Heritage-community-rights; a new political movement

For 5 years I was sci + tech convenor for the GP and a  member of national council. About 2002, there was an internal coup in  the party with policy and executive power centralised in Leinster  house. Indeed, Gormley asked me about then to allow policy to be decided in Leinster House. Several of us resigned over the Ciaran Cuffe affair, which  began the party's lurch to the right.

My partner Melanie O'Reilly (of RTE 1) and I live for now in Berkeley, California, but my visa restrictions have lessened, and I can return more often.

We see the following major issues that should be addressed by an Irish
ecology party

1. National ownership of resources, as the 1916 proclamation envisages; Shell in mayo is the reductio ad absurdum there.
2. Protection of heritage; while Tara is extremely prominent, equally destructive attacks have been launched at the native music industry and – hard though it may be to believe- native scientists, who are being replaced by grotesquely subsidized foreign imports (a la Medialab and SFI)
3. An ethical foreign policy, which the current use of Shannon is not, putting it mildly
4. Sustainable development of the west (I am from Clare, and have seen my hometown of Kilkee -or Kilkutta because of its sewerage problems– being destroyed by development that has been illegal in California since a century ago and John Muir)

However, those of us from the original greens remember a time when being “green” meant also community, equality, and health. To this I would add “rights” as the state in Ireland becomes more and more oppressive. . Similarly, I think it is necessary that any new heritage party should have “green” in its title, as we should not concede that. So “Eire ghlas/Green Ireland” (the alternative for “green' in Ireland, uaithne, is hard to pronounce for English speakers)and underneath Heritage-community--rights strikes me as good marketing. It is tragic – but also a fantastic opportunity – that the current “greens' have embraced neoliberalism, as incarnated in the Lisbon treaty, just as this exploitative and inefficient way of running the world's economy has proven without merit.

Indeed, there is a massive opportunity now with NAMA going through, horrible though it is in concept. It is my opinion that the GE 2007 was turned around for FF in the last week with developer money; it has been known for some time that FF pay canvassers. The quid pro quo was that Bertie would make calls to the banks whenever a developer needed the banks to go easy on them. NAMA means that this unaccountable source of power within Irish society will be subject to FoI requests; and, sure enough, developers are already having court orders against them. In this vein, I should add that I believe FF to be finished; their very success in enriching their supporters, and the vacuousness of their agenda (they can hardly start on about the north again a la Haughey in opposition) ensures this.


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Executive summary

“Eire ghlas/Green Ireland”

Heritage-community-rights

This party proposal combines the well-accepted green emphasis on sustainability with an emphasis on individual rights. It argues that the state in Ireland has become too big, and needs to withdraw from many areas in which it has proven incompetence. Any resources it acquires through taxation should be used for health and community, not neoliberal experiments. Conversely, it should actually apply its laws on corporate enforcement, rather than allowing rampant corruption. Finally, the provisions of the original GP constitution that separated policy, elected reps, and the executive should be honoured this time around.
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Eire ghlas/ Green Ireland founding principles



Prologue

Eire ghlas attempts to realise the aspiration that the rights of the 
planet are the rights of the person. Green parties to date have run 
the risk of forgetting about issues like social justice in their 
righteous enthusiasm to save the biosphere. While this enthusiasm is 
not misplaced, there is a fatal flaw in conventional “intrinsic value” 
Green thought; the  person is the culmination of nature, and political 
parties should never value the rest of nature over the person. The 
resulting political project, our political project, is a far more 
interesting one that that of conventional Green thought.

We argue that environmental destruction, which is indeed accelerating 
at frightening rates, is ultimately the result of centuries'-long 
attacks at the dignity of the human being, both by forces on the left 
and on the right. To realise our full humanity in all its physical, 
biological, social, intellectual and spiritual dimensions, which is 
the real project of every human life, includes within itself the 
project of caring for the biosphere of which we are part. 
Specifically, this project, stated as a political program, is radical 
enough to dismiss as capitalist propaganda current neoliberal thought, 
and as socialist propaganda attacks on the post-enlightenment concept 
of the individual in the name of any kind of forced collectivism 
including so-called “social partnership”. Social justice, thought of 
as economic fairness, can be achieved neither by capitalism or its 
communist mirror-image; it requires the altogether more sophisticated 
resources of economic game theory, among much else. It also requires
changing the Irish legal system to give individuals legal resources when
the state attempts to expand itself further into civil society
by engaging in litigation with a citizen, often taking the citizen to the supreme court a la Cahill versus DCU, 29 June, 2009.


Environmental 
costs need to be factored in as concretely as real human effort, as 
distinct from manipulation of economic indices, in considering any 
plan of action.


