2024 WAS THE hottest year on record and the world is warming even faster than scientists had predicted.

In Ireland, we have legislation purporting to halve emissions of greenhouse gases by 2030, our National Biodiversity Action Plan was recently assessed by the World Wildlife Fund as among the best in Europe while politicians (most of them at least), talk a good talk when it comes to the need for action.

Yet implementation where it matters remains poor. Agriculture and fisheries, together the biggest pressures on the environment across a range of metrics, remain unreformed. Although overall emissions are coming down, we are way off track to meet targets according to the Climate Change Advisory Council, while transport emissions are going up.

Little is being done to address the impacts of forestry and degraded peatlands, despite a clear mandate for action given to the last government. Apart from the fact that they kicked the Greens out of the Dáil, a majority of voters in an exit poll on the day of the election said that the government did not go far enough in pushing the Green agenda.

These contradictions point to a lack of democracy and accountability in our political system. Although Ireland scores relatively well in the quality of our democracy when compared with other countries, it is also the case that democratic control over important aspects of how our country is run remains weak to non-existent.

Truly democratic?

Decisions on how our land and sea are used, and in particular how the billions of euros in public money are spent on subsidies for farming and fishing interests, are taken by a very small number of people in the Department of Agriculture. Invariably, because of the way the system works with lobbying, this means there will be input from business interests and lobby groups that are not accountable to the general public.

No democratic body voted in favour of steering our food production model towards one that is exclusively export-led, beef and dairy dominated and that places a phenomenally large environmental burden on present and future generations. Despite our seas being for the common good of the nation, no one has ever been held accountable for handing it over, for free, to industrial fishing fleets that have left us with a collapsed marine ecosystem. I don’t remember the Dáil voting to systemically defund public transport in favour of private cars over decades (a trend the last government, to its credit, has reversed) and yet that is what we got.

Public consultations, where people are asked their views on matters of public policy, are now routine. Yet, how the results are integrated into the decisions that are ultimately made is a mystery. An exhaustive public consultation for our most recent Forest Strategy clearly indicated that people wanted public money to promote a lot more native forests and to end the planting of monocultures of alien conifers. Yet this was not reflected in the final policy.

In urban areas, there is greater accountability from locally elected officials but the way that desperately needed changes to traffic flow in Dublin City Centre last summer were nearly scuppered at the last minute, despite having been approved through a democratic process, shows how lobbies for private interests still have too much power over decisions that should be made in the public interest. Our democratic structures are simply not up to the task of making the changes needed for the green transition, even when these changes are broadly popular.

Voice of the people

One response has been the Citizens’ Assemblies, which demonstrated their ability to affect societal change, particularly during the debate over the Repeal of the Eighth Amendment in 2018. Assemblies on making Ireland a leader in climate action and, separately, on biodiversity loss showed that complex and thorny topics can be confronted. However, their results were mixed and, in both instances, bold recommendations on reforming agriculture (for instance, introducing a meat tax) were dismissed out of hand. A recommendation from the Assembly on biodiversity loss to develop a new plan for our food system, a critical step, or to reintroduce predators (from the Young People’s Assembly) were simply ignored by the government.

A way forward would be to put these measures to the public in a vote, like what is done in the US. In 2020, for instance, voters in the US state of Colorado elected to reintroduce wolves, bypassing the lobbying power of ranchers. Why should the public not have a say in the imposition of a meat tax or the proportion of spending on public transport versus roads, or whether our forestry model should be dominated by Sitka spruce monocultures? Proposals for change could come through either the Citizens’ Assemblies or through a petition process which requires a threshold of signatures.

We also need to reform the process of public consultations to give them a legal status that cannot be simply ignored. As it stands, this is corroding trust in politics as it asks people to put time and effort into participating in the formation of public policy only for uncomfortable results to be set aside without explanation.

If politics cannot address the big issues of our time, and climate change and biodiversity loss are surely chief among these, then people will lose faith in politics and turn to extremes, leading to a vicious cycle of polarisation, misinformation and inertia. Fortunately, for now, Ireland is not as far along this path as some countries, but that is not likely to hold if we cannot address the deficit in democracy.

Pádraic Fogarty is an environmental campaigner. 

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