by Lynda Sullivan
[This article is part of a series called Answering Ireland’s Call: Thoughts for a new republic (Freagairt ar Ghlaoch na hÉireann: Smaointe ar phoblacht nua). The series will publish articles discussing the reunification of Ireland but within the context of early 21st Century ills such as the climate crisis, capitalism and fascism. If you like what you read, please share the articles far and wide. If you have insights and ideas on the subject and want to make a contribution, the project team would love to hear from you via irelandscall@mailbox.org. This article was also published on ZNetwork.]
Sitting in a tent called Ash in an uncharacteristically sunny summer’s day in Ardboe, listening to two Palestinian women talk of resistance in the face of genocide and ecocide, I was reminded of Maya Angelou’s truth: ‘no one of us can be free until everybody is free.’ Because if ‘they’ are not free (whoever they may be) then we are still operating under a system based on oppression, and thus, not free ourselves. So unfortunately a ‘free Ireland’ will not come with constitutional change – the road is much longer than that, but it could be an opportunity to reset the compass. Ireland could even be a beacon in the dark.
I was at Ardboe for Climate Camp Ireland– a place and time for envisioning environmental justice, resurrected in recent years by the grassroots anti-capitalist climate action group Slí Eile. The five-day camp seemed to me to be asking a clear question: ‘what would environmental and climate justice look like in Ireland, and how can we bring it into being?’ In my opinion, it would look like what it would look like elsewhere: a society free from capitalism, colonialism, racism and the patriarchy (and any other oppression and exploitation of the ‘other’ that also has a name). The ‘no’ is clear.
Actually the no became crystal clear as I listened to activist and artist Donal O’Kelly tell the story of a family. This family has had a big impact on our island, and many others on the planet. This family worked hard to bring a lot of pain and misery to a lot of people. This family carries the name of Shaftesbury. The very first Earl of Shaftsbury, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, was heavily involved in shaping the slave trade – engaging his young legal protegé John Locke in 1669 to draft the Fundamental Constitution for the new colony of Carolina – which provided that ’every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves of what opinion or religion soever’. [1] I hear from Donal how Shaftesbury was also a shareholder in the Royal African Company, which built forts and “factories” on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea to hold captured slaves to be trafficked to the Caribbean and American colonies, generating the Atlantic Slave Trade. [2]
Some generations later, in 19th Century, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, possibly evoking the warped spirit of his ancestor whose name he carried, is credited with sowing the seed of Zionism and proposing the idea of ‘restoring’ the Jewish people of Europe to Palestine, via the ethnic cleansing the indigenous Palestinians, to satisfy his evangelical obsession with the notion of the second coming of the messiah. He fanatically pursued this fiction throughout his life and succeeded in embedding it in the British elite’s psyche to be disastrously acted on a century later.
Arriving at the present day, the current Earl of Shaftesbury, Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, inherited in 2005 his family’s claim of the bed of our ailing Lough Neagh, which was originally granted to (stolen by) Arthur Chichester in 1606 and passed to the Shaftesburys via marriage. At camp we heard how local fishermen were banned from fishing on the lake for 80 years, a local practice known to date back 9 thousand years, until they scraped together the funds to buy fishing rights from the Shaftesburys in 1972. Up until last year the current incarnation of the Shaftesbury clan said he would only relinquish the lough if he was paid for it – for some millions to accompany the riches he receives from yearly royalties from the, up until a couple of years ago, unlawful sand dredging of the bed of the lough. Now, due to the pressure and creative campaigning from grassroots activism and those behind Climate Camp (Slí Eile and the camp’s hosts – Save Lough Neagh Coalition), he came out with a blog, just before his own eco-festival, saying he ‘would like to transfer ownership’, but – ‘to whom?’, not trusting in the state or the lough’s communities to look after it. Well the answer to that question is simple – anyone but you.
Racism, genocide and ecocide – some of the scours on our humanity that has had us out on the streets of late. And a story of a family which shows how our struggles are all connected – not just to their lineage, but to the dehumanising, exploitative and extractivist system that has been written by white supremacists over the past number of centuries.
Lough Neagh’s ailments go beyond what the Shaftesburys pocket – sand mining is but one of its problems (and to those who say sand mining doesn’t cause ecological harm – do your research). The largest contributor to the toxic blue-green algae that is suffocating the lough comes from another capitalist venture – industrial agriculture. Climate camp always ends in an action, and this year’s action took place outside Moy Park – not only the biggest player in the distortion of agriculture for profit, but also now the biggest profit making business in all of the North, shaping our economy to suit its shareholders. Moy Park is owned by Pilgrims Pride who are in turn majority owned by JBS – the largest meat processing enterprise in the world, who engage in land grabbing and slavery to raze the Amazon and the Brazilian Cerrado to grow soy to feed our factory farmed animals. Most of the meat coming out of our animal factories is shipped to Britain (dead pig is the new potato), leaving the shit to seep into our soils and flow into our rivers and lakes – hello blue-green algae, goodbye dogs and cold water swimming. NI Water’s sewage management, a good few septic tanks and an invasive mussel also deserve a mention in Lough Neagh’s sad story.
But she also has her champions, and they were out spitting fake vomit at the gates of Moy Park the other Sunday. They were also in the camp telling of the eels – who are lying low on the scraped bed, waiting for a clear path up to their grub. And they were sitting in the Sessile Oak tent telling of alternative visions of feeding ourselves that doesn’t cost the earth.
These guardians were listened to by others from other frontline struggles. Those who are uncovering our states’ false claims to be moving away from fossil fuels whilst pushing new fossil fuel infrastructure (Gas Caverns at Islandmagee, Oil Terminal at Whitehead, LNG on the Shannon), those who are similarly debunking our states’ contradictory greenwashing of the new mining craze ‘for the green transition’, and those who expose the influx of water and energy gozzling data centres for the supposedly necessary digital transition (which also needs lots of minerals underneath our feet).
Indeed, another reason that it was important for the Climate Camp to be in Co. Tyrone was to highlight the planned ‘mine camp’ in the Sperrin mountains, and Ireland as a sacrifice zone for the new mining boom. Just like with Industrial Agriculture, both states on this island are hugely facilitative to this mega industry. Both governments in consecutive years attend the world’s biggest mining conference to advertise Ireland as ‘Open for Business’ for rampant extraction. Around a quarter of the island is already concessioned to mining companies for prospecting, compared to 0.8% in England. Multinationals are the new colonisers and they’re being invited to stay for tea.
We have Europe’s biggest zinc mine in Co. Meath, a gypsum mine in Co. Monaghan splitting Gaelic pitches in half, a gold mine riddled with health and safety woes at Cananacaw, Co. Tyrone, again the undesirable title of Europe’s biggest for the ‘towering monstrosity’ that is Aughinish Alumina on the banks of the Shannon, and we’re also host to the deluge of unregulated quarries that litter the island. Extraction is business as usual on the emerald aisle.
And this all happening in both states with publicly funded planning systems who supposedly answer to environmental regulations. Some argue we just need better regulations, or for the current regulations to at least be upheld. Yet others, including some game-changing lawyers who introduced us to the idea of the Rights of Communities and Rights of Nature some years ago, believe that the only thing that environmental regulations regulate is the environmentalists. They funnel us into the ‘box of allowable activism’, swallowing up our energy tinkering with a system designed to allow destruction, which actually relies on it.
And that system, of course, is capitalism (often referred to by our politicians as ‘economic development’ or ‘progress’). And green capitalism is just same shit different day. And keeping it intact, protecting it, – with its underpinning reliance on endless growth and the consequent need to swallow more and more resources, isn’t only massively unjust, it’s also just not possible. We can’t just continue with business as usual and simply switch the fuel source to renewables because there aren’t enough minerals in the ground, even if they were extracted via violence and death, to satisfy the projected (and for some minerals current) demand (which is very different to need). So the system will fall, it’s just a matter of how and when. How much will be sacrificed before then? And will we have grown enough new shoots with strong enough roots to rise up through the rubble?
How much will be sacrificed before then depends on how much of the bad shit we can resist. Holding actions, sites of frontline resistance, are what occupies a lot of grassroots energy. The frequent accusations of NIMBYism thrown at many frontline struggles is deeply frustrating and frankly ignorant. Communities putting so much time and energy into holding back the onslaught not only do it for themselves, as they have the right to do, but they also do it for the rest of us, and for those to come. Resisting damaging projects is protecting our ecosystems and communities, it is improving the future prospects of a life-sustaining society. And, like a good dinner, it’s better with company. Collective resistance, with solidarity between communities in the same struggle and across movements, gives us the best chance for a future.
Climate camp is a great example of this multi-layered solidarity. It can also be seen, for example, at Gairdín An Phobail where housing activists, mental health campaigners, families surviving a hostile asylum system, and others organise together while they grow food and a movement for land justice. It can be seen also in the rise of coops and trade union organising for democratic workplaces, and in the neighbourhood committees of CATU. There are many other examples where the New Ireland we’d be proud of is already alive. While resisting the old we are also creating the new, and living it.
So the voices we need to hear in conversations about constitutional change are these – the grassroots. It’s not with the academics who shout into you what you’re supposed to be thinking and doing, it’s not with green NGOs who don’t want to rock the boat they’re sitting in, and it’s nowhere to be found in mainstream politics. Of course these institutions can serve, if they’re not caught up in serving themselves. And of course the grassroots isn’t always radical, the system is adept at clipping our wings; but spaces like climate camp, and the many examples of cross-fertilisation of movements, are opportunities to unlearn and to learn anew. To tear down and to build up. To nurture relationships on the basis of equity, equality, love and respect. Proposing solutions based on actual experience of the problem. Living the world we want, the world we need, whether or not this state or that state or a new state feels compelled to care.
References
1 – Mavis Campbell, Aristotle and Black Slavery: A Study in Race Prejudice, Race, XV, No. 3 (1974)
2 – Donal O’Kelly: Lough Neagh to Gaza (article in process)
