Editor’s Note: Previously Frank Armstrong reviewed Michael Pollan’s journey through the use of psychedelics. Here ‘Desmond O’Brien’ recalls a recent psilocybin treatment at a clinic in the Netherlands, which he found ‘a hugely emotional and profoundly beautiful experience, interspersed with frequent moments of absolute hilarity.’
‘my life had come to an end’
I recently went on a psilocybin (so-called magic mushroom) retreat in the Netherlands – a form of psychedelic therapy for anxiety and depression. To the uninitiated this may sound like quackery, but there’s a good deal of solid scientific evidence pointing to its potential for treatment of mental illness, especially long-term depression.
Prior to going through with it, I had concluded that I was doomed to an endless cycle of frustrated unease and pessimism. What I went through has made me more optimistic that I have a lot more time left, and that chapters remain to be written. But it is still early days, and I am not saying it will be easy.
The retreat was quite a journey. Three days, with a trip in the middle day, bookended by powerful group therapy conducted by trained professionals, all in a tranquil setting with access to a garden.
I found it a hugely emotional and profoundly beautiful experience, interspersed with frequent moments of absolute hilarity. At no point was I scared by what was a wild ride that brought tremendous catharsis, and involved deep bonding with fellow participants.
For a long time beforehand I was at the bottom of a dark, deepening well, clawing helplessly at the walls. I am still in that pit in practical and material terms, but the light at the top doesn’t seem quite so far away. It’s as if a rope has been dropped down for me to climb towards the opening.
By the end of the experience I felt more relaxed than I have done in years. Only time will tell how capable I am of integrating what I have learnt into my day-to-day life.
I must persevere with therapy, meditation, writing, communicating, yoga and just breathing. Contending with horrific, insidious and relentless anxiety, as I have done, I need constant reminders to slow down so as to avoid those terrible spirals.
“Cosmic Pocahontas”
The ‘trip’ began with geometric patterns emerging from the darkness, creating quite a pleasant show. It brought neither anxiety nor nausea, as affected a few other participants.
Indeed, one poor fella’s vomiting cut through the air in Dolby Surround Sound reminiscent of The Exorcist! But he was gently taken care of by the facilitators, and emerged after a while into the bliss we all felt, and was utterly untroubled by that phase in retrospect.
Slowly, the doors of the library of memory opened and I was brought on a tour, over which I had considerable control. This featured many moments of my past, such as running out to play in my grandparents’ garden, and being tucked into bed by an au pair.
It was all from a first-person perspective. I never saw myself. There was an overwhelming feeling of love as I observed these scenes, and many friends and family appeared – or perhaps it is more accurate to say I had chosen to bring them to mind – all enveloped in this infinite affection.
“Love is the glue”, I said to myself after discovering a wonderful sense of oneness with the universe. I had the sense of us all, young and old, alive and dead, as helpless babies in the eyes of an omniscient presence, tumbling in eternal clumsiness through space, bouncing off each other while she, and it did seem a nurturing, reassuring maternal figure (the “Cosmic Pocahontas”, as the other Irish fella there referred to her in his Cork accent), observing us all with a benign smile, having seen it all before.
Most of the time, rather than looking around and getting my jollies with visuals – and especially during the first few hours – I wore eye covers to heighten the inward therapeutic journey. This deepened the tour of the unconscious.
I experienced tears of joy, sadness and laughter that ran down my face for a great part of the journey. Emotional inhibition was lost and at one point with the prompting and hug from a facilitator, I sobbed uncontrolably and breathlessly like a child.
Returning to a pleasant normality
At a certain point I removed the eye covers. After that, at all times, I knew exactly where I was, and who I was with. I experienced no auditory or visual hallucinations, but amplified senses, a curious fuzziness to everything, changes in texture and a mildly swirling fractalization of surfaces and objects; no pink elephants!
Looking around, we resembled infants in a crèche, smiling warmly at each other, in mutual knowing. Towards the end we sat up, ate the sliced fruit and pieces of chocolate provided for us, and began to reflect in pairs and small groups on our experiences.
Finally, we took off our jackets and shoes, creating another amusing kindergarten-scene-of-chaos, and then strolled and chatted in the garden. Returning to a pleasant normality, we endeavoured to articulate our individual experiences.
The analogy that came to my mind is this: that we are, as adults, swimming in lanes defined over time by the influences of our environments. The psychedelic experience lifts up those lane dividers, allowing us to roam freely in the pool. By the end of the experience, we had developed an awareness of how we are stuck in those lanes, but that they are not as fixed as we had perceived. And that is freedom.
The experience brings us back to our younger, more joyous and playful selves, peeling away, at least for a while, the rigid constraints of our adult selves, to reveal the child that we were, and still are.
And little kids, as I’m sure you are aware, trip up all the time.
To contact the author of this piece email: admin@cassandravoices.com
The great English chemist James Lovelock conceived the Gaia (Gr. ‘goddess of earth’) Hypothesis in 1972, later developing this alongside American microbiologist Lynns Margulis. Later still, Lovelock, aged eighty-seven, was awarded the prestigious Wolston medal by the Geological Society of London for his pioneering concept.
Now firmly embedded in the zeitgeist, the Gaia Hypothesis posits that unknown forces, popularly conflated with the idea of Mother Earth, nurture our planet’s physical environment to sustain life. To draw on another famous scientific analogy, it might be said that Gaia maintains ‘just rightness’ (i.e. ‘the goldilocks theory’) through righteous homeostasis.
As Gaia approaches her golden jubilee, however – and James Lovelock edges toward his one-hundred-and-first birthday – the evidence mounts against faith in the concept of perpetual renewal; her resilience and raison d’être has been weakened after millennia of selfless resolve .[i] The precipice lies before us.
Gaia has tolerated humanity’s repeated abuses, but only in recent geological time has her mood turned conspicuously (and literally) stormy.
There are, nonetheless, grounds for hope. As Gaia’s health fades, Greta Thunberg’s rage burns ever more brightly. There is an existential ecosystem crisis to be called out, and Greta has risen to the challenge.
A strange energy reverberates whenever this Swedish teenager speaks publicly. Her unflinching delivery is as riveting as a tense drama; her conviction is that of a seasoned stateswoman, with deliciously scathing rhetoric unleashed in staccato rhythm.
Intriguingly, the voice retains the appeal of naivety. Significantly, despite and indeed because of this innocence, the overall effect can be intoxicating to grownups who thought they had lost hope.
‘Futile Nobility’
Greta’s fury has burned a hole in the establishment’s defences. The fire she started has been stoked by public sentiment. A paradigm shift in environmental attitudes is now apparent, but worryingly certain world leaders have adopted a bizarre form of stoicism in the face of Greta’s resuscitation of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’.
Against this backdrop, scientists’ noble pursuit of rigorous data to prove what may seem obvious can seem futile.
For instance, in the recent Special Report on Climate Change and Lands, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), embodying the spirit of righteous scientific detachment, claim only ‘high (but notably not ‘very high’) confidence’ in the (surely self-evident) statement that ‘sustainable land management can contribute to reducing the negative impacts of multiple stressors, including climate change, on ecosystems and societies.’[ii]
There are other examples of such reticence. In the midst of the Sixth Extinction, following on from a century-long campaign of insecticide, a team of UK entomologists published a paper calling for more data on insect declines, state:
we respectfully suggest that accounts of the demise of insects may be slightly exaggerated. Bad things are happening—we agree—but this is not the whole story. We call for hard‐nosed, balanced, and numerical analysis of the changes taking place, and for calm and even‐handed interpretation of the changes, rather than rushing headlong into the hyperbole of impending apocalypse.[iii]
Selling Copy
Political leaders such as the POTUS Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a.k.a ‘Trump of the Tropics’, who recently mocked his latest nickname ‘Capitão Motoserra’ (Captain Chainsaw),[iv] provide a jarring contrast to valiant scientific rigour. Sadly but no longer surprisingly, these leaders frustrate efforts to slow anthropogenic ecosystem decay. Sadder still, we are increasingly desensitized to the toxic brew of xenophobia and climate denial.
Whilst posing less risk to the environment than ignorance at world leader tier, the disregard of the most bombastic commentariat is equally galling. Cue journalistic tropes of Alpen-crunching tree embracers, guffawing reference to Ireland’s ecological anti-hero, the Kerry slug, and glib ‘kill the whales, save the plankton’ slogans.
