Seán Fearon challenges republicans to consider incorporating a green agenda into their political activism ‘When we think of economic performance as Irish republicans, we must prioritise social and economic equality, redistribution, physical and mental wellbeing, the quality of employment, the impact on our democracy, the health of our communities, and the sanctity of the natural world’.
Republicanism and ecology politics BY SEÁN FEARON Irish republicanism, as the primary vehicle of radical social and economic progress on this island, is perhaps an outlier among mainstream left-wing movements in continental Europe, Britain, and the United States. Environmentalism and an embrace of green politics is, at best, tangential to our programme of change on this island. Misconceptions may lie in the widely held view that the politics of ecology - the balance between the ecosystem of humanity, our economic activity, and all other ecosystems on earth - are some sort of middle-class hobbyhorse. It is perhaps for this reason that the climate emergency is on the coattails of our economic programme; a sort of appendix to the social justice arguments that have made Irish republicans relevant in exploited communities, now as ever. However, the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and often socialist forms in which Irish republicanism has found expression since the 1790s are bonded to the politics of
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ecology. The British imperial project in Ireland, and its colonial practices of land confiscation and exploitation of Irish workers which have animated republicans throughout our history, are the same practices which have brought us to the brink of ecological collapse. They are bound together by the logic and pseudo-religious obsession with economic growth. Like the people of East Asia, the continent of Africa, and Latin America, generations of working people in Ireland were exploited and brutalised at the altar of imperialist growth, but among post-colonial societies, the Irish state stands out as uniquely growth-obsessed. We have swallowed whole the myth that rising national output and a bejewelled arrangement for multinational corporations is one and the same with economic development and a modern, humane and ecologically sustainable society. Of course, Ireland is not alone in this.
There is a blinkered obsession among policy makers, political parties from right to left, and, above all, the economics profession with growth as the sole measure and object of economic performance. It dominates today’s globalised capitalist economy. Everything else is secondary, namely the well-being of society, the health of our communities, and the disfigured state of the natural world. ‘Growthism’ is an idea entirely at odds with indigenous concepts of progress and wellbeing, in Ireland as in other colonised regions. In our aim to unravel the malicious legacy of colonialism here, and the layered economic inequality it left in its wake, republicans should share common cause with those rejecting endless economic expansion to bring the world economy back into line with our planetary boundaries. In short, we need a ‘greening’ of Irish republicanism and a vision of a new model of a post-growth economy in Ireland.
ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2021 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 anphoblacht
