alongside second-level priorities, which can be reached only on condition the first are being achieved. So the SDGs create a kind of policy fog in which it is hard to see the wood from the trees. Secondly, despite years of debate, the goals fail to resolve the decades old conundrum of sustainable development. This is the fact that ‘economic’, ‘social’ and ‘environmental’ dimensions do not really sit side by side or form interlocking circles. The ‘economic’ and the ‘social’, in reality, are dependent on the ‘environmental’. We need to move away from the inadequate cliche of interlocking circles to a ‘doughnut’ model as put forward by Oxfam. There is no overarching agreement in the SDGs that we need to move towards a world which lives within planetary boundaries. This is a real opportunity lost. Thirdly, however worthy the SDGs are, they are weak voluntary initiatives rather than an international treaty. Of course, voluntary initiatives have an important role in setting norms, but they only thrive when the environment is conducive to their realisation and are matched by strong implementation measures. The goals are debilitated by dysfunctional power structures, which render them a side-show, if not quite irrelevant to the main drivers of power. Unfortunately, important policies are being actively promoted by the same states that signed up to the SDGs and whose actions elsewhere directly contradict many of the goals. One alarming example is the emerging rules on global trade and investment, epitomised by the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is being negotiated between the EU and USA. Controversial proposals within TTIP include Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanisms. These will effectively facilitate MultiNational Corporations to circumvent domestic court systems and sue sovereign states through a confidential arbitration mechanism in challenging governments for introducing regulations that in multinational businesses’ view harms their interests or profit margins. This raises concerns about the state’s right to regulate on a wide range of public policies, including extreme poverty and environmental standards. SDGs do not even enter into these negotiations. Another example is continued state subsidies and investments in fossil fuels. If remaining below the agreed 2°C-increase target for global temperatures is to be possible, a basic pre-requisite for the SDGs, 80% of known remaining fossil fuels need to remain under ground. Yet in 2014 the global economy missed the decarbonisation target needed to limit global warming to 2°C for the sixth year running. Fourthly, the respective roles of the state and the private sector in SDG development and implementation is deeply concerning. The visibility of the private sector and the pledges made in New York reflect the way that major corporations have managed to skew the agenda. One official pledge made by MasterCard at the SDG Private Sector Forum to bring 500 million people in the developing world into the credit market, thus enabling them to achieve Goal 8, is indicative of this. A pick-and-mix approach to the SDGs is already evident, facilitating corporations to use them to their marketing advantage while not addressing basic human rights and issues such as lack of accountability. The UN appears to have already relinquished control of its own message about the SDGs to the corporate sector through its ‘Global Goals’ campaign. This was launched during the Summit. In signing a licensing agreement for the Goals with key sponsors such as Gucci, Citi and others, it effectively delivered the SDGs, a key global public good, into private ownership. A clause in the campaign agreement means that those who use the goals’ branding must do so in ways which do not damage the partner brands. Technically speaking, therefore, if an NGO such as Trócaire or Christian Aid, draws attention to the systemic problems of corporate power whilst using the goals’ branding, they are in breach of the licence. Though it

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