Purveyors of such sensationalist hyperbole do so to sell copy. The shock-jock Jeremy Clarkson wincingly entreats Greta, with misogynistic undertones ‘to be a good girl, shut up, and [don’t] go out in a skirt that short.’[v]
Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed ‘obnoxious, loud, and frequently fired ,’[vi] U.S. Republican journalist Michael Graham is another exploiting an angry white male anti-environmental constituency to garner a following.
For his part, the POTUS has also sparred with the Swedish child activist, in characteristically unbecoming fashion, mockingly referring to this ‘very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.’[vii]
What fun would ensue if the IPCC were to invite Thunberg, Trump, and a band of other incendiary speakers to a public climate debate. The Canadian clinical psychologist and global media star Jordan Peterson could provide ruthless post-match psychoanalysis to provide car crash television on a stratospheric level.
I suspect Thunberg might decline the opportunity as a matter of principle stressing the irrelevance of idle words.
Yet it seems we need Greta to stimulate our senses, deadened as we are by a constant stream of ever-worsening statistics. As an example, take these statements of fact: ‘Nature declines are at rates unprecedented in human history;’[viii] an area of primary tropical rain forest the size of Belgium was lost in 2018,[ix] and these losses exceed those from 2017 when an area the size of a football pitch was lost every second.[x] Is it just me, or do these harbingers come off sounding oddly banal?
Here in Ireland, 85% of habitats, protected under EU Habitat Directives, are in ‘unfavourable status.’[xi] Curlew numbers – whose reverberating cry was once a soundtrack to Ireland’s uplands – have declined by 96% since the late 1980’s,[xii] and may go extinct within five to ten years. Such statements sting and depress, but many of us seem desensitized by over-stimulation in a mediated age.
Eco-thinkers
‘Ms.’ Thunberg, as she is sometimes addressed with mocking respect by her dissenters, is inarguably an ecological ‘thought leader.’ That term seems to have been first used to describe American philosopher and early ‘eco-thinker,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was said to have ‘the wizard-power of a thought leader.’
As we face down the ecosystem crisis, we need more environmental thought leaders to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Lovelock, E.O Wilson, and Dublin’s own Frank Mitchell.
We need effective eco-communicators to recruit followers to the environmental movement. These new recruits could heal the fatigue in long-term activists – labelled as outré or leftfield by the establishment – jaded by the inaction of policymakers.
With environmentalism mainstreaming, new voices can dynamise and nourish environmental stewardship on the heretofore disinterested fringes.
Hearteningly, in May 2019, Dáil Eireann became the second legislative assembly on the planet (after the House of Commons in the U.K.) to declare a Biodiversity and Climate Emergency. After decades of numbing stasis, law-makers in this State with the power to instigate change seen to have committed to radical environmental objectives through Ireland’s Climate Action Plan,[xiii] and Ireland’s (third) National Biodiversity Action Plan.[xiv] Let’s wait and see whether long-term institutional failures can be overcome.
As a career ecologist, I care as deeply for slimy moss, and eels as for doe-eyed dolphins or deer. All are a part of the web of life; even the wasps we love to hate play their part as aphid predators. Yet committing my life’s work to conservation has done little to allay a sense of powerlessness to bring about meaningful changes.
And yet – with rumination over my own more unsustainable habits a favourite past time – I see that we can all do more on an individual level, becoming, like Greta, the change we want to see in the world.
Whoever stated: ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’ happened upon a problem and solution to the current biodiversity and environmental crisis.
For the sake of Mother Gaia we must substitute kinesis for stasis. The power of one is the collective potential of all. Wizard- (and perhaps also witch-) powered thought leaders are at the ready.
[ii] IPCC, ‘Climate Change and Land’, August 2019, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/
[iii] Chris Thomas, T. Jones and Sue Hartley, ‘“Insectageddon”: A call for more robust data and rigorous analyses’, Global Change Biology, March, 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331456611_Insectageddon_A_call_for_more_robust_data_and_rigorous_analyses
[iv] Tom Phillips, ‘Bolsonaro rejects ‘Captain Chainsaw’ label as data shows deforestation ‘exploded’’ August 7th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/07/bolsonaro-amazon-deforestation-exploded-july-data
[vii] Kate Lyons, ‘Donald Trump tweet appears to mock Greta Thunberg and UN speech’, September 24th, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/donald-trump-tweet-appears-to-mock-greta-thunberg-and-un-speech-1.4028590
[viii] Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), ‘Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’’ May, 2019. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/
[ix] Niklas Magnusson, ‘Deforestation Wipes Out an Area the Size of Belgium’, April 25th, 2019, Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-25/how-bad-is-deforestation-two-connecticuts-were-lost-last-year
[x] Damian Carrington, Niko Kommenda, Pablo Gutiérrez and Cath Levett, ‘One football pitch of forest lost every second in 2017, data reveals’, 27th of June, 2018, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/jun/27/one-football-pitch-of-forest-lost-every-second-in-2017-data-reveals
[xi] NPWS (2019). The Status of EU Protected Habitats and Species in Ireland. Volume 1: Summary Overview. Unpublished NPWS report
[xii] Unpublished data from Allan Lauder (2017) cited in O’Donoghue, B.G. (2019). Curlew Conservation Programme Annual Report 2018. National Parks & Wildlife Service, Killarney O’Donoghue
Few among the crowds walking down Thomas Street will know there is a hidden garden in the heart of the Liberties. In the past this site served as a car park, and a popular place to shoot up. Later it was bought up and fenced off. Shops and houses, however, had back door access and it became an unofficial dumping ground.
I first came across it in the spring of 2014, and met Tony Lowth the Guerrilla-Composter of Dublin City. By that time it had become a garden space, using a No-Dig method, with Tony’s stashed compost.
I was unemployed at that time and straight away I was hooked on the project. The students from nearby NCAD wanted to grow vegetables, Tony wanted to make compost and I was just looking for my place in the world (and some fresh vegetables).
Located in the city centre, there was an abundance of organic waste from some surprising sources. We were bringing in coffee grinds, horse manure, garden and vegetable waste. Tony went to Dublin’s Victorian fruit and vegetable market almost every morning, and came back with a van full of discarded vegetables. The main challenge was to scale the hill leading up to the garden: everything was pushed up on a wheelbarrow.
The right location for the heaps was selected by Tony, and we just layered the materials to achieve the perfect carbon to nitrogen ratio. The rest of the work was done by nature. First with bacteria and microbes starting the bio-digestion process.
A pile of compost pile literally cooks. The heat kills the pathogens which could be dangerous for human health. The remaining work is done by earthworms, which rapidly multiply as they munch trough the organic waste. Their saliva and intestines further reduces the pathogens. As the worms digests the organic materials it consumes, it refines them. Nutrients, including minerals and trace elements, are reduced to their most usable form. The castings have a neutral pH of 7.0.
Bit-by-bit the site was cleaned and converted into a very productive garden where events and workshops were held, with many volunteers coming and going. At a certain stage we simply ran out of space, and started to build heaps against a big pile of construction rubble which had been dumped on the site over the years. We kept going and our heap became the symbol of the garden, the Compost Hill.
Lots of hard work went into the garden, and with all the compost on site, we had created probably the most fertile patch in all of Dublin city. The garden was becoming a pilot social and enterprise project showing what can be made of vacant plots around the city. That was until relations began to sour between Tony and the College.
Without warning, locks appeared on the gate not long afterwards, and the famous hill diminished as the compost creatures were no longer fed. Access was restricted to one day per week at midday for designated people with access to the space. We had to sign in at the college reception and take a key. Restrictions were eventually eased, but without Tony managing the works and bringing volunteers and workers the garden became wild again.
Nature with its amazing productivity made the most of the rich compost and covered all the beds with lush growth. We tried to keep up with the weeds, but with limited time this became very hard.
The compost hill and the garden is now covered with weeds of a size you would not see elsewhere. If you look closely you can still harvest lots of vegetables and if you look really closely you will find amazing biodiversity.
The city centre site is now worth millions of euros, but not for its environmental importance but because developers are willing to pay that amount for space to build more student accommodation, or a hotel.
