From top: Last week’s High Court ruling over a proposed €160 million incinerator at Ringaskiddy is the latest twist in a 20-year campaign; Dan Boyle

It has been an interesting seven days. On Friday we learned that the High Court had set aside a planning permission for an incinerator in Ringaskiddy, County Cork.

The Judge accepted as valid grounds that a then member of An Bord Pleanala worked for a company providing advice for the incineration company.

While it may seem obvious that such grounds should invalidate, in Ireland we seem to have clung to the belief that Chinese Walls have protected us from these compromising situations in the past.

A further judgement is awaited as to whether the planning permission should be fully squashed. It’s anticipated that the decision will be re-inserted into process at Bord Pleanala level.

For twenty years those of us living in and around Cork Harbour have lived with this nonsense. Multiple oral hearings on previous planning applications with Bord Pleanala. Waste licence applications with the EPA. Other court hearings for judicial review.

Families have been reared during the time that this campaign has been ongoing. And still the incineration company, with those in state agencies supporting their proposals, persist.

Five days later I am attending a webinar. A representative of the incineration company is making a presentation. He is well versed in greenspeak. Why this isn’t an incineration company at all. This is all about waste to energy.

We should put aside any misgivings we might have about this being a combustive process adding to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Or that any energy produced by this process, quite expensively, is totally dependent on the constant creation of waste.

This isn’t incineration. This is combined heat and power. This is the circular economy, we are being told.

In the week that we now have a strengthened Climate Action Bill, the biggest challenge that lies ahead is that those who need to change won’t change. Instead they will indulge in greenspeak and engage in green washing.

We can’t afford to wrap the unsustainable in a green cloak. To meet the challenge of reducing our carbon emissions it has to be about changing, much more than adapting.

There will be many who won’t change. Enough of us need to. The argument at least seems at least being won. Changing the culture will prove more difficult.

Pursuing the politics of it may even more difficult. There is a school of thought that the climate emergency is a war where the righteous should overcome the ignorant and the unwilling.

I believe the opposite. We don’t have a hope if we can’t being as wide a cross section of society to along with us on the belief, that unless we can act collectively in understanding the problems we have, and agree the actions needed to overcome them.

It won’t involve everyone but it does need to involve most of us. I’m glad the pre legislative process has brought about a stronger Climate Bill. It came about by involving an entire Oireachtas committee in a way that is sadly rarely seen.

Because of that I’m optimistic that the necessary change can be achieved. There are more than enough issues on which we can and should divide. The Greens on our own supply more than enough divisions on such issues.

On the Climate Change we really can’t afford maintaining the status quo. We really should be promoting a different type of burning desire.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

From top: Taoiseach Micheál Martin (left) greeting Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage Darragh O’Brien (right), whose Land Development Agency Bill will strip powers from local authorities; Dan Boyle

One of my motivations in contesting the 2019 local elections, was the possibility that there might soon be a following election for an executive Mayor for Cork.

If it were to happen I felt I could offer myself as a candidate with experience who could meet the challenge of the position.

A referendum on that issue was narrowly defeated in Cork, but was approved in Limerick. That city will get to implement the first, and only, real advance in local democracy in the history of the State.

As regards local government in Ireland, its history has been extremely poor. That history has been a catalogue of diminishing functions and powers since the inception of the State.

Sadly that ball started in Cork City with the application of the Cork City Management Act, 1929, which separated the executive functions of a local authority away from its elected members.

Since I was first elected to what was then Cork Corporation in 1991, that diminution of functions has continued unabated.

The Council to which I was elected was a housing authority which had a self build capacity. It was a planning authority of first instance, not by passed as with strategic housing developments.

It was a waste management authority. It was a water authority.

When the various functions of local authorities were not being moved to newly established, ever more distant quangos, the remaining decision making powers were being shifted from elected councillors to appointed officials within the councils themselves.

This is a process that is now being repeated with legislation giving powers to the Land Development Agency.

Within this bill is a provision to remove the power from elected councillors to vote on the disposal of property to the Agency. This is wrong on a number of levels.

Not only does it remove one of the few, important and necessary powers of elected councillors, it virtually gifts land to the Agency where it may be developed without cognisance of the wider development goals of an area.

This is being proposed because of a mistaken belief that local oversight is inconvenient to the development of housing, and may be subject to political abuse.

Oversight should never be seen as inconvenient. Failing to politically convince is hardly an abuse. Too often we have had legislation that has used an administrative machete to achieve desired goals.

