Guest blog – Happy Paddy’s Day by Mark Robins

Mark Robins – a more or less full working life in and around nature NGOs and agencies various –  mostly in South West England and especially for the RSPB. Moved to Ireland in 2018 and for a year led the BirdWatch Ireland Conservation & Policy team and is now a freelance natural environment and sustainable & rural development specialist (sort of retired but glad to do interesting things). Twitter: @ByHedge

A chara

Happy Paddys Day 2021! A big day of celebration each 17th March and my chance to share a second annual round of thoughts on nature conservation in Ireland.  

In last year’s blog I got onto the state of nature (with a few exceptions – bad to very bad), the place of nature in Government’s eyes (something to be exploited or more generally systematically ignored), the environmental movement here  (small to tiny  NGOs) and borrowing a phrase from the cultural studies academic Raymond Williams how  in a ‘structure of feeling’ of emotions, moods and atmospheres these have undermined action for biodiversity. How Ireland’s green potential doesn’t seem to compute. I also noticed something hard-to-pin-down around land, including a post-colonial tinge.

This year I can tell you nature is still in big trouble, but refreshingly we have a new Government that is trying to do something about it. Will the computer say yes, and the people get biodiversity on a scale enough, only the future knows?  

First to the politics of the situation and this is worth telling. After a February 2020 general election, a new government was formed four months later in June as a coalition of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party. Coalition is the word here, as it is in so many countries that use proportional representation. As a newish observer of this something significant (but painfully born) emerges – a Programme for Government (PfG). A word search for ‘biodiversity’ gets 51 mentions including in the second opening paragraph this sentence: COVID-19 has presented the global community with a terrible set of challenges to add to the ongoing climate and biodiversity emergency.  We can agree with that!

The PfG is the bible for this government with ‘Natural Heritage and Biodiversity’ getting its own section with 16 commitments of ‘We will:…..’ and plenty of other biodiversity-relevant We Wills elsewhere too. None of this is to say the still new’ish coalition is environment-centred but for sure its green content massively reflects the Green Party  being in government. That choice – to go into coalition with two larger right of centre parties was hard fought with many members voting against the idea (yes, there was a Party vote on the decision). Small parties can get eaten up in coalitions.

Ireland’s recent governments and their political leaderships – at best breathtakingly wilful or ignorant and at other times under the cover of austerity politics – have fearlessly displayed their contempt for nature. Infamously providing €16.8 million state support to the greyhound ‘industry’ while chucking the agency of government for nature – the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) – the crumbs of an annual budget of €11m.  For a small party with 12 of the 160 members of the Dáil Éireann (the lower house and principal chamber) coalition politics is definitely going to be tricky for the Greens though this PfG offers both a cover and a constraint. With a recent report finding that Ireland scored last out of 15 EU countries in reaching the environmental Sustainable Development Goals, honestly things could only get better with the new government.

With such a lousy starting point can a Green-tinged government reverse the decades-long neglect of the environment? A few thoughts…

If it’s a universal truism that it would be really helpful to have an effective dedicated government body for biodiversity then something is happening here. First, the defunded and neglected NPWS got its money doubled in Budget 2021 – up from the previous €13 million to €29 million. Second, the lead Minister announced a strategic review (a key commitment in the PfG and underway from February 3^rd) to  assess its remit, status and funding (sounds like everything!). Will any new body become independent? What will its mission be? Will it really be fit for purpose?  Will it be funded properly (one report says €1.38 billion will be required  for SACs and SPAs up to 2027)? Will it genuinely be innovative? Will it be dominated by a natural science and technocratic view? Will it find an authentic approach that works in its quite tough Irish context? With a fast turnaround promised we should find out this summer.

The shape of a future successful NPWS is something to focus on but set this in the scale of the task to achieve a genuinely green, Emerald Isle rich in valued nature and pose the question: what will an effective transformation look and feel like? I’m really not sure the imagination has flowed on this yet.