Fortunately, some teachers in the College recognise this as one of the last green places in the Liberties and also as a great opportunity for the College to facilitate students to learn about nature management and farming. Perhaps in the time the garden will became a unique art and ecology outdoor studio.
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Martin Obst works as a project engineer, in the middle of a new boom in Irish construction. As an escape from the corporate world, he and his wife-to-be are building a perma-culture garden and planting native woodland on the west coast of Ireland, close to his favourite surf breaks.
It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold. Andre Codrescu
In Ireland, if you hear ‘Section 8’, you might think THEFT, as here we have a statute for that, oh and FRAUD. No need to applaud. Meanwhile in America, they might mean housing the homeless or be talking about WWII-era homosexuals, bisexuals, crossdressers and transgender people deemed mentally unfit to serve in the military. Their undesirable behaviour being quaintly labelled ‘dishonorable discharge.’
Social engineering aside, it seems even at the federal level, there’s a fine line between love and hate. But be aware there exists a vital Section 8 under Article One of the venerable U.S. Constitution, called ‘The Copyright Clause’. It reads: ‘To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries.’
Also known as the ‘Intellectual Property Clause’, these precious words provide that each patent granted remains inviolate for a solid seventeen years. And I speak from personal experience: in the sixties, once expired, patents could not be renewed.
Since then, Congress has consistently cobbled together rules around a patent to galvanize its value, with consequent financial benefits for the holder. These and other actions by Congress systemically thwart the laws that governed a creative capitalism under which America once thrived.
One result has been to tilt the playing field in favor of corrupt oligarchs and multinational corporations, who can afford the capital-intensive funding of new ventures on the front end.
While the Constitution’s specified process for amendment was ignored by Congress, a slew of new laws were spawned to maintain the 99% at 1960s income levels. This legislation bedevils a middle class who slaves for longer and less, but still pays the sky-rocketing price of ingenuity and innovation.
To become a songwriter, performing artist, or movie producer today requires alliances or confrontations with giant media or technology corporations, and involves fighting prohibitively expensive legal offensives to retain patent rights in perpetuity.
Michael Jackson’s heirs have inherited the highest-earning estate in history according to Forbes magazine, which collects more royalties than Jackson himself ever did. Michael’s life ended in a homicidal dose of sedatives administered by his personal physician. After being convicted of involuntary manslaughter, the doctor served four years, before being released based on a combination of prison overcrowding and his own good behaviour.
Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the nom de plume Mark Twain, was a staunch advocate for authors against publishers. He identified the latter as pirates of copyright and speculated that last minute augmentations to his works could prevent them ever entering the public domain.
Do his descendants still receive royalties for Tom Sawyer? The short answer is no. In 1966 the last of his line, granddaughter Nina, a heavy drinker, informed bartenders of her preference for vodka to be served, graveside, at her funeral. Found in her oft-frequented Los Angeles motel room, Nina was declared a suicide, and her cause of death presumed to be alcohol and an overdose of pills.
Generating billions every year, Big Pharma makes minuscule changes to the secret sauces developed just prior to the expiration of a plethora of profitable patents. The drug cartel’s strategy buys another seventeen years of protection for products which remain fundamentally unchanged, while Americans continue to be overcharged. Smaller firms that could otherwise create efficacious generic alternatives at lower prices are cut out of this highly lucrative cycle.
In technology for twenty-six consecutive years, IBM has maintained its position as the U.S. patent leader. Big Blue dominates the market and is on track to tally a grand total of ten thousand patents. This leaves companies like Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Samsung and Qualcomm to quibble over the crumbs of core technologies, meaning more artificial intelligence, cloud computing, virtual reality and drones.
Be they for licensing or litigation alone, reaping the hefty annual fees from these expansive global portfolios remains their primary business activity, and these companies don’t feel compelled to produce anything of lasting tangible value at all.
On reflection, a beacon can be weakened, but does the U.S. Constitution seek and destroy the same creativity it claims to preserve? On closer inspection, do ‘We the People’ get what we deserve at the till, when those good ol’ boys we elected hand us the bill?
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Following a global trend since the arrival of the Internet, mainstream Irish media, including the so-called ‘paper of record’ the Irish Times, is increasingly required to sell itself. The days of someone reading a daily newspapers cover-to-cover are fading into nostalgic memories. Now editors feel obliged to dangle click-bait, and even fake news, often through social media feeds, with content increasingly accessed on smartphones.
The result is diminished intellectual content, with greater emphasis on sports, titillating lifestyle stories, and consumer surveys. Moreover, advertising paymasters, generally multinational companies, often appear insulated from probing investigations; in Ireland’s case leading to a reliance on foreign-owned publications to break stories.
Journalism should not be placed on a pedestal, or equated with a secular priesthood: any writer has conflicts of interest, biases and personal foibles. Nor are business people bereft of ethical considerations. The point is about how the interests of the public informant and salesperson are balanced across a media spectrum, and the danger inherent to any democracy when media is run on a purely commercial basis, identifying its interests with other businesses. This now appears to be the case with the three main Irish players: the national broadcaster RTÉ, Independent News and Media and the Irish Times newspaper (which last year purchased the only other indigenous national daily, the Irish Examiner).
It is also apparent that the current Irish government’s ‘pro-business’ policies align with the interests of leading providers. This brings broadly sympathetic coverage, evident especially in the uncritical ‘reporting’ of strategic leaks, and publication of generally flattering images of leading politicians, especially media-conscious Taoiseach Varadkar.
The close relationship between mainstream Irish media and the government came into sharp focus last year when unmarked government advertorials appeared across indigenous print media.[i] This now has serious implications for reporting on the environment, including man-made climate change and the Extinction Crisis.
Climate Inaction
On June 16th the Irish government launched a Climate Action Plan that gained essentially positive press coverage, emphasising how seriously the government was taking the issue. For example, the headline in the Irish Times the following day read: ‘Climate action plan promises ‘radical’ change.’
Environmental NGOs, however, reacted very differently to the Plan. An Taisce said it fell ‘well short of the kind of radical, transformational document our recently declared national ‘climate and biodiversity emergency’ warrants.’[ii]
Friends of the Earth offered a more favourable assessment describing the machinery for delivery as ‘the biggest innovation in Irish climate policy in 20 years.’ They cautioned, however, that the ‘plan gets us to the starting line on climate action. It will take consistent political leadership to ensure it is implemented on time…’[iii]
Elsewhere, The Environmental Pillar, a coalition of over thirty national environment groups, lambasted a ‘general lack of clarity, ambition and urgency in the new Climate Action Plan to Tackle Climate Breakdown’, or reverse biodiversity decline.[iv]
Finally, the Irish Wildlife Trust in its press release bluntly stated: ‘There is no indication that the government is willing to rethink agricultural expansion plans which are as odds with environment goals.’[v]
Importantly, agriculture (essentially livestock agriculture) and transport (mostly of the private motor car variety) are projected to remain the main sources of Irish greenhouse gas emissions (currently combining to comprise over 50% of the total – rising both in absolute terms and proportionately. See table below).
Climate Deception
The Plan does little to address the Irish population’s disproportionate contribution to a climate change (the third highest per capita in the EU[vi]) that is already giving rise to extreme weather events close to our shores, and increasing frequency of storms here too. It also all but ignores a potentially irreversible Extinction Crisis facing the natural world, including in Ireland.
Since then the government has blocked the passage of a cross-party Climate Emergency Bill, using a previously arcane and potentially unconstitutional ‘money messages’ parliamentary procedure. The Bill would have denied any further licences being granted for the purpose of oil or gas exploration in the country. This is certainly not evidence of the kind of “consistent political leadership” sought by Friends of the Earth, who, on reflection, more recently acknowledged that the ‘actual measures in the Plan don’t add up to bringing Irish emissions down far enough fast enough.’[vii]
In essence, the Irish Times, among others,[viii] helped generate positivity in the Plan’s wake. This is apparent in the opening paragraph to an editorial the following day:
The appropriately broad scope of the Government’s Climate Action Plan must be acknowledged. A scan of the plan’s headings shows that this administration, however belatedly, has fully grasped that global heating is negatively impacting every aspect of our life and that a plethora of policies and behaviours require urgent changes.[ix]
Over the following days, opinion writers debated aspects of the plan, but none, it seems, was permitted to excoriate it.
