On the adjournment: With the Oireachtas and Drapier still on holiday, this column is offered to backbenchers as a soap box. This week the Greens' Eamon Ryan TD on the challenge of Cancun and globalisation
I feel sure that beneath the surface of indifference Irish people still expect politics to provide a story which can help make sense of our lives. Well, here's one: it's the story of how people are beginning to question the international powers which govern their world, and to recognise humanity's interdependence.
This is sometimes labelled the "anti-globalisation" movement but is in my mind better described as a global justice movement. It has people asking simple pertinent questions.
• How can one-fifth of the world live with such excessive consumption while the poorest fifth lives and dies on less that €1 a day?
• Why do some of the global institutions meant to solve this imbalance seem to do more harm than good?
• Why can't we introduce international rules to avert the environmental crises we feel so powerless to stop?
• Why should we put up with a world order in which the strongest military powers guard the Earth's resources at the point of a gun?
Anyone thinking along these lines will have their political antennae fixed on the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks in Cancun, Mexico, next week. Just before the talks, the multinational pharmaceutical companies agreed a deal on the access of developing countries to medicines. Despite the positive spin put on it, the deal was years late and provided a fraction of what was expected and desperately needed.
The US and the EU have also agreed together in advance how much of their massive agricultural subsidies they are prepared to give up at the talks.
The litmus test of the talks' success will be whether these powerful trading blocs get their way and succeed in the opening up of trade activities in investments and services to the WTO process.
Development NGOs argue that such an outcome would be disastrous as the current arrangements inevitably favour the multinational corporations and advanced industrial nations which are equipped and eager to exploit opening markets. It is vital that the WTO rules are changed so that developing countries can get out of the cycle of exporting primary raw materials to pay off their debt on corrupt loans.
The threat to multilateralism comes from the extreme right and extreme left, but not in my mind from the Green movement. To return to protectionist trade barriers and to deny international free trade would lock poorer countries into their poverty. Fair international trade, involving a redistribution to poorer countries of some of the resources we have stripped them of down the centuries, holds the key to solving global poverty.
We do want to return decision-making and economic activity to the local level, but we recognise that you can't say to a people: "Keep wearing your charming pampootees, while we wear fashionable shoes."
It is human nature to want things we don't have. However, trade rules should not dominate the other multilateral activities that the UN and others need to engage in.
It is clear that the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy and the WTO's rules are unable to take into account the environmental costs that come with the current world trading systems.
We need to change from the current squandering of our dwindling fossil-fuel resources so that the transport of bulky raw materials by air and road becomes less attractive, bulky raw materials which earn poorer countries so much less than "value-added" goods could earn them.
As fossil fuels run out, this will become the logical course of action. The question is whether we can use the remaining resources to help set up the alternative renewable energy systems in time.
It is also very easy for us to cite the US as the bad guy and ignore the fact that we follow a similar international economic agenda. A myriad of EU environmental directives will count for little if we are taking the last fish from west African waters and still dumping our excess foods on their local markets.
If only the debate at our next EU referendum moved on from whether one is pro- or anti-European and instead concentrated on how we want the EU to act on a global stage.
In my opinion, multilateralism often expands the remit rather than diminishes the role of our national parliament. Our delegation could be doing so much to steer the EU position in Cancun in the direction of concessions to the developing world. It is more likely, as Michael D. Higgins said in the Dáil, that it will be seen "sailing off into the sun with deluded economics in one hand and a tequila in the other".
The fact that the Minister for Agriculture is the only senior minister attending gives some indication where our priorities lie. The two Ministers of State in tow have no doubt been given clear instructions from their bosses, Mary Harney and Charlie McCreevy.
The Government seems foursquare behind what is known as the "Washington Consensus", a trade and economic policy developed by a selection of right-wing economists in Washington 20 years ago which espouses privatisation and market liberalisation as the only way to go.
The Minister of State, Willie O'Dea, would probably accuse me of "derelict idealism" and reiterate his approval in this paper on April 4th of Lord Palmerston's maxim that in matters of diplomacy we should always follow our "permanent interests".
However, the stage on which our political stories are being told is changing. We are the first generation to be able to look back at our planet from space and see it as an interconnected ecosystem. Our new global communications system is akin to a new nerve system, which connects distant people in new ways. Our future security clearly lies in a more just and sustainable management of our economic activities.
I sense we are ready and willing as a people to accept difficult political decisions as long as they are part of a story of redressing the injustices we are inflicting on each other and the damage we are doing to the precious creation around us.
Eamon Ryan is Green Party TD for Dublin South
Next week: Senator Kathleen O'Meara (Labour)