The proposed legislation has had the surprise effect of uniting councillors, from all political parties and none, in their opposition to the bill.

Whether this will be enough to stop its progress is hard to see. After all years of emasculating Irish local government has gone unhindered due to the acquiescence of generations of councillors.

The other significant difference between 1991 and now was that the Council I was elected to then contained ten members of the Oireachtas, nine TDs and a Senator. The ending of the dual mandate has accelerated the weakening of local government.

Central government has only been too happy to weaken local government. All the while allowing back bench TDs operate as if they were still councillors.

The parish pump remains a flood risk to real reform in our political system. Change in any sense remains inconvenient.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

RollingNews

From top: Green Party’s Malcolm Noonan, Minister of State for Heritage and Electoral Reform in the Housing Department, after his election to the Dáil in the Carlow–Kilkenny constituency last year; Dan Boyle

There are many policy/legislative milestones I would like to see Greens in government achieving. One particular bill I would be invested in, is a bill I know will bring no particular political advantage, but has the capacity of bringing about a better politics.

The Electoral Reform Bill, being piloted by Green Minister of State Malcolm Noonan and currently undergoing pre-legislative scrutiny, will help establish an independent electoral commission in Ireland.

Why is that important? A permanent, ongoing independent electoral commission would become a fail safe for democratic norms here.

It would be responsible for the upkeep and regular updating of the voter register, making it easier and less mysterious for voters to register.

It would act as an honest arbiter in ensuring that voters are kept properly informed, less subjected to propaganda and untruths.

The McKenna and Coughlan judgements have seen temporary commissions established to oversee the conduct of individual constitutional referenda, as and when they have occurred.

The fitful nature of these commissions has undermined their effectiveness. The temporary nature of each has meant the ability to properly police those advocating in each referendum has been undermined through the knowledge that each commission was a passing entity.

This could be best seen during the 2012 Children’s Rights referendum, when then Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald flagrantly abused the McKenna Judgement in using State resources in an overwhelmingly biased way.

An permanent commission could seek information on the scale and use of resources, in all elections, prior to their being expended.

By continuing to exist after each election or referendum it would acquire the ability to directly take on malfeasance.

A third role, and equally important function, of an electoral commission would be to review and fairly define constituency boundaries.

On the surface this has largely been independent for a number of decades. However the review process has been ad hoc, with government ministers setting out the terms of reference, as and when such review groups were formed. A permanent electoral commission would bring continuity and better objectivity to this.

A new area a permanent electoral commission would have responsibility for is the regulation of online political advertising. The effect of disinformation in recent elections, throughout the world, has obviously been malign. The powers given and the ability to use such powers will be key. Undoubtedly disinformation with the intent of subverting democracy needs to be taken seriously.

The most interesting aspect of the bill are the measures to allow for an increase in postal voting, and for the holding of elections on more than one day.

The pandemic is influencing the physical way we might vote in the future. It also will probably influence the who we might vote for as well.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

Pic via KCR

Dan Boyle

If you’re explaining you’re losing, so the political maxim goes. Government too often resorts to a failure to communicate effectively as being a reason for policies not succeeding.

To be criticised and to be open to criticism should be at a core of any democratic system. For the most part criticism is necessary, appropriate and is vital in bringing about accountability.

For the achievement of the best levels of accountability surely being able to critique criticism should also be part of the process.

Not to question motivation. It should always be assumed that criticism is levelled by those equally concerned in bringing about the best outcomes.

But where criticism can and should itself be criticised is on its quality. Is it informed? Is it consistent? Is it within context? Does it compare like with like?

Criticism, especially uncritical criticism (an intentional oxymoron) tends to get unquestionably accepted when a narrative gets created that those being criticised are so irredeemably flawed, that every criticism must be justified.

This is often achieved by fixating on singular aspects of wider, far more complex situations. We long for easy solutions. Such solutions are especially tempting at times of maximum frustration.

Often when we talk about communication failures what is being referred to is the inability to say what is wanted to be heard.

We all want it every way. We want progress to be achieved quickly but cautiously. We want bold action but reserve the right to say I told you so when the bold becomes seen as rash.

Those whose role it is to criticise, an important and vital role, carry a huge advantage in that their criticisms are rarely subject to the same degree of scrutiny of those they challenge.

This partially compensates for not having the same access to up to date information that who they criticise, and who they must criticise, hold.