The greenwashing is best illustrated by a photograph featuring the following day in the Irish Times of the full Cabinet of Ministers arriving in the Phoenix Park to launch the Plan on an electric bus.[x] Yet this is one of just 13 State-owned electric vehicles among 6,573 listed, and came after the National Transport Authority recently announced the purchase of a further 200 diesel buses,[xi] for use nationwide. In Dublin nitrogen dioxide levels from diesel engines are already in breach of EU standards in a range of locations,[xii] seriously imperilling human health.
The EPA’s recent emissions’ projections[xiii] make for stark reading:
Mt CO2 eq
2017
2020
2025
2030
Growth 2018-2030
Agriculture
20.21
20.32
20.66
20.85
3.2%
Transport
12.00
12.68
12.48
11.86
-1.2%
Energy Industries
11.74
11.95
13.66
8.62
-26.5%
Residential
5.74
6.42
5.66
4.55
-20.7%
Manufacturing Combustion
4.66
3.86
3.70
3.44
-26.2%
Industrial Processes
2.23
2.39
2.67
3.01
34.6%
Commercial and Public Services
1.97
1.31
1.15
0.97
-50.9%
F-Gases
1.23
0.98
0.90
0.78
-35.9%
Waste
0.93
0.58
0.49
0.44
-52.2%
TOTAL
60.74
60.53
61.43
54.55
-10.2%
The highest-emitting sector, agriculture, is predicted to increase its share to almost forty-per-cent of the total by 2030, while emissions from transport flatline. There is no evidence that the government’s Plan will alter these trajectories.
Climate Opportunism
In fact, climate change is being sold as an opportunity to roll out a fleet of electric cars, especially once the implementation of Bus Connects – really a road-widening exercise – ensures Dublin becomes even more of a U.S.-style motor-city.
Foreign manufacture of electric vehicles externalises environmental and human impacts, including the mining of cobalt in Congo for lithium batteries.[xiv]
Considering the success of the Luas, light rail seems a superior option to develop in our urban areas than noisy, uncomfortable and polluting buses. With a comparable population to Dublin, Prague has an extensive tram network offering a rapid, regular and comfortable service.
A sensible climate action plan for urban areas could offer scope for a new generation of electric vehicles, including electric bikes, scooters and vehicles for the elderly – perhaps even involving state assistance to manufacturing enterprises. The motor car, as currently conceived, is not simply a major polluter, it is also unnecessarily large and poses serious dangers to other road users, as well as leading to social atomisation.
Moreover, as long as fossil fuels generate electric power (under the Plan coal-burning Moneypoint power station is to be phased out in 2025,[xv] conveniently beyond the lifespan of this or the next government), electric vehicles could actually generate higher emissions than diesel equivalents, as one German study shows.[xvi]
Another lacuna to the Plan is a failure to discuss reducing air travel between Dublin-London, accounting for 15,000 flights per annum, making it the busiest air corridor in Europe.[xvii] This might involve improving ferry services out of Dublin and, at the very least, providing a rail service from the Dublin city centre to the Port. It could even involve cooperating with the U.K. government to achieve improvements in the rail service out of Holyhead, potentially making sail-rail journey times competitive with air travel alternative.[xviii]
Furthermore, the tired argument about maintaining the status quo in agriculture, the worst-offending sector, to the benefit of a narrowing elite, and underpinned by billions in subsidies, is based on a common misconception that Irish livestock ‘production’ diminishes impacts from livestock agriculture occurring elsewhere.
This is the ‘our coal smokes less than their coal’ argument. In fact, recent analysis by An Taisce of U.N. figures[xix] shows Irish agricultural products to be responsible for among the highest emissions in Europe. Any plan purporting to diminish Ireland’s contribution to climate change is a waste of paper without proposals for radical reform of Irish agriculture. Emphasis, and subsidies, should shift to the cultivation of fruit and vegetables for the home market thereby reducing fossil fuel dependency, increasing employment and potentially raising the nation’s health.
The so-called ‘Paper of Record’
The Irish Times should not be considered a ‘paper of record’, or an unbiased conduit of ‘facts’, as it advertises itself. Although managed as a trust, a significant salary overhang and investments extraneous to news-gathering and commentary, including www.myhome.ie, have seen it develop into what is an overwhelmingly commercial concern. This approach may be a necessity for the survival of a medium-sized newspaper in the digital era, but it has important, generally unacknowledged, consequences for Irish democracy.
It should be emphasised that many Irish Times journalists display diligence and integrity, and stories are still broken, but since Paul O’Neill became editor in 2017, the paper has become noticeably more business-friendly, and deferential to the current government.
One leading columnist, Stephen Collins, is particularly partisan in his support for the dominant economic consensus of steady growth and rising rents administered by a political duopoly.[xx] Left-wing analysis of Irish politics and society is only given an intermittent platform, especially since Vincent Brown’s retirement, and with Fintan O’Toole mainly devoted to international commentary.
Notably, Dan Flinter, chairman of the Irish Times Trust since 2013, holds a range of external directorships, where potential conflicts of interest could arise. For example, he is a non-executive director of Dairygold Co-Op, and chairman of its Remuneration Committee and a member of the Acquisitions and Investments Committee.[xxi] Ongoing expansion of the dairy sector since the lifting of EU milk quotas in 2015 has been the leading cause of the agricultural sector’s (and the country’s) rising emissions.
A worldwide environmental crisis is upon us, and many, particularly young, Irish people are focused on the country’s global responsibilities. Meaningfully addressing the gathering storm – in Ireland’s case by shifting agricultural priorities (and subsidies) away from livestock production and phasing out the motor car in urban areas – would work, however, to the detriment of vested interests that advertise heavily in Irish media.[xxii] Such an approach would also be anathema to the dominant paradigm of economic growth-without-end, oblivious to environmental impact.
The government’s Climate Action Plan seems to have been designed to assuage the justifiable fears, and desire for real action, among wide sections of the population, but it is really a greenwashing exercise, as the responses of leading environmental NGOs show.
Unforgivably, the Irish Times misrepresented the Plan as a ‘radical’ document, despite its obvious deficiencies. This is a betrayal of a loyal readership, and honourable journalists working there. Irish democracy is being undermined by an institution which many of us grew up believing was one of its cornerstones, on an issue of crucial global importance.
[xiii] ‘EPA’S GREENHOUSE GAS PROJECTIONS SHOW THAT IRELAND HAS MORE TO DO TO MEET ITS 2030 TARGETS’, Environmental Protection Agency, June 6th, 2019. https://www.epa.ie/mobile/news/name,66072,en.html?fbclid=IwAR3cGLpPKV9k4fTIVE8EMCJ_DPqG4bK_Ked5xWObMD5pzt_j63_wGQK7R24 accessed 9/6/19.
[xxii] As regards the motor car industry, see Stephen Court, ‘Drivetime’, Cassandra Voices, 31st of May, 2018. ‘http://cassandravoices.com/environment/drive-time-the-irish-medias-message/
Recent Local and European elections witnessed an electoral Green Tide, especially in Dublin, where Ciaran Cuffe topped the European poll. But this week Dubliners are contending with a Brown Tide, of shit, after overspill from the Ringsend Wastewater Plant.
It is far from an isolated example of this government’s environmental negligence. What makes it all the more nauseating is the doublespeak emanating from many Fine Gael politicians, who claim to care, including the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Hard decisions are avoided and basic infrastructure is creaking, or non-existent, undermining the nation’s health. Planning for the future is long on glossy PR brochures but short on substantive action.
Creaking infrastructure.
Here are five obvious signs:
1. Milking for all it’s worth: the Environmental Protection Agency recently projected a steady increase in national emissions, emanating in particular from the agricultural sector. By 2030 they estimate almost forty per cent of the national total will emanate from that sector.[i] This is the product of long-standing government policy. The Harvest 2020 plan, published in 2010, and driven by Simon Coveney as Minister for Agriculture from 2011, set ambitious targets for increasing dairy production, which have made Ireland the world’s second leading exporter of controversial infant milk powder into the Chinese market.[ii]
2. Drilling Begins: The May elections showed Irish people are awakening to the need for climate action. Conveniently, two days after the poll, the Department of Climate Action granted consent for an exploratory oil and gas well off the Kerry coast.[iii] It begs the question as to whether the Department understands its remit to be the acceleration of climate change, as opposed to the opposite.
