Vote Green, get blue

South Dublin County Council voted yesterday voted to reject water charges, supporting a motion tabled by newly elected Labour councillor Dermot Looney.

All councillors voted against charges with the exception Fianna Fáil members. Two of the four Fianna Fáil councillors voting in favour of charges and two were not present for the vote. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour, Sinn Féin and the People Before Profit Alliance (Socialist Workers’ Party) were elected to the council which represents the primarily working class districts of Lucan, Clondalkin and Tallaght along with Rathfarnam.

The Green Party, whose initiative the water charges are, lost its sole South Dublin County Council seat in the last election.

As Looney points out, despite the absence of public and political support for water charges, other factors are involved: “The council management supports water charges, as does virtually every council in Ireland because they’re starved of funds,” he told forth

Water charges were first introduced by Labour before the party voted to rescind them in 1997.

“Labour’s record is mixed on this issue but we intend to be a forefront this time,” said Looney.

A single county council voting against water charges is not typically the kind of issue forth covers, but this vote has a broader political significance. Far from being radicals who sold out to Fianna Fáil, Ireland’s Green Party represents a deeply conservative strand of political thought – one that judges people on the basis of their consumption rather than their ability to produce.

From a Green perspective, water is a commodity to be paid for on the basis of its scarcity. For everyone else it is something that falls from the sky and the price of processing and transporting it so that it is freely available to everyone is simply the price of a civilised society. By seeking to introduce water charges the Green Party is planning not only double taxation (water is already paid for out of general taxation), it is also attempting to remodel society on the basis of its belief that people must be pushed into behaving in a certain manner by means of financial (and other) penalties.

Despite this conservative agenda which not only seeks to reduce productive output in actual terms but also supports regressive consumption taxes the Green Party has somehow managed to paint itself as a radical force in Irish politics.

Ironically, the party has been the target of much public anger and, as things currently stand, is likely to be reduced to a single seat at the next Dáil election. The party was virtually wiped-out at the last council elections (though it was never a strong force in council politics, lacking a clear politico-economic base for first preference votes). Members have been defecting from the party in greater numbers than have been from Sinn Féin and yet press coverage would suggest the opposite. Most recently, the entire Donegal branch has disaffiliated.

All of this fury, however, is not directed at the Green Party’s political programme. Rather it is a result of its political opportunism. Both loyal Green supporters and the wider public are angry that the party is propping-up the unpopular Fianna Fáil-led government. Such criticism, while correct, misses the wider point that it is not only Fianna Fáil that is responsible for attacks on the living standards of ordinary people: such austerity measure are at the very core of the Green Party’s ideology.

Strangely, this is a widely misunderstood fact. Sinn Féin senator Pearse Doherty, for example, has complained about the Greens’ support for the reintroduction of university tuition fees: “It is incomprehensible that the Green Party are standing side by side with Fianna Fáil on this issue.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, such a move is not only comprehensible, it is fully in keeping with the Greens’ attacks on social mobility – there is a direct correlation between university education and improved earning potential. While others might see this as people rising out of immiseration or the development of the skills to improve our world, from a Green point of view it simply means more people with more money to spend on supposedly scarce resources and the creation of pollution. 

It is not as though the party lacks prior form. Despite its regular attempts to present itself as the voice of ordinary person, the Green Party has long pursued a set of policies that would be attacked as ultra-conservative or neo-liberal if they were espoused by any other party. From supporting bin taxes – again based on consumption and again double taxation – to a congestion charge that will force working class drivers out of Dublin city, the list of Green policies that intentionally fail to meet the needs of the public is endless:

– A stamp duty fix that would actively discourage construction of new homes
– The replacement of motor tax with punitive fuel taxes
– Bring an end to all new road construction after the existing commitments to the National Roads Authority have been met
– Promote smaller apartments, high-density over houses

It couldn’t be any other way. Green ideology is primarily focussed on consumption and so individuals who are in fact thinking, acting subjects are rapidly reduced, at best to the status of consumers of resources and, at worst, to polluters. Internationally, the Green agenda seeks to reduce economic growth, to create a “zero growth economy”, in the name of achieving “sustainability”. In other words, permanent recession. The Ireland-based Green economist Richard Douthwaite goes even further, stating: “Zero growth is not an option. We can’t hope to level off at present income levels and keep them there. It might have been possible to have arranged that at the end of the Second World War but that choice has gone. We face a long-run decline and no-one knows where the bottom might be.” (2)

Where the Greens have supported working people, such as by reducing PRSI, it is entirely by accident, focussed not on higher take-home pay but on shifting taxation to industries the party disapproves of.

Driven by its one-eyed view of everything as a scarce resource the Green Party has inverted the importance of production and consumption. This is something it shares with traditional conservative parties – a common bond with the “supply-side economics” so hated by the left – and yet, few on the left appear able to recognise that the Green austerity programme will disproportionately hurt those on lower incomes. Even the party’s policy on the Irish language is viewed through the prism of “sustainability” and actually referred to as a “cultural resource”.

Another popular green theme is overpopulation, even in a country as visibly underpopulated as Ireland – something that can be historically verified. Again, humanity is viewed in diminished terms that see it only as a destructive force through “overconsumption”, something that has even branded an illness – “affluenza” – by psychologist Oliver James. (3)  That such a notion is a clear affront to working people has almost entirely escaped notice. Those of us without money to waste on carbon offsets and other quasi-religious rituals would be excused for feeling that wealth is the source of all evil.

The Green Party’s impending implosion at the hands of the electorate, however, will be little cause for celebration: as with the Progressive Democrats, its agenda is now ingrained in political discourse and supported to greater or lesser degrees by most of the other parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in particular. Still, while the environmentalist attack on the public will undoubtedly continue, this should not blind us to the fact that the Greens have not been seduced by power: the reality is that a vote for the Green Party was always a vote for the elite.

By Jason Walsh

Jason Walsh is the editor of forth. He is a contributor to the Irish Times, the Irish Examiner, the Guardian, the Sunday Business Post and Ireland correspondent for the CS Monitor

(1) Reintroduction of third level fees a regressive measure, Sinn Féin, February 4, 2009
(2) The stark choice is not growth or no growth: it’s share or die (Microsoft Word format document), Richard Douthwaite, Quakers in Britain conference paper, 2009
(3) The sick society, William Leith, the Guardian, January 27, 2007