The experience is that when those who criticise propose and do so in a grossly mistaken way, such errors are soon forgotten allowing for completely diametrical positions to be later taken.

For those criticised errors become accumulative.

The use of language is what is most important in the critical environment. There is a need for precision in the use of words, in what gets explained and how.

When questions get asked and how will elicit different responses. Such responses become conflated because the phraseology gets deemed to be incorrect.

To put it another way no wonder we have developed a system of politics where whatever you say nothing predominates. This is because, often, whenever something is said it then becomes creatively interpreted.

I suspect that when writing this I will be accused of ghosting about some issue du jour, be that management of COVID; trade agreements like CETA; or the handling of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission.

I’m not at least not specifically, but in general I am. These and any other issue we subject to critical analysis, as we should.

It isn’t the case of not being able to take the heat. Every issue needs to be tempered. If I’m arguing anything here it is that there should be a responsibility for intellectual honesty on both sides of every issue.

This is what is critical.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

From top: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, then Nigeria’s Foreign and Finance Minister, at a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2007; Dan Boyle

This week has seen the appointment of the first African and first woman to be appointed as Director General of the World Trade Organisation, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

Her appointment had been held up because of opposition from the Trump administration. With election of Joe Biden as US President, this objection has been dropped.

In being appointed Dr. Okonjo-Iweala joins a growing coterie of women who hold important global political/economic positions.

The presidents of the European Commission and the European Central Bank, along with the recently US Treasury Secretary, form a potent collection of influencers who will influence how the global economy is likely to develop, or not, in the years to come.

The growing political influence of women should of course be welcomed. Despite these significant appointments the political power of women remains tokenistic in many parts of the World.

In Ireland we remain particularly backward in promoting women into positions of power.

A direct promotion of women into prominent political roles does not guarantee better ways of making decisions and better decisions themselves, but it should make such change more likely.

Among the many reasons why the political glass ceiling has been largely unbroken has been because the routes that had been mainly available to women have either been those of inheritance, or in seeking to replicate the toxic behaviour of men in succeeding in the male world of politics.

Margaret Thatcher would be a good example of the latter. More ballsier than any man however inept they were.

Nor should any female politicians be not considered as being as incompetent as any man. The second UK Tory Prime Minister, Theresa May, is a prime example of that.

The most successful female politician of our era, Angela Merkel, is set to be replaced as leader of her political party by a man. It is certain that he won’t be anything like as successful.

What more women in decision making role would do is bring about a better sensibility. Women tend to be more patient, tend to be more likely to take a longer term view, see a bigger picture.

Women, as a rule, are more likely to practice a politics that is less confrontational, more co-operative. What more political women are more likely to do than men are is to re-prioritise the political agenda, relocating resources to issues that have a wider societal impact.

We don’t lack for real World examples of this. We have the very impressive Prime Minister of Aotearoa, Jacinda Ardern. There is the five party coalition government formed in Finland, with all female leaders. Finland where innovative policy approaches, on education and on eliminating homelessness, exist. And they haven’t been doing too badly on COVID either.

Not only are more women needed to change the how of politics but also the where. Away from musty chambers into the communities where real lives are lived. And also the when, making decisions in a more child friendly/family friendly way.

I realise I’m taking myself out of a job here.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

EPA

From top: Minister for Housing Darrah O’Brien (left) with Peter McVerry at a construction project on Haddington Road, Dublin 4 where the Peter McVerry Trust will deliver 18 new social housing units; Dan Boyle

The government’s housing policy is starting to take shape. It is likely to increase supply significantly. However, because of conflicting objectives, it is also likely to miss out on key objectives.

The building of greater numbers of social housing units, after decades of neglect, will help dampen rising prices. A ramping up of cost rental, what the Green Party has promoted most strongly, should achieve something similar.

Where I feel the government’s strategy will achieve least is by placing too much of an emphasis on affordable housing.

In Ireland we have had a cultural attachment towards home ownership. This obsession has been why the development of property has become a touchstone of our economic being, often to the cost of having a more rounded, more diverse economy.

In recent decades Ireland has gone from having one of the highest levels of home ownership in the World, to now being under the European average. For some this is deemed to be a bad thing.

Mixed and balanced housing tenure should be the goal of any housing policy. We are still a journey away from that. What is making that a harder to journey is the clinging to of the belief that incentives benefit house buyers rather than property developers.

What taxation incentives have also done has been to direct building types of development other than residential housing.