3. Traffic Fumes: It is over a decade since the European Union’s environmental body described ‘Dublin as a ‘worst case scenario‘ for ‘unsustainable car-dependent urban sprawl.’[iv] Little or nothing has been done in the interim to counter what is an unusually car-dependent city. Moreover, a recent survey found Dublin to be one of the slowest cities to drive through in all of Europe[v]; all these cars, including those with diesel engines that continue to be sold, are diminishing air quality, with air pollution levels regularly breaching healthy standards set out by the WHO.[vi]
Seapoint, Dublin, 9th of June, 2019.
4. Swimming Ban: Thousands of Dubliners depend on a daily swim for their mental health and wellbeing. Last week it was revealed that partially treated sewage had leaked into Dublin Bay, creating a substantial health risk to bathers. The treatment facility was built in 2005 to accommodate a population of 1.64 million people, but now handles wastewater from approximately 1.9 million. As a result, the facility is constantly overloaded, tarnishing one of the city’s greatest assets in Dublin Bay.[vii]
5. Greenwashing: Senior Fine Gael politicians have long specialised in saying one thing on the environment, while doing precisely the opposite. Leo Varadkar, for example, claimed he supported the school strike for climate,[viii] oblivious, or attempting to undermine, how these young adults were, in fact protesting against the negligent policies of his government. In terms of agriculture, the Irish Wildlife Trust’s Padraic Fogarty recently wrote about the government’s propaganda that ‘it would be wrong to think that Origin Green was merely ineffective – it is much worse than that. It is, in fact, a greater threat than all these insidious pressures precisely because its marketing is so effective.’[ix]
The idea of home is a recurring Irish preoccupation – níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.[i] This can be traced to a history of Famine dispossession, and a subsequent Land War. The Irish Constitution still commits the State to supporting women as home-makers.[ii]
It perhaps explains the vehemence of recent criticism, from across the political spectrum, directed at the Fingal Battalion Direct Action for protesting outside private residences of government ministers Simon Harris, Richard Bruton and Paschal Donohoe, as well as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
Social Democrat councillor Gary Gannon condemned the campaign as ‘entirely wrong’[iii]; while the Irish Times also weighed in, likening the protests to interventions at hospitals and medical clinics by anti-abortion groups.[iv]
While in the UK the sight of politicians’ homes being besieged by an intrusive media or angry protestors is a familiar one, in Ireland we expect restraint and even civility around the domestic space of public representatives.
That the Fingal group styles itself a ‘Battalion’ also conveys paramilitarism and a form of mob rule. Political protest, however, is always considered ugly by those in power, and an absolute ban on any form would set a dangerous precedent. What if the mob is actually in power?
Before the last Italian election a crowd, holding candles, gathered outside the Milan residence of Silvio Berlusconi, as a member of the Five Star Movement read out an indictment against the disgraced former prime minister, revealing his links to the real mob, or mafia.[v] It was a powerful democratic statement: calling a billionaire politician to account outside his home.
In order for a campaign on the margins to gain public attention a degree of civil disobedience is often required. That was certainly the case with the NAMA to Nature project in 2012.[vi] Ghost estates around the country appeared as a testament to folly and greed, making the public overwhelmingly receptive to what was a trespass on private property to heal the landscape by planting trees.
But since the Crash we have seen a steady reassertion of the rights of property-owners. This often works to the detriment of marginalised citizens, and can imperil the habitats of species under threat of extinction. Travellers also defy a widespread devotion to private ownership, making them a convenient target for unscrupulous politicians.
The government’s housing policy is failing at a fundamental level the ten thousand homeless citizens.[vii] An entrenched sympathy with landlords was set out by Eoghan Murphy in a speech to the Dáil last December:
We have to be very careful in interfering more than we are at the moment. We have to make sure that we are not placing extra burdens on these small landlords. And we have to make sure that we are not prohibiting someone from selling a property that they own when they might need to sell that property for perfectly legitimate reasons in their own lives. They may not have the money to re-compensate the person living in the property at that point.[viii]
Above all the government has failed to build the houses necessary to alleviate the Housing Crisis, at a time of when the states coffers are bulging. Taoiseach Varadkar’s oft-stated ideological opposition to socialism seems an obvious reason.
Upholding property holders rights extends to giving farmers free reign to do as they wish on their land. Last month Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Josepha Madigan signed off on an order extending the burning season of uplands, the habitats of hen harriers and skylarks, among other wildlife.
Anne Marie Hourihane in the The Times Irish edition provided a scathing assessment of the Minister’s response:
At the weekend Josepha Madigan, the heritage minister, suggested that we address Ireland’s plummeting bird population by installing bird feeders in our gardens. Unfortunately, skylarks and hen harriers are not known for their attendance at bird tables, preferring to nest in uplands. Maybe the proposed bird feeders are intended as a diversionary tactic for the birds that will be nesting in the hedgerows in August. For example, your local yellowhammer — if you have one, as the yellowhammer is already on our danger list — might leave his hedgerow to get a slap-up feed at some well-appointed bird table, then fly back to his hedgerow, where he’ll say: “Hey, man, where’s my gaff? Also, the wife and kids . . .” It’s going to be a great craic.
Hourihane also highlighted an extension to the period for cutting hedgerows, which, she wrote, ‘contain so much wildlife, so many insects — including bees — so many small mammals, that they are a permanent wildlife programme all on their own. Now we will be allowed to cut them in August.’[ix]
Madigan’s response revealed either naivete, or a disregard for vulnerable species. Yet this runs contrary to the common good of preserving wildlife, potentially infringing what may, at a later time, be found to be in breach of any native species right, ‘to be, to habitat, and to fulfil its role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth community’, as argued previously.
Leo Varadkar’s committed to an ‘extensive investment programme’ in the arts[x] during the Fine Gael leadership election, yet many artists and musicians struggle to afford a accommidation in Ireland. This is especially the case in Dublin, soon to be the EU’s most expensive city for rental accommodation.[xi] The plight of musicians is particularly difficult given how digital technology has decimated potential earnings from CD sales.
Songwriter David Kitt, who grew up in Madigan’s Dublin South constituency, where his father Tom Kitt was actually a Fianna Fail T.D., last year announced he was unable to afford accommodation in the capital, bemoaning how, ‘Dublin’s heart and soul is being ripped out and sold to the highest bidder.’[xii]
Furthermore, a recent letter signed by 407 members of the Irish theatre community claimed the direction the Abbey theatre is taking is causing ‘devastation among our ranks’, and pointing out there would not be a single Irish-based actor involved in any productions between September 2018 and February 2019.[xiii]
The Abbey, founded by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, is the national theatre of Ireland. The staging of J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World in 1907 there brought riots over an unfavourable portrayal of Irishness. A lack of indigenous theatrical productions today prevents similar interrogations of contemporary Irish culture, while forcing many thespians into exile.
True art and literature, as George Steiner argues, is ‘always, a critique’, involving ‘a value judgment of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.’[xiv]
We have also learnt of funding being denied by Irish embassies abroad to Irish artistic endeavours that fail to cast the country in a favourable light.
The reliance of artists on patronage develops worrying dynamics. Will the anointed elite continue to pose the difficult questions essential to great works if funding is jeopardised? The major concern, however, is that Dublin, in particular, is being denuded of the vitality and originality of a vibrant artistic community, compelled to make their homes elsewhere.
Rare birds and feckless artists are forms of endangered wild life that do not fit comfortably into a society dominated by the interests of land owners. Those who invade the domestic spaces of politicians are roundly condemned, but can Ireland offer the sanctity of a home for all its species?
[i] Lit. ‘There’s no hearth like your own hearth’, or ‘there’s no place like home’.
[ii] Article 41.2.1: ‘In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.’
[v] ‘Alessandro Di Battista sotto la villa di Berlusconi, legge la sentenza Dell’Utri (COMPLETO)’ Youtube, February 9th 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRpXvuxP28k, accessed 12/3/19.
