Since entering Government two months ago this week, the Green Party has taken some heat from campaigners and the media for failing to reverse policy on touchstone issues such as the routing of the M3 motorway through the Tara-Skryne valley and the use of Shannon airport by the US military, writes Oisín Coghlan.
This is not surprising. Tara and Shannon have both been the subject of long-term civil society campaigns in which the Green Party took a clear position against the status quo. But it was surely expecting too much from a party of six TDs negotiating a programme for government with a party of 78 TDs that it would succeed where five years of civil society campaigning had failed. It's like expecting a substitute coming on in the last game of the season to save your struggling club from relegation.
The routing of the M3 is not, after all, a one-off planning mistake that some reasoned argument and a little political leverage can put right. It is the apogee of decades of shambolic planning that has consistently put concrete before conservation, equated progress with profit and made Dublin a byword for urban sprawl. The US use of Shannon to fight an illegal war and to move planes involved in kidnapping and torture is not a foreign-policy aberration, but rather a reflection of Ireland's dependent position in the new world order. Does anyone really think a Fine Gael-led government would have agreed to end the military use of Shannon?
So should the Greens have kept their hands clean and their feet firmly on the high moral ground, in opposition? Lismullin would still have been excavated and paved over, the US troops would still stop over. And in the second-best world of political compromise it seems one issue weighed more heavily on the Green Party negotiators than complicity in US imperialism and acceptance of facts on the ground in Meath: the urgency of acting on climate change.
We have 10 years to take the steps to stop climate change running out of control with catastrophic consequences for humanity. No surprise then that a party whose raison d'être is environmental sustainability voted six-to-one in favour of putting their leaders into Cabinet now, despite the compromises involved. Staying out would have been to let the best be the enemy of the good. And shouting "I told you so" from the high moral ground as the flood waters rose would be of little consolation.
The resulting programme for government has been criticised as standard FF-issue, with Green trim. But that's to ignore one little-heralded, but hugely important, commitment: to cut Ireland's climate-changing pollution by an average of 3 per cent a year for the next five years. That sort of reduction would put us on the path to meeting our Kyoto target and prepare us for the steeper cuts that will be required after 2012 if Ireland is to do its fair share. Crucially, it contrasts with the outgoing government's promise, detailed in the National Climate Change Strategy published in April, to cut Ireland's emissions by just 3 per cent over the whole of the next five years. So it would seem that much of the Greens' political capital was invested in getting Fianna Fáil to agree to cut Ireland's climate pollution by almost five times more than they had planned to. It is on their ability to achieve government follow-through on this commitment that their decision to go into coalition should ultimately be judged.
This does not mean that campaigners can fold their tents and leave the field to politicians. There has been some discussion in these pages as to whether you need to take office to achieve change or whether shaping public opinion is enough. Neither is sufficient, of course; both are necessary. Think of Noel Dempsey who spent five years as minister for the environment advocating serious action on climate change, including a carbon tax, and failed. One factor in that failure was the lack of strong civil society voices to counterbalance the vested interests and the naysayers.
Moreover, on Tara and Shannon the failure of the Greens to shift Government policy simply reflects the failure of the wider environmental and human rights movements to mobilise a critical mass of public opinion. Only when it is clear that all the Government parties will pay a political price for failing to act that is higher than the perceived economic cost of acting will we see a change of course on Tara or Shannon.
We are entering a new political season. The Government team has high-profile new signings and promises much. Time will tell. Carbon emissions will either go down or go up, for example. But the results will not merely depend on the deftness of Ministers' political footwork. Unlike fans, citizens cannot afford to be hurlers on the ditch. Without sustained public pressure on Government to deliver, the policies required to shift Ireland to sustainability may never see the light of day. It's all to play for.
Oisín Coghlan is director of Friends of the Earth. He writes in a personal capacity.