Welfare for developers has given us more hotels, student accommodation and introduced us to the joys of co-living. All developed while a dearth of residential housing continued.

I’m not opposed to incentives, where such incentives have direct positive effect. What I would like to see incentivised would be to bring back unused, vacant and derelict properties back into housing stock. To seek these objectives would have a broader benefit of bringing City and town centres back to life.

The concern for Generation Rent would be better applied if we had less of an emphasis on home ownership, with much more of an emphasis on security of tenure.

Fair and affordable rents must be the policy goal, even above affordable mortgages. Government policy needs to promote this as the norm, not as some kind of runners up prize for the disappointed.

While we are at it maybe we could try to bring to an end the era of property porn. Rhapsodic prose celebrating additional zeros being added to property values has not served us well.

What it has done has made housing less attainable for more people. It has brought additional, but largely notional, wealth for an older generation many of whom live in housing that is much too large for their current needs.

Traditional housing policies have made housing people more difficult. They have created the instruments that are helping to ferment greater inequality.

Ultimately it is the economy itself that suffers. A population constrained by rents that are too high or mortgages that are too expensive, limits money being spent on anything else.

There are small signs of wanting to do things differently. But the movement is too slow, too tentative.

Demography demands that we do things differently. The real goal should be to own the issue rather than insisting that all of us should be preoccupied with owning property.

In baseball parlance that would be a home run.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

RollingNews

Dan Boyle

Recently I listened to Susie Dent, the well known lexiographer associated with the Channel 4 programme ‘Countdown‘, state that the term ‘literally’ is now accepted in its figurative as well as its literal sense.

This saddens me. I see it as another cheapening of discourse.

For several years we have been living with counter argumentation that feels it needs no association with facts or truth. If it confirms an already held bias, by being confident in asserting such arguments, they acquire their own truth.

We have learned to confuse passion with anger or invective. We have come to see what had been thought of as abuse as some type of strength of character.

We have lost the ability to see that the views of others can and do have validity. We fear being seen as weak if we admit that our own views can and should change, if better arguments exist, or if we are seen to be misinformed.

We have created a world where expectations must be met immediately and in full.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a system of politics where change, if it occurred at all, was often painfully slow. A system where obstacles were more successful in impeding progress.

The cycle that I have witnessed in overcoming change has seen the process of new ideas being subjected to indifference, to derision and then towards acceptance.

Mine is a political generation that has seen change as being hard won. A generation that has had to be vigilant against attempts to roll back victories that have been positive and progressive.

The pace of change since the turn of the millennium, both in terms of amount and depth, has been of a level greater than I have ever experienced before in my life.

I have come to appreciate how much better we are doing in achieving change. My previous experience of change being obstructed or being painfully slow, has made into something of an incrementalist.

We incrementalists are these days seen as the enemy, by those who see themselves as being the new vanguard of the revolution.

Having lived most of my political life overseeing zero or inching change, I have come to appreciate any positive deviation in policy direction to be significant change in itself.

Unlike the prevailing mood I don’t want it all now. I have come to believe that expecting such can be an impeding factor in bringing about change.

As well being an incrementalist I have also become a pragmatist. For some this magnifies the disdain in which I should be held.

To believe that battles should be picked and chosen, that to seek ultimate wins by accepting in the short term some battles can’t be won, is seen as betrayal by the self declared righteous.

These days it seems that expectations are not defined by our values, but by how quickly we can impose our beliefs on others.

Of course reactionary forces continue to exist. They are most prevalent where ignorance and deceit hold sway. Moral superiority is not the way of dealing with their contagion. Nor is having progressives vent their collective spleen against each other for not being bold or pure enough.

Change is coming. We should acknowledge each element of change as and when it occurs. To divide our energies and blur our focus, is to deny and delay change.

This isn’t the time for that.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

From top: Bessborough former Mother and Baby Home in Cork; Dan Boyle

This June will see the 30th anniversary of my first election as a councillor. I was elected for the South East ward. The now infamous Bessborough Mother and Baby Home was part of the ward.

I hadn’t canvassed there. Part of my reticence was based on fear. My then wife had been born at the facility. She would have associated the place as representing a black hole in her knowledge of herself. While she had no direct memory of the home, her sense that her being born there would not have been positive.

Later I would have been asked to represent the Lord Mayor of Cork at an event to mark a significant date in the history of Bessborough. When asked to speak to the gathering I sought to depart from the usual platitudes by adding a personal touch.