It was exciting to meet the enthusiasm at the inaugural meeting of Talamh Beo, a grassroots organisation of farmers, growers and land-based workers on the island of Ireland. It aims to ensure a living landscape, where people and ecosystems thrive together.
Inspiration comes from the Landworkers’ Alliance (UK), which in the five years of its existence has become a voice for small food producers, farmers, growers and land-based workers (which also includes beekeepers, herbalists, foresters and flower farmers).
What we do at grassroots level in Ireland is of the utmost important as we confront a potential climate catastrophe, which we need to acknowledge as individuals and communities. No matter who we are in society, and what class we belong to, we all eat three times a day, and should be nourishing ourselves with good food, from a ground that is well taken care of.
We can farm in a far more sustainable way, beginning with our own gardens, and make conscientious food choices, avoiding plastic waste, and supporting local farmers.
This is crucial to our health and wellbeing, ‘Let the food be your medicine’, as Hippocrates put it; or as Darina Allen said on her ‘Foodture’ podcast: ‘Do your best to source chemical-free organic food, it’s really worth the investment … the less you spend on food the more you spend on medical care.’
If you think you can’t afford better food, consider where you now invest your money: how often do you go to the hairdresser, or drink a pint or choose to drive somewhere? There are priorities we have in terms of our time and money.
It is always a good time to start thinking about growing some of your own vegetables!
Ideally you should begin by building up soil nutrients from November onwards, but if you are starting now and feel you have missed the boat, don’t worry. We are adopting a No-dig method in our garden, which can begin at any time of the year. In this respect our inspiration is the legendary Charles Dowding, whose website and Instagram page offers plenty of excellent free advice.
If your space is limited you can use raised beds made from timber. Even a small concrete yard offers sufficient space. This type of raised bed is ideal for older people who might wish to avoid bending over.
The main ingredient of growing is good compost, which you can source from local farmers, and elsewhere. To start a bed we recommend gathering lots of cardboard, and spreading it straight onto the ground. Then spread a 10cm layer of compost over this. Beds should be approximately 1m wide, allowing 30cm for pathways between each one. Wood chips give a neat appearance to the pathways, and suppress weeds.
While your new beds are settling down, start propagating your favourite vegetable varieties in pots and trays of fine seed compost on your windowsills inside. You don’t generally need a rich compost to germinate seeds; heat and moisture are sufficient. You can multi-sow and do successional sowing to have a continuous supply of fresh ingredients throughout the year.
Those wishing to start an organic farming business, or a just develop partial self-sufficiency, should access networks of independent Irish growing organisations. We highly recommend linking up with an experienced farmer in your area to build a good relationship, and learn where the food you eat is coming from.
The Organic Growers of Ireland has created a Small Growers Network to help growers who have completed formal training or an internship with them. It is essentially a participatory network that is open to anyone who feels it would be useful. You don’t need much experience to be part of it; what you do need is the enthusiasm required to build up your strength on the farm.
The Network offers a forum for small farmers to highlight the specific needs of their holdings. It is organised by Jason Horner, founder of the OGI, and monthly meetings are happening in Cloughjordan, with farm walks providing different discussion topics, led by established organic growers.
Becoming a supporter of Irish Seedsavers helped us get involved in seed sharing and gave us access to workshops and events (including brilliant talks from Mary Raynolds). Apple-tasting days were a highlight. Seed saving is useful to anyone with an interest in biodiversity, increasing the variety of vegetables, and helping bees to pollinate by reducing monoculture.
The Flower Farmers of Ireland also promote the cultivation, marketing, sale and use of Irish-grown cut-flowers and foliage, and support and act as an advocate for growers.
We believe the Land belongs to us all. That is why we need to restore natural ecosystems, and put power back into the hands of small-scale producers. At the moment production is dominated by multinational supermarkets, which leads to waste and inequalities. It is time to get up and grow, or at least choose honestly grown local food.
The path of pollen: the lovers’ tale between bee and flower. Once upon a time, bees were carnivorous – entering into flowers to gain access to smaller insects as a means for protein food supply. After frequent visits to the opening of the flower, curiosity began to mount in the bee. The flower was so visually beautiful, producing aromas incredibly alluring, what else could this elusive creature have to offer besides a convenient fast food location?
Inching its way deeper into the delicate flower, the bee dabbled the sweet nectar and nutrient-packed pollen. Fireworks. Explosions. The bee bid farewell to catching flies and raised its standards, dedicating itself to the bees new life partner: the show-stopping flower.
With a vegetarian pledge, bee and the flower began a co-evolution, involving nourishment for the bees in exchange for seeds for the plant. A balanced, harmonious relationship. The bee still earns its stripes as one of the plant’s best allies in reproduction.
Will this love stand the test of time?
I was walking through a park wondering if I should fulfil my original intention to dedicate an article to bees, or focus on Spring Tonics (maybe another time). Suspended in this mind chatter, I stumbled upon a dead bee on the pavement. Thank you for hearing me and delivering this obvious sign, Universe.
I examined the bee – it could have just been taking a break. It was sitting on its legs, wings side up. I sat with the bee, not spotting any obvious injuries, but I did not sense any movement either.
Wishing not to leave it alone in the middle of the foot path, I regretfully took a leaf of ivy and scooped the bee up – a perfect fit. Looking around for any nearby flowers to rest the bee by, I had to settle for a mossy green spot that had collected morning dew next to a stream.
It struck me again (double thank you, Universe) that the initial direction in my head for writing this article was to raise awareness of our responsibility to plant food for bees, and Nature was presenting me with a perfect illustration.
Around this time of year, humans have adapted the ritual of planting bulbs ‘for Spring’. Flowering Daffodils and Tulips being the most obvious example. While a pop of long overdue colour is therapeutic, these plants generally are not the best options for pollinators. Modern hybrids have been heavily manipulated by plant breeders to select uniform eye-candy for human adoration, heedless of the side-effects such as loss of nectar and pollen.
These Frankenstein-flowers come at a major cost to bees: after hibernation, without early sustenance, a bee will die.
We as seed facilitators need to plant with others in mind and treat the soil and seeds as sacred. We can do so by adopting these three rule of thumb:
Prioritize bulbs and seeds or ‘in the green’ plants that are Organic. A number of commercially produced bulbs are manufactured with pesticides. What is toxic to humans is also toxic to bees. When a seed or a bulb is modified with pesticides, do you think these chemicals disappear when the plant develops?
Buy local! And plant locally, too.What plants are indigenous to your environment? These plants will be the most attractive to your local pollinators.
Shapes and sizes matter.Consider the depth of different flowers in correlation to the anatomy of different species of bees. Variety will help attract all sorts of beneficial pollinators. A varied selection of plant species is required not only for a balanced diet, but also to ensure a steady food supply throughout different species blooming times.
These three points flow in the same vein as what is important to consider when shopping for honey. Choose Organic, Local, and Variety. To me, it is best practice to purchase seeds with the understanding that everything you plant enters into a common space for fertility: the same soil we as humans and all those alive depend on for existence. Put another way, mirror purchasing seeds to the way you would choose your own food for optimal health.
Your body being the soil; and food the seeds. A full circle.
Still not sure what to plant? A lot of seed providers will actually state on the packet whether a plant is attractive to pollinators. You can also consider the following bee magnets:
– Crocus
– Snow Drops
– Hellebores
– Clover
– Heather
– Herbs (Borage, Rosemary, Thyme, Lavender, Marjoram, Calendula, St. John’s Wort and many, many more!)
– Trees (Fruit, Rowan, Hawthorn, Elder etc.)
– Wild Flower Mix
Finally, nature provides some of the best early bee foods without any human intervention. Many human-classified ‘weeds’, such as dandelion, are a fantastic first food source for hungry bees, and can aid in fostering greater biodiversity within a collective ecosystem.
How Irish Propaganda Operates Part I (HIPO I) identifies an ‘essential constituency’ of farmers, which offer an overwhelmingly preponderance of their support to representatives of the political duopoly in rural constituencies. Upsetting this cohort frays a brittle alliance maintaining the dominant consensus of steady economic growth, and rising rents. As a result the media and politicians exercise caution where direct criticism of their interests is concerned, exemplified by Leo Varadkar’s volte-face in response to revealing he was cutting down on his red meat consumption.[i]
To define the ‘farming’ sector as such is, however, misleading: what is really referred to is the cartels, which control the export and domestic trade in livestock products. These have, over decades, manipulated farming opinion, especially through the in-house Irish Farmers Journal and pro-industry IFA, into falsely assuming an alignment of interests. Transnational corporations also influence national nutritional guidelines, and contribute to the state’s ‘laggardly’ response to climate change.