Can the environment escape a politics of resentment born partly at least out of poverty not so long ago? Is there something different about land and country here – said to be obdurately pre-modern until the 1972 advent of the EEC (p 569 R.F.Foster. Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 Penguin, 1989)? And if in its postcolonial state, agriculture formed a critical link in forging the modern Irish nation, what role will land-use play in the making of a truly green isle?? Maybe we will see a form of identity rooted in place and class outweighing some kind of partisan culturally determined anti-environmentalism? I hope so. Otherwise we are in some kind of very difficult to escape trap in this twin biodiversity & climate crisis.

Enough theology, as for everywhere there’s a tough road ahead for biodiversity here but things are moving. New money for wetland restoration and policy shifts from the state peat board, an unravelling of the festering sore on land use and rural communities called sitka plantation forestry and the first signs of a new woodland focus, consultation unlocked on MPAs, commitments to a wildlife crime unit, and some promise in the new CAP programme if Ministers stay true and don’t waste the opportunity.

The PfG We Will commitments to a land use plan could be quite eye-opening, new money from the carbon tax for climate measures in agri-food sector could help, the genuine application of the European Green Deal, a big push on organics and a policy statement on the bio-economy could all begin to stir how land, one of Irelands biggest means for production, get used. 

Britain has exited the EU (I wish it hadn’t) and the lows of some of its poorer processes. Right now, the next few months of 2021 will be key to better for farmland biodiversity as the course of the new CAP programmes risk once again becoming a liability to EU credibility. In ground hog day style, neither studies showing the systems inadequacies, nor advocacy by a broad pro-reform coalition, look like stopping MEP’s and farm Ministers from stripping what little environmental ambition it ever had from the Commission’s proposal. Food feels like a new war-on-the-environment front. So, while asset managers are promising to divest from fossil fuels, they expand investments in high-carbon foods and commodities. Echoing  this the Irish environmental NGOs have just walked out of work towards a new Agri-Food 2030 Strategy saying It fails on so many fronts, and we cannot put our name behind the perpetuation of the environmental crises we have highlighted time and time again.

In the latest figures  I can find from a quick scan, the Irish agri-food sector generated 7% of gross value added during 2016, accounting for c9% of national employment and c10% of Ireland’s merchandise exports. This included cattle, beef, and dairy product exports. Ireland’s agri-food exports include several high-value dairy brands: including Kerry Group, Glanbia, Greencore and Ornua. Agri-food then is a big deal alongside a highly developed knowledge economy focused on services in high-tech, life sciences, and financial services. Ireland overall sits quite high in both EU and global rankings for say GDP per capita  or the Human Development Index.  All of this is to say Ireland (privately-rich publicly-poor) can afford to invest big time in nature in its time of crisis. Food, the means of production and the corporates around it, can do much more for restoring genuine sustainable land use. The agri-food sector has real power here, financial and political, and it needs to be challenged to do much much better for climate and biodiversity. More creatively, finance, high-tech, life sciences, food and a knowledge economy sound like the sort of C21st blends we are going to need to fix our environment….

It’s an Irish particular that agriculture accounts for 1/3rd of our total emissions but with the country committed to halving these by 2030, current proposals go down an incremental rabbit hole (for agricultural emissions to slow but overall not to reduce at all!). The agri-food sector continues to do its damnest to avoid the big shifts ahead. So, with the Green party leader and cabinet member Eamon Ryan just now (early to mid-March 2021) about to publish its definitive (post-scrutiny) version of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Bill  we’ll see how much politics matter? Seven percent yearly reductions in overall greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade will send a clear signal to businesses, to farmers and to communities that climate action is good. When it comes to land use and the means to production that is agriculture, will it do it in a way that transforms the prospects for biodiversity?

I hope a shift is coming. That politics will be shown to matter. That even the cultural ideologues of the post-Civil War parties will choose to drive forward an Irish way of getting nature to its rightful place in a genuinely green Island.

By the way – the Irish for ‘biodiversity’ is ‘bithéagsúlacht’. Enjoy it people!

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