Ireland, 2009

The dozen years up to 2008 have been glory years for economic neoliberals in 
Ireland; by the same token, the next 15 will be the opposite. The 
surrender of control of interest rates, and self-imposition of 
draconian interpretations of relatively broad EU guidelines like those 
on competition, effectively created a property bubble, and deprived 
the state of the economic autonomy that Arthur Griffith  so stressed. 
Emboldened by their empowerment due to these circumstances, 
neoliberals undertook a project of running down and privatising many 
state services that had taken generations of dedicated work to build 
up. The resulting mess has produced the most privately indebted 
country in the world per head of real income, and a thoroughly 
disempowered younger generation. At the height of this period, with 
extraordinary rendition/torture flights being allowed in Shannon, the 
FF/PD government attempted to impose the same kind of e-voting system 
that has been discredited and abandoned in the US. That was Ireland's 
moral nadir, and fortunately we stopped them

In the meantime, the official “Green” party   negotiated for a place 
in government with this thoroughly criminal government. For this 
reason alone, it would be imperative to form an alternative green 
party; however, there are many more positive reasons that we will now 
see.

Policy principles

Constitutional

EG believes that the sterling work of the Irish people in achieving an 
agreed-upon written constitution needs to be responded to in our 
generation with equal vision and courage. It believes that the 
following changes need to be made;
1.Deletion of the theocratic prologue in favour of a secular statement 
like that with which the Indian  constitution opens
2 Addition of an amendment like the first amendment in the US 
which, by protecting religions from
the state, has also protected the state from religion. If 
necessary, the existence of individual conscience as the moral 
unit of the state needs to be stated explicitly.
3 Deletion of all other sectarian and sexist implications of 
the 1937  constitution



The People and its Territory

It is a historical fact that a terrorist campaign in the name of a 
united Ireland paradoxically led to the Irish state's dropping its 
claim on the north-eastern part of the island. The history of British 
colonisation and indeed genocide in Ireland, and the inspiration 
Ireland's revolts gave to other colonies, are similarly historical 
facts. While a  united Ireland should remain an aspiration, the GFA 
has provided peace, and an altogether more interesting project is 
possible. One of our nobel laureates, John Hume, suggested that the 
100 million or so people worldwide of Irish ancestry should be offered 
nationality, if not citizenship.

State and civil society

The incursions by the state into civil society culminated in deepening 
of employer/union “partnerships” which resulted in a de facto loss of 
the right to withhold labour, to get reinstated once fired, and indeed 
to form trade unions in the public service (since the state insisted 
that you join one of its choice as a condition of employment). 
Simultaneously, membership of unions in the private sector is 
vanishing. This is one area that the state should withdraw from.

The experience of Ireland as an independent state indicates that the 
state can run a rudimentary health service, schools up to but not 
including third level (where its institutions need private 
competition), an airline, and a telecommunications network, inter 
alia. Its incursions into the music business and indeed the arts in 
general, software and most of science, and much else have had the sole 
effect of providing subsidised competition for altogether more 
talented individuals. All this needs to be rectified.

It looks rather as though the crisis in the irish  banking system resulted in a de facto 
nationalisation of the banks by issuing Irish (banking) bonds which are bought mainly by the Irish banks, and mainly with money supplied by the ECB. This  effective nationalisation will have must 
be adjusted in favour of the people and against the incompetent and  immoral bank management, perhaps by turning the bank bonds into shares and shifting the burden from the taxpayer to the mega-institutions that own the bonds..

The economy

Ireland must be prepared to regain control of its destiny, even if 
this means renegotiating the terms of its membership in the EU, WTO, 
and so on. For example, an average house should cost at most double 
one's income, and the mortgage should last at most 20 years. In a 
state that has borrowed $100 billion or so from foreign banks since 
2003, this state of affairs will not be achieved without pain.

Environmental  costs must be factored into every activity monitored by 
the state. Corporate enforcement must rise to the level of the US; 
this in itself will release massive energy from individual 
entrepreneurs who have been struggling under the crony capitalism that 
weighed on recent Irish public life, and destroyed countless businesses

Finally, it is taken as self-evident that the state should aspire to 
social justice, indeed equality of opportunity, for all its citizens.





Green Ireland

We still have a relatively pristine environment, be this due to penury 
and genocide rather than ethics. The mindset that would damage the 
Tara  surroundings needs to be expunged. Rigorous claims should be enforced 
on all our assets from predators, both from without and within. With 
this, an emphasis on Irish culture and its unbroken history for 
thousands of years needs to complement our experience of our beautiful 
country.


Bare bones structure of the party


If nothing else, the 2002 coup demonstrated the urgent necessity of maintaining democratic and representational structures in the party. The unit should be the constituency, not the ward. There has to be an executive, elected each year at national convention,but it is one whose brief should be tactics rather than strategy, let alone the capacity to compromise core principles. There has to be national council, a policy making body, which electoral candidates should attend, along with policy co-ordinators and an elected member from each constituency. The contempt shown for policy by electoral candidates last time around is, in retrospect, what doomed the party as principles and strategy became subservient to sound-bites.