It would be incorrect to suggest that the sector is immune from criticism – habitually referred to as ‘our farmers’ by the state broadcaster – in mainstream Irish media. Any reputable news organisation which ignores compelling stories covered in the international press would lose credibility, and there are conscientious journalists working within these organisations. Moreover, the Irish media must appear to be balanced – ‘facts don’t have opinions’ as the Irish Times advertises – and conscientious. But the paper of record neglects to run investigations – thus the horse meat scandal of 2013 was broken by The Guardian – while subtly shaping public perception.
Veganism, in particular, is treated with a mixture of contempt and fear. This reaction may be symptomatic of an older generation’s contempt for a thrusting, and increasingly environmentally-informed, ‘snowflake’ generation, but anti-vegan invective also advantages many of their main advertisers. A recent article in the Irish Times by Brian Boyd warned: ‘Beware the perils of Veganuary’; quoting ‘renowned chef’ Anthony Bourdain’s description of vegans as ‘the Hezbollah-like splinter faction of vegetarians.’[ii] The article recycles arguments previously made in UK publications likening the philosophy to the dietary disorder called orthorexia – an unhealthy preoccupation with eating healthy food.
Yet the science on the matter is clear, with the American Dietetic Association advising that ‘appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.’[iii] The rise of Veganism is the least of Ireland’s nutritional problems: the country is in the grip of an obesity epidemic, linked to the standard Irish diet. What is striking about the paper’s coverage of veganism is that vegans themselves are rarely, if ever, permitted to speak directly to the reader.
‘Cartels have manipulated farming opinion for decades’ Image (c) Daniele Idini
Lancet Recommendations
Last month The Lancet published a paper entitled ‘Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems’, which ‘found strong evidence’, indicating ‘food production is among the largest drivers of global environmental change by contributing to climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater use, interference with the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and land-system change’.
The paper convened thirty-seven leading scientists from sixteen countries in various disciplines including human health, agriculture, political sciences, and environmental sustainability. They argued we can provide ‘healthy diets … for an estimated global population of about 10 billion people by 2050 and remain within a safe operating space’; crucially, however, ‘even small increases in consumption of red meat or dairy foods would make this goal difficult or impossible to achieve.’ This will require ‘unprecedented global collaboration and commitment’ and ‘nothing less than a Great Food Transformation.’[iv] The headline, in the Irish media at least, was a recommendation that red meat consumption should decline by 90% in developed countries such as Ireland.
This radical and timely proposal appeared on the front page of the Irish Times. But a subtle fight back soon commenced, undermining its contents. Was it by coincidence that on the following day a recipe by Lilly Higgins appeared in the paper for sirloin steak?
More substantially, two days on, Kevin O’Sullivan interviewed Professor Alan Matthews; the headline writer emphasising his academic credentials. Matthews argued that ‘Ireland had a role in continuing meat and dairy production, provided it backed up its sustainability credentials with rigorous evidence.’[v] This is a significant proviso given that leading environmentalists have decried the government’s flagship Origin Green as an exercise in ‘greenwashing’.[vi]
The bias of the piece is demonstrated by a failure to canvass the opinion of an environmental scientist who could have offered an alternative perspective (and any number would have done so) to counter Matthews’s opinion. Instead the partisan views of the IFA’s Joe Healy were dutifully conveyed.
The editorial stance of the Irish Times (penned perhaps by O’Sullivan himself?) is made clear a few days later, when it described the report as ‘narrowly prescriptive’.[vii] The message is the equivalent of a ‘fuck you’ to the thirty-seven scientific authors, saying we in Ireland prefer to invert the food pyramid and will continue to devote 90% of our land to livestock.
The Irish Times also misleadingly conflates production with consumption. Allowing (without accepting) that Ireland enjoys a comparative advantage in low carbon-emission livestock production, which we continue to export, albeit within a reduced market: why should Irish consumers adopt a different diet to the rest of the world – especially given the authors are not only exploring environmental impact but also healthy nutrition – simply because we are living in a country currently dominated by pastoral agriculture?
As long as we operate within a global food system – where the bulk of our own agricultural products are exported and we import essential commodities including most of our fruit and vegetables. We cannot have it both ways, and say domestic consumption should mirror domestic production.
The Irish Times, for its part, is not displaying the “unprecedented global collaboration and commitment” the authors have called for. The editors are in no position to question the veracity of the Lancet analysis, leaving their pronouncement in Post-Truth territory.
Change of policy in the National Broadcaster
Hitherto virtually a cheerleader, a perceptible change in reporting policy on climate change is setting RTÉ on a collision course with the agricultrual sector.
The legitimacy of expressing climate change denial is being denied. Shutting down discussion on any subject may seem prescriptive, and a dangerous precedent to set, but considering the overwhelming scientific consensus, and the cataclysmic scenarios painted, the response appears proportionate. This works to the disadvantage of the cartels, which have been expanding the dairy industry in particular, while cloaking its emissions.
Michael Healy-Rae, ‘Self-styled Kerry man Joke’.
The new policy of zero tolerance became obvious on a recent episode of RTÉ’s Liveline, when Tim Boucher-Hayes refused to accept the validity of Michael Healy-Rae’s ‘opinion’ on climate change, before giving him enough rope to hang most political careers. Boucher Hayes exposed the self-styled Kerry man joke, who insisted he was being insulted, but could not say how.[viii]
After many years of watching, and occasionally appearing on RTÉ, I was amazed to hear the dialogue. I fear, however, that advertisers will make their feelings known, highlighting the threat to ‘livelihoods’, ignoring how most farmers’ incomes are derived entirely from EU subsidies. If anything, farmers should be paid to cultivate healthy fruit and vegetables, or re-wild their estates.
The sector makes great play on its importance to the Irish economy, but the input costs, including direct payments to farmers, imported feedstuffs, fertilizer, machinery, and fuel are not acknowledged; nor are externalised costs such as the pollution of waterways affecting the availability of potable water. This points to the long-standing failure of the Irish media to interrogate the structure and impacts of the sector.[ix] In this respect the environmental and agricultural correspondent George Lee has been a serious disappointment.
It should also be emphasised that the environmental argument has moved on from a narrow focus on climate change, which can lead to damaging outcomes, such as encouraging sitka spruce plantations which acidify soils and reduce biodiversity, in order to allow the dairy sector to expand.
The beef industry is more vulnerable to the environmental and nutritional arguments being laid against it, but the challenges to the dairy sector are mounting too, especially in terms of the idea that consumption is essential to human health, or event beneficial: the Harvard School of Public Health say that dairy is neither the only nor the best source of calcium.[x]
The shady global manipulation of nursing mothers who are encouraged to top-up with formula, or give up on breast feeding altogether, is a scandal waiting to erupt. Ireland, as the second highest exporter of powdered milk in the world, will be at the heart of it.
Unsurprisingly to date there has been no coverage in mainstream Irish media of the decision of the Canadian government to no longer identify a specific function for dairy produce in a healthy, balanced diet. Their new guidelines lump dairy in with other proteins. Canadians are advised to fill half their plates with fruits and vegetables, a quarter with carbohydrate-rich foods, and a quarter with protein sources.[xi]
Canada’s new healthy guidelines do not contain a separate dairy section.
Previously, Ireland’s leading environmental writer John Gibbons – notably writing for DeSmogUK rather than the Irish Times which he occasionally contributes to – exposed the use of fake data by the Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed purporting to show emissions from the sector were not rising as fast as they were in reality.[xii] The plot is curdling, and the message can only be managed for so long, especially with EU fines looming over rising emissions.
Source: Ireland Environmental Protection Agency.
‘Two sides of the same debased coinage’
Fintan O’Toole is the Irish Times’s most high profile columnist. Alone arguably in the Irish media, he is permitted to do investigative work alongside editorial commentary. But he has now positioned himself as a global intellectual, rather than simply an Irish hack, devoting himself to the subject of Brexit in particular in publications such as the New York Review of Books and New York Times. His articles condemning Britain’s ‘mad’ imperial hubris increasingly appear like word magnets on a fridge that are shuffled about from week to week. It means one of the progressive ‘slots’, essential to the Irish Times’s distinctive brand of conscientious virtue-signalling, is rarely focused on Irish issues.
