We've long fancied ourselves as a beacon of civilisation, so it was good, last October, to have an official endorsement of the fact that other European countries can learn a lot from us. It's just a pity that what they can learn is how not to do things, writes Fintan O'Toole
In terms of planning, the mad sprawl of Dublin over the past decade is now a textbook example for other developing countries in Europe. Last October, the head of the European Environmental Agency's (EEA) spatial analysis unit told Frank McDonald of The Irish Times that Dublin is now being held up for countries such as Poland as the "worst-case scenario" of urban planning. The city's achievement in occupying the same area as Los Angeles with just a quarter of the population is the kind of horror story that can be used to frighten others into adopting sensible policies. "We're using it," said the EEA, "as an illustrative case for cities in eastern Europe to show what can happen if you let the money flow without having a vision of balanced development."
The Green Party has the same justification for going into Government with Fianna Fáil as Jonathan Swift had for leaving money in his will to found "a house for fools and mad": "no nation needed it so much". However, many principles were abandoned as foundlings on the doorstep of power, it would have been hard for anyone with the vaguest concern for the environment to contemplate with equanimity another five years of fecklessness.
Official attitudes to the physical world around us haven't just been careless. They have been wilfully perverse. Given a choice, there has been a bloody-minded tendency to go for the ugliest, most harmful option.
There were two routes proposed for the M3 motorway, one of which meant driving it through the Tara-Skryne valley, and one of which did not. There were two ways of getting the gas out of the Corrib field: refining it at sea, as is usually done, or running pipelines through sensitive and unstable landscapes. There are two ways of managing Ireland's forests: churning out masses of low-grade, uneconomic monocultures or planting sustainable, indigenous and lucrative species. We've taken the nasty option every time.
These choices are made for political and institutional reasons, but also for cultural ones. One of the legacies of our history of dispossession is that we've never, collectively, taken ownership of the place we inhabit. We don't belong to it and it doesn't belong to us. So, on the whole, we treat it with contempt. We are so inured to this that we hardly notice, but outsiders do: one of the most negative perceptions of Ireland among visitors in Fáilte Ireland's surveys of tourists is around litter and pollution. Just 44 per cent of people who come here on city breaks, for example, rate these aspects of Ireland as very satisfactory.
From 30 Irish towns and cities, waste water is being discharged into estuaries or the sea with either no sewage treatment at all or the most basic (and utterly inadequate) treatment.
Nearly one-third of the rivers and ground-water sources in Ireland are polluted and the downward trend that had been evident up to last year has now been reversed. Thirty-six per cent of private group-water schemes are infected with E.coli. We are also in breach of European law requiring coastal waters where shellfish are cultivated to be clean: only 14 of 58 bays reach the required standards.
The catastrophic illegal dumping of waste went on under the noses of local authorities. The worst of it may have stopped, but the handling of construction waste remains anarchic, with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reporting that "an unacceptable situation exists whereby there is a lack of reliable information due to poor record-keeping". An astonishing 24 per cent of Irish households either have no access to, or do not use, any waste collection services, resulting in an estimated 200,000 tonnes of waste being either burned or dumped every year.
Much of this happens because environmental crimes are not taken seriously. EU laws are flouted with metronomic regularity. The European Commission has had to take the Republic to court time after time for inadequate sewage plants, reckless waste disposal, failure to implement environmental directives, the absence of national systems to protect endangered wildlife and so on.
Last year, the EPA got just 15 convictions against offenders in the District Courts, resulting in a grand total of €178,841 in costs and fines. It got three convictions in the Circuit Courts, reaping €185,520 in fines and costs. That makes an average of €20,000 in costs and fines for every conviction - hardly a disincentive to activities that can be extremely lucrative. Basic monitoring, moreover, is pathetic: 65 per cent of public group-water schemes and 41 per cent of private group-water schemes are either not adequately monitored or not monitored at all.
Changing this culture of reckless disregard is a huge task for the Greens, but if they can achieve it, the devil will have paid a decent price for their souls.