I thanked those associated with the centre with being involved with the birth of someone important in my life.

My revelation was met with silence. It seemed that I had broken the Omerta. Taking pride in what had been determined was an act of sin in this place of shame. The shame, as defined then, was to be female and in ‘trouble’.

The report of the Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby homes makes copious mentions of Bessborough. Many of references are horrific. The unsocial contract that Church, State and much of Irish society shared contained provisions that went beyond the dumping on of the frowned upon, the tutted upon, and the failures to God’s grace.

Many, who were sent here to spare the embarrassment of others, were subject to a torrent of psychological terror. Many were put through awful levels of physical abuse.

Constantly they were told they were the fallen undeserving of respect. Their children were not their children. But they were considered to be bearers of the same sin, entitled by those who so determined to the same lack of respect and disgust as their woebegone mothers. The health and very often the lives of these children were disgustingly neglected. The death rate in these institutions were many times that which existed in general society.

Where they survived the children were taken away and given to others, often commercially. Some were made human guinea pigs for the testing of drugs.

The Commission Report goes into far greater detail on the scale and incidence of these atrocities. Though written with legal considerations in mind, it doesn’t in any way dilute the nature of these crimes. Where it does disappoint, however, is being emphatic on where the responsibility for these crimes lay.

Ultimately it is the State, in the form of governments elected and public servants administering, that bears the greatest responsibility. With this commission report, one of a series of investigations that expose how the Irish State unduly influenced by religious organisations has failed in meeting the rights and entitlement of all its citizens equally, it seems that the need to apologise, if not atone, has become all too familiar.

We cannot continue to allow sorry to be the easiest word. Such apologies are hollow if not followed by real and effective ways to bring about change. Give those who have been left behind and forgotten the rights they should be entitled to, the right to full and total information as to who they are and where they come from.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

Paul Soden (left) with Dan Boyle

I last met Paul in February. He was something of a force of nature, somewhat ironic as nature was a theme he enthusiatically chose to promote. Paul had left Cork and Ireland some years earlier, seeking not only to live somewhere else but also to live another kind of life.

He went to Brazil where he became a farmer, as far removed from his previous life as he could get. He lived, worked and raised a family in a remote part of the country, equidistant from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

Despite his radical change of lifestyle his initial approach to farming was quite conservative. He bought into the idea that nutrients needed to be artificially added, in vast quantities, to make land arable.

He soon saw this approach was having the opposite effect. He worked with others in his new community to practice regenerative farming. Working with rather than against nature, he and they saw this as a better way of doing things.

While he loved his new locale and his very different way of life, he wanted to share what he was learning with as many people as possible.

He returned to Ireland several times. On each visit he would seek to meet with as many people as he could to share his experience of farming with nature, and how Irish agriculture would benefit if it would also change.

His February itinerary was typical of such visits. He spoke at a number of events in Galway, and in Kinsale. He spoke at a seminar at University College Cork. I organised a meeting for him at Cork City Hall, where he also met with the then Lord Mayor, who was someone who he had gone to school with.

That was Paul’s great strength. He wasn’t messianic. He didn’t seek to hammer home his values. He chose instead to relate to people with warmth and empathy.

I found him to be supportive and encouraging of me. Like many in politics I suffer from Imposter Syndrome. Because I speak more of the experience of others than those of myself, I’m always aware that undermines my credibility.Somehow Paul saw past that. He would ask me to introduce him at events, and to introduce him to others.

He saw networking as a global opportunity. He worked with the Kiss The Ground Foundation, an organisation that promotes environmental policies through documentaries. They had made a documentary on his work in Brazil. Paul would have seen this as an opening feature. This year he was promoting the Kiss The Ground documentary, narrated by the actor Woody Harrelson, shown through Netflix.

The last time I physically saw Paul was through a Zoom meeting I had organised with Minister of State, Pippa Hackett, herself an organic farmer.He was as enthusiastic as ever, greatly looking forward to his next trip to Ireland, whenever this ‘thing’ would be behind us.

I learned of his death through a third party who presumed I had heard. It was later again I discovered his death was covid related. That was from a phone call from the wife of a man, now in his nineties, whom we mutually knew. Our last conversation was on how we would meet in the future to celebrate this man’s life.

Paul was younger than I am and far more healthy. I see his death as emblematic of the year we have been living through. I see his legacy as something I would like to encourage in others.

It was an honour to know you Sir.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle