by Seán Fearon
[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.]
For a commentary reflecting on the barriers partition places in front of a radical eco-social programme on the island of Ireland, it is possibly hackneyed to frame a set of arguments on partitionist lines. This programme, however, slogs through a mire of two different kinds in the North and South of Ireland, and it is therefore helpful to look at them separately.
For the North, it is easy to address the core of the problem bluntly and directly. For creating ecological crisis, dealing with these crises as they arise, and in forming radical policy to prevent further crises in the future, Northern Ireland is a failed state.
Much of the reason for this powerlessness to address its own policy failures lies in the political economy of partition. Devolved states in the UK, and particularly the North of Ireland, are deprived of the ability to make powerful interventions in the economy in the interests of people and planet.
These interventions include punishing exploitative and polluting behaviour, taxing wealth and excessive income to curb overconsumption and inequality, and borrowing to roll out unprecedented investment in modern public transport infrastructure, for example. The state must build and own a huge suite of renewable energy assets, which can generate income for reinvestment in society, and it must provide the basic services required for a dignified life as a right, not a market opportunity.
Progressives across the world recognise these policies as prerequisites for a just transition to a sustainable and fairer society. They also correctly identify the chaos and self-interest of the market as singularly ill-equipped to achieve these objectives. It should be said clearly, then, that partition makes the above objectives impossible. They cannot and will not happen in the North of Ireland whilst partition persists.
Disempowered by the devolutionary set-up, and unable to marshal the resources required to make meaningful investment for a rapid green transition, the Northern Ireland Executive is forced to rely on private interests and the market to achieve policy objectives. In energy, state policy seeks to entice private renewable energy giants to build wind farms for the benefits of their shareholders, because the capital does not exist for the state to build and own these assets. Green ambition is restricted in housing, too, where policy focuses on giving landlords deadlines to insulate their houses because the state cannot build modern, affordable, and zero-carbon homes itself. Europe’s biggest illegal landfill festers outside Derry City in part because the state is unable to afford a clean-up. The compulsory purchase of a dying Lough Neagh may face the same barrier.
Environmentalists and radical progressives, therefore, face a problem which cannot be resolved by tweaks and by shuffling seats in the Assembly chamber. In the North of Ireland, the state is kept on a leash to the detriment of citizens, whilst the dogs of the market run, and eat. This problem is structural. It is constitutional. The state has no money to invest, no power to raise money, and no chance of procuring more power in the democratic deficit of devolution in the UK.
It is understandably difficult for many environmentalists in the North to engage with an alternative constitutional future which can offer us a more positive eco-social horizon. This hesitancy to engage with the opportunities of reunification may stem from the fear that politics of this kind will create a divisive sideshow to the main focus of the environmental movement – restoring the natural world and shielding it from the carnivorous appetites of the superrich. These fears, though well-meaning, are misguided. Reunification offers the North the only feasible avenue through which we can fundamentally reshape society-economy-ecology relationships.
The above arguments should not be taken as ignorance of the Republic of Ireland and the state of the non-human living world on the island of Ireland more generally. The post-colonial nature of the Irish economy has produced a growth regime which is perhaps distinctly intensive relative to other small, high-income economies. But partition cannot be blamed for capitalism, and the rampant exploitation of living and breathing nature by the demands of the market.
The southern Irish economy is intensely destructive. It is among the most material and carbon intensive economies in Europe. It has shattered planetary boundaries. If the world economy had the same footprint as the Republic of Ireland, we would need three planet earths to get by.
It has also produced huge quantities of wealth at great social and ecological cost to Ireland and the rest of the world. Some of the ten multinational companies which pay 1 in every 6 euros in tax collected by the Irish state – Apple, Google, Intel, and Microsoft among them – are responsible for disfigured landscapes in the developing world. Parts of the super-profits accumulated by these firms are achieved by sending unprotected, and often underage, workers into cobalt and lithium mines, so that batteries for iPhones and laptops can be made. Exploited labour extracts the minerals for luxury products, mega-companies sell them around the world, and Ireland collects some of the tax.
This unedifying growth model is unsustainable not simply on an ecological basis – though this is true – it is also morally untenable, particularly for a country which still shows its own post-colonial scars. Yet the mainstream case for reunification relies on these tax receipts and an intensification of this growth model.
A remodelling of the Irish economy, north and south, is needed to achieve a truly sustainable way of guaranteeing the basic needs of all on the island of Ireland as a human right. It must build a model that achieves this without relying on an ‘imperial mode of living’, and without sacrificing the non-human living world to meet the profiteering demands of multinationals and large domestic firms. Reunification presents a historic and unmissable opportunity to build this model together, with eco-social rights imbued in a new constitution, and with the North of Ireland unmoored from the shackles of the neoliberal devolutionary environment.
Seán Fearon is an ecological economist working at the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) at the University of Surrey. He works on the WISE Horizons project researching sustainable consumption, human wellbeing, and time use. He will be transitioning to the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) to work on the REAL project, helping to design a post-growth deal for a good life within planetary boundaries.
