The Green Party is nothing if not interesting, particularly in the midst of its current maelstrom of activity. One might almost be forgiven for believing that the Greens are running the whole show at the moment, writes Mary Raftery.
The party has come a long way since its dislike of having leaders or personality-based politics. Suggestions based on Buddhist principles (such as that made apparently some years ago) that their party political election broadcasts should consist of two minutes of silence are unlikely to surface in the new lean, mean, green machine. Their relatively recent political naivety, or even eccentricity, may well have led many to believe that they would crumble when confronted with the real world of hard decisions and unpleasant compromise inevitably associated with government, and even more so with coalition administrations.
However, so far the Greens have displayed considerable steel. Minister for the Environment John Gormley's shot across the bows of Monaghan County Council on the rezoning issue is likely to send shock waves through every local authority in the land.
Employing a little-used section of the 2000 Planning Act, which allows him to act in the public good, Gormley has instructed the Monaghan council to rescind no fewer than 29 of the rezonings it had included, against professional planning advice, in the latest development plan for the region.
It is a long overdue signal that wild and wilful behaviour from councils will no longer be tolerated, and that rezonings should follow the principles of good planning as laid out by the various strategies for national development.
There will doubtless be those who will argue that the Minister's action constitutes a gross interference in local democracy and in the rights of local politicians to represent their communities. However, it has become abundantly clear over past decades that the repeated practice of rezoning vast swathes of land for development, often against planning advice and even common sense, has had a profoundly negative effect on many communities. If the Minister can act to root this out, he will in fact have enhanced the fundamental principles of local democracy by redressing the balance between the needs of communities and the profits of developers.
The other issue which the Greens have faced up to squarely is that of GMOs, or genetically modified organisms. The Green Party has always wanted Ireland to be a GM-free zone. It is suspicious of food which has been genetically modified, arguing that it has not been proven to be free of possible health risks.
However, it is almost impossible to prove beyond doubt that anything is risk free. What the bulk of the science in the area tells us at present is that there is no evidence that GM foods are unsafe. All of which means that the debate over GM or not GM is likely to rage around Europe for the foreseeable future. I say Europe here, as this is the region of the world where there is the most pronounced consumer resistance to GM foods. So strong is the hostility, in fact, that most major European food chains have declared themselves GM free.
In Ireland, we have (as is our wont) lived quite happily with a comfortable and unthreatening fudge. While Fianna Fáil was vehemently anti-GM 10 years ago, this has changed of late to the point where the previous government officially described its attitude to GM as "positive but precautionary". What this seems to have meant in practice was an expectation that Ireland would almost automatically support measures at EU level to free up access for GM products across Europe.
But no longer. The Green Party, with two key ministries in this area (Environment and Food), has begun to make its weight felt with what can only be described as a seismic shift in government policy. Over the past six weeks, the new Government has twice indicated at European level that it now strongly opposes GMOs in all food, including animal feed. At the EU Standing Committee on Food Chain and Animal Health, Trevor Sargent abstained in a vote on a GM animal feed ingredient called Herculex which continues to be banned. And John Gormley moved to support Austria, a firmly anti-GM country, at a recent EU meeting.
Any move to shut down the use of GM-based animal feeds will have enormous financial implications for the Irish beef, dairy, pig and poultry sectors, which have a substantial reliance on these products. However, leaving things as they are may have equally negative economic consequences should the EU move to introduce mandatory labelling of all meat and dairy produce from GM-fed animals - something which is also Green Party policy.
While Ireland as a country likes to market itself as green and clean, the reality is often somewhat different. The current Green Party focus on GM foods, whether for humans or animals, may finally make us confront at least some of the contradictions we usually manage to live with so smugly.