Lessons from history: rural revolt never ends well
JUST when everyone thought it was safe to talk about turf again, Climate Minister Eamon Ryan has managed to set the country ablaze. When it came to this issue, the Green Party had a cunning plan to kill the revolt with kindness by agreeing to listen and consult… and then implement the ban anyway once the Dáil is closed.
Then the party leader, far from damping down the flames, intimated that peat briquettes might also be banned.
The Climate Minister told the Dáil: ‘On the peat briquettes, I’ll be perfectly honest, I’ll be looking at the science there to make sure we are absolutely certain those peat briquettes, because of the way they’re processed, because of the way they burn, are below the ten micrograms of pollution that’s put out into the atmosphere.’
In the same speech, Mr Ryan also snuffed out his honest-broker position, noting of a proposal that turf be treated the same as other fuels that, even prior to any scientific testing, ‘I don’t believe it’ll open up a future where we find it is actually possible to burn that turf’. He added: ‘No matter how seasoned it is, it brings difficulties.’
Hours later, the minister said he did not want to see peat briquettes banned, but by then it was too late.
Just as his Coalition colleagues were daring to hope the rural revolt against the turf ban had cooled, the heat was back on.
But how dangerous could a turf war actually be? Well, we have been here before. As two previous examples of rural revolt show, they rarely end well for the urban side.
THE ROD LICENCE
The 1987-1989 rod licence debacle still sends a shiver down the spines of those who thought it would be a simple matter to license trout fishing.
Instead, they got the fisheries equivalent of The Field as anglers all over the country rejected this attack on their historic rights.
The dispute led to angry standoffs between anglers opposed to the licence and those willing to implement it. The Department of the Marine told the Government in 1989 that gardaí were refusing to intervene when anglers were confronted with protesters. In one case the department said anglers had been told they would be ‘torn limb from limb’
and ‘sent home in a coffin’.
In the end, in an Irish solution to an Irish problem, the hated licence was replaced by a noncompulsory certificate system that was never implemented.
Many believe the furore foiled Charlie Haughey’s last tilt at an overall majority in 1989.
DOG BREEDING
Few things could faze Brian Cowen during the surreal collapse of the Celtic Tiger.
But the then-taoiseach was visibly astonished when, in 2010, his party managed to tear itself apart over pedigrees for greyhounds.
No one quite remembers what the Dog Breeding Establishments Bill was about, and few were very clued-in at the time, but tempers ran high. Legend has it that a serious attempt was made to throw Mattie McGrath out a window during one furious exchange.
In the Dáil, Fianna Fáil’s John O’Donoghue said of the then leader of the Labour Party, Eamon Gilmore, who supported the Bill, that he was like ‘a gadfly around the tail of an old cow’.
The Government won a vote on an amendment by just one vote: 69 to 68. Throughout the vicissitudes of three emergency budgets, the surrender to the IMF and a €73billion bailout of the banks, it was the closest the Government came to defeat.
GROUNDS FOR WAR
People might think the cutting and selling of turf is a simple enough thing to resolve. In fact the labyrinthine rights involved leave the National Children’s Hospital looking like the ladybird book of property deals.
The numerous people affected by a ban include the following:
People who have turbary rights, Q3 agreements, fee simple rights,
acquired rights, commonage rights, licensed rights, leased rights, inherited rights and familial rights;
People who assisted the State by providing their bogs for preservation as part of the designation of boglands;
People who participated in the Turf Compensation Scheme, where they sold their bogs to the State;
People who took compensation to buy turf elsewhere;
People who opted to be supplied with turf by the State;
People who moved bog under licence or turbary rights;
People who have historically rented or have been provided with a plot; People who saved turf for their own households.
A POSSIBLE TRUCE?
Those who are seen as ‘sympathisers’ of turf users have claimed there is a simple solution.
They have called on Government to work with the industry to ensure that turf sold in urban retail outlets complies with the same moisture-content regulations that apply to timber and peat briquettes, thus making a ban on the sale of turf unnecessary.
But this proposal has been undermined by Mr Ryan’s declaration that peat briquettes are also regarded with suspicion by the climate change police.
FIRE STARTERS
Hopes of a solution to this impasse will not be improved by a cast of characters that leave the two nominal Government leaders, Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar, looking peripheral.
Michael Healy-Rae
The archetypal man in a flat cap evokes a visceral response from the Greens, who see Mr HealyRae, below, as the antithesis of everything they hold dear.
Danny Healy-Rae
Whatever about Michael HealyRae, his brother Danny, pictured below his sibling, is the Greens’ ultimate rural bogeyman. He’s definitely a waking nightmare for the posh Dublin set, although his voters in Kerry would take that as a compliment.
Michael Fitzmaurice
The turf-cutters’ advocate is increasingly seen as the voice of reason in a very unreasonable debate. Michael Fitzmaurice, right, bottom, has come closer than anyone else to capturing Eamon Ryan with his suggestion that we apply reason and science to this issue..
The puritans
Some believe that, left to himself, Eamon Ryan would not be such a bad fellow. But there is also a sense that the Green Party leader – who after all is in charge of a party of ideologues – is in political and ideological thrall to an elite class of privately educated, puritanical, trust fund millionaires who want to cleanse rural Ireland of its unseemly ways.
Barry Cowen
The consigliere of the Fianna Fáil rural backbenchers, Mr Cowen is increasingly fed up with Eamon Ryan’s Magic Roundabout act. He carries a big stick and growls (and bites) like a trapped badger.
Michael Ring
enemy and an even more dangerous Coalition partner when disillusioned. He’s wilier than he is given credit for being.
Shane Ross
Often in Irish politics the battle is not about what the battle appears to be about. In this case the Government has inherited the Shane Ross legacy of being perceived to be at war with rural Ireland. Be it the rural pub or drinkdriving, Mr Ross, pictured bottom, was seen as having a cultural dislike of rural ways. Mr Ryan is increasingly seen as a continuation of that.
Eamon Ryan
It would help if the minister in charge of this could be considered a safe pair of hands. Instead, we have Mr Ryan, the great proponent of rewilding wolves, the man who urged us to deploy our window boxes against coronavirus, who suggested shorter showers might be a solution to the energy crisis. This is the minister who, despite leading a party that is even more woke than the Labour Party under Ivana Bacik, managed to become involved in an N-word controversy.
SUMMER SHENANIGANS
Every summer, some daftness arrives to shake the political establishment to its foundations. Last year it was Zappone-gate and the year before it was Golf-gate. The accident-prone dancing of Eamon Ryan through this minefield indicates we are heading towards rural Ireland’s version of the coal miners’ strike. A summer battle between, on one side, the puritanical factcheckers of the Green Party and their baggage train of An Taisce and Friends Of The Earth, and on the other side, a rural resistance, many of whom believe the Earth is flat, and who believe even more fervently that the Green Party are a new race of Cromwells intent on obliterating rural Ireland, will at a minimum be entertaining. But if any of the rising Greek chorus of fearful Government TDs decide to leap, it could also become as dangerous as the Irish Water furore during austerity. Sinn Féin will certainly be watching it all with great interest.