Moreover, O’Toole has long displayed a blind spot towards environmental issues. As an urban, literary man he might be excused for playing to his strengths, and avoiding environmental questions, but how these are dealt with is increasingly important to the understanding of any country. His current emphasis is all the more frustrating given during his early career O’Toole forensically exposed the collusion between Charles J. Haughey’s administration and Larry Goodman’s Anglo-Irish Beef Processors, culminating in the Beef Tribunal of 1991.
Goodman’s company APB continues to dominate the Irish beef processing industry. Symbolically at least in 2012 the family of Larry Goodman acquired the former Bank of Ireland headquarters building on Dublin’s Baggot Street.
Yet O’Toole’s subsequent book on the subject claimed that the ‘emerging democracy of the Irish State was in a fundamental way incompatible with the power of the beef industry’; likening Ireland to a Latin American country where conversion from tillage to grassland depopulated the land and brought speculative investment, with the difference that in, ‘Ireland, the land was cleared by emigration rather than the slaughter of the Indians’[xiii]
He went so far as to claim:
The strength of the beef industry has been such as to limit the development of the kind of coherent, confident civil and political society which could control that industry and integrate it into a working notion of the common good. It is no accident, therefore, that the events described in this book are as much about political failure in contemporary Ireland as they are about the behaviour of the beef industry. They are two sides of the same debased coinage.[xiv]
O’Toole effectively conveyed the extent to which that Fianna Fáil government, especially the then Minister for Industry and Commerce Albert Reynolds, did the bidding of a company that exposed the state to a export credit liability of €100 million, and a wanton disregard for human health in the processing of cattle for food.
At one point O’Toole described how the Irish government’s relationship with the company had:
definitively pushed the government beyond the bounds of democratic authority and into the realms of the arbitrary abuse of power. The most basic norm of democratic government – that the state is not above the law – had been breached. And it had been done at the request of Larry Goodman.[xv]
The horse meat scandal of 2013 provided further evidence of a permissive attitude towards breaches of health and safety regulations in Goodman’s company or subsidiaries, yet he has remains untouchable. The mainstream Irish media, including Fintan O’Toole are seemingly uninterested, or unwilling, to conduct further investigations. Instead we get great rollicking tales about English ineptitude.
Pastoralism
After independence, pastoralist farmers (including the first Minister for Agriculture Patrick Hogan 1924-32) have effectively conveyed the idea that their interests align with the population at large. This account has rarely been challenged either by historians (with the exception of the late, Raymond Crotty) or journalists. Yet the pattern of immigration that continued into independence from rural Ireland was a product of a mode of production requiring low labour inputs, as O’Toole pointed out.
Wheat production even for domestic consumption did become uneconomic once mechanization became widely available from the early 1950s. Moisture levels during harvesting of Irish cereals make them unsuited to combined harvesters. The traditional method of tying or ‘bindering’ wheat by hand and drying it bundles before storage had become too labour intensive. It then became axiomatic from the 1960s that Ireland’s comparative advantage lay in livestock production, beef in particular, despite the historic inefficiencies of the sector.
One opportunity cost of relying on beef and dairy for export has been that overall food prices in a predominantly rural society have remained comparatively high, even by comparison with a highly-urbanised country such as Britain. This has worked to the detriment of urban workers, and even those living in rural Ireland, most of whom still live on imported foodstuffs.[xvi]
Furthermore, since independence a lack of variety in the range of crops being grown for the domestic market is apparent. In part this was a consequence of a stunted gastronomic culture. The result has been that the traditional Irish diet is notably low in fruit and vegetables consumption, increasing the likelihood of obesity. An historic missed opportunity was the failure of the state to support an emerging cooperative movement, advocating state-assisted greenhouse construction across the West of Ireland during the 1960s.
Today, with a climate not dissimilar, and a landmass far smaller, the Netherlands is the second leading exporter of vegetables in the world by value.[xvii]
The arrival of EU subsidies in the form of the CAP from the 1970s ossified the structure of Irish agriculture, driving up the price of land, and thereby decreasing the scope for the kind of cutting edge horticulture the Dutch have mastered.
Dig deeper into the substrate of Irish society and one discovers further ill-effects from Irish pastoralism’s inversion of the food pyramid. One-off housing is often seen as the scourge of rural Ireland. In contrast the Clachan of pre-Famine times involved substantial consolidated settlements, where farmers mostly grew crops for direct consumption. The Great Famine came about because of the tiny holdings of so many farmers, which brought intensive mono-cropping, and reliance on a single foodstuff.
Abandoned settlement, County Sligo.
Furthermore, extensive motor car reliance is connected to these one-off-developments; also bringing problems with subsequent urban development, as the preference of the pastoralist migrant to the city was for a detached home, rather than an apartment. We now contend with low density, suburban sprawl which has led the European Commission to describe Dublin as a ‘worst case scenario’ for ‘unsustainable car-dependent urban sprawl.’[xviii]
There appears to be little genuine opposition to the political duopoly, with Sinn Fein increasingly occupying the position held by Fianna Fáil in the nationalist spectrum. Sounding off on non-issues such as Venezuela belies a growing accommodation with the dominant consensus. The worst case scenario is that a Far Right party will derive support from the rising discontent with widening inequality, a housing crisis and the ongoing crisis in the provision of publish health.
Until we develop a functioning Irish media, interrogating the economic and social structures, including agriculture, and bringing accountability, the advance of genuinely progressive politics will remain stalled.
[iii] Craig WJ, Mangels AR; American Dietetic Association.’ Position of the American Dietetic Association: vegetarian diets.’ J Am Diet Assoc. 2009 Jul;109(7):1266-82. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864/, accessed 26/1/19.
[iv]Prof Walter Willett, MD, ,Prof Johan Rockström, PhD, Brent Loken, PhD, Marco Springmann, PhD, Prof Tim Lang, PhD, Sonja Vermeulen, PhD, Tara Garnett, PhD, David Tilman, PhD, Fabrice DeClerck, PhD, Amanda Wood, PhD, Malin Jonell, PhD, Michael Clark, PhD, Line J Gordon, PhD, Jessica Fanzo, PhD, Prof Corinna Hawkes, PhD, Rami Zurayk, PhD, Juan A Rivera, PhD, Prof Wim De Vries, PhD, Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, PhD, Ashkan Afshin, MD, Abhishek Chaudhary, PhD, Mario Herrero, PhD, Rina Agustina, MD, Francesco Branca, MD, Anna Lartey, PhD, Shenggen Fan, PhD, Beatrice Crona, PhD, Elizabeth Fox, PhD, Victoria Bignet, MSc, Max Troell, PhD, Therese Lindahl, PhD, Sudhvir Singh, MBChB, Sarah E Cornell, PhD, Prof K Srinath Reddy, DM, Sunita Narain, PhD, Sania Nishtar, MD, Prof Christopher J L Murray, MD, Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, January, 2019. The Lancet.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext?utm_campaign=tleat19&utm_source=HPfeature’, accessed 26/1/19.
[vi] Manus Boyle, ‘Fine Gael accused of greenwashing over Green Week campaign’, August 24th, 2018, Greennews.ie, https://greennews.ie/fine-gael-green-week-accused-greenwashing/
[ix] The cost of inputs https://greennews.ie/fine-gael-green-week-accused-greenwashing/was estimated at over €5 billion in 2017: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/oiiaf/outputinputandincomeinagriculture-finalestimate2017/ accessed 25/1/19.
[x] Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, ‘Calcium and Milk’, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/calcium-and-milk/
[xviii] Untitled, Belfast Telegraph, ‘EU using Dublin as example of worst-case urban, 4th of October, 2016, sprawl’ https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/breakingnews_ukandireland/eu-using-dublin-as-example-of-worstcase-urban-sprawl-28409383.html
If you think you can’t afford better food, consider where you now invest your money: how often do you go to the hairdresser, or drink a pint or choose to drive somewhere? There are priorities we have in terms of our time and money.
