Last week, in another example of the natural talent for stand-up comedy that has been such a source of pleasure in recent Irish culture, Pat "The Cope" Gallagher, Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, told the European Parliament in Brussels that "the environment is a key priority during the Irish Presidency of the EU over the next six months", Fintan O'Toole reports.
Speaking of the need for sustainable development, he stressed that "we are committed to growth and social progress throughout the enlarged Community, decoupled from environmental damage". Humour, alas, is notoriously hard to translate, and his listeners sat with glazed eyes and rigid faces, thinking that the poor man was serious.
The reality is that, even while our leaders have learned to parrot some acceptable environment-speak for European consumption, we are living right now through a sustained and remarkably successful backlash against the environmental movement. The shift in attitudes over the past 20 years is being rolled back. The lessons learned from decades of bad or non-existent planning are being torn up. And the backlash is coming from the top, led by the present Government.
This ought to be a golden age for Irish environmentalism. A generation of young people has been educated to think of itself as part of an ecosystem. The worst suspicions of a corrupt planning system, hijacked in the interests of private greed, have been borne out, and indeed exceeded by the hard evidence of the Mahon tribunal. The price of bad planning, with development driven by profit rather than need, is being paid by the hundreds of thousands of commuters who spend more time in their cars than with their families. The grotesque spectacle of vast illegal dumps in Wicklow has given us visceral images of the feckless and anarchic attitude to waste that has brought shame on the country.
And yet, the environmental movement is taking a hammering. Earthwatch, the Republic's affiliate of Friends of the Earth, has all but collapsed. An Taisce is having to lay off some of its key staff. In some parts of Ireland, admitting membership of An Taisce is to invite the pariah status of a paedophile.
On the institutional level, those whose job it is to ensure that economic development is balanced with environmental responsibility are now seen as easy targets. Recently, Minister of State Frank Fahey openly attacked county managers and planners for allegedly trying to "dictate what's best for rural Ireland". (Everyone knows, of course, that that's the job of builders and developers.) The heritage service Dúchas has been broken up and brought under the personal control of the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, who, as revealed by The Irish Times last week, has regularly rejected the advice of his officials to appeal against insensitive planning permissions. Mr Cullen has also been signalling his intention to take personal control of the licensing of newly-discovered heritage sites. Most importantly of all, Mr Cullen and the Taoiseach have recently indicated their intention to weaken the already quite minimal controls on the construction of one-off houses in the countryside.
It is no great surprise that Fianna Fáil, which has long had an intense and intimate relationship with some developers and builders, should want to do all of this. What is remarkable is the evident confidence that declaring open season on environmental responsibility is a political winner. Just a few years ago, the perception was quite different. The party made a concerted effort to add another shade of green to its traditional image, with high-profile campaigns on Sellafield and the Taoiseach declaring sustainable development as one of his guiding political principles.
Why the change? The only explanation is that those in power have grasped a great paradox in the public mood. An economic boom on top of decades of bad planning has created an anarchic shambles of a country in which daily life involves a constant element of hassle and harassment. Harassed people don't have time to think things through for the long term. They want what they want and they want it now. Thus bad planning creates pressure for more bad planning.
If it's cheaper right now to build an isolated house 20 miles from where you work, then build it now. If you're gnashing your teeth in a traffic snarl-up, you want someone to shoot those bloody mediaevalists protesting about Carrickmines Castle and holding up the completion of the M50. Never mind that the one-off house means more driving, having to drink polluted water and being condemned to a lonely old-age. Never mind that the scandal of Carrickmines results, not from the protests, but from strange decisions made by a corrupted planning system. The past and the future are luxuries that those who are stuck in a stressful present tense can't afford.
And the cynical exploitation of this mood is itself self-sustaining. Today's bad decisions feed tomorrow's anarchy which generates demand for more bad decisions. We can go on like this until the country becomes uninhabitable. Which is presumably what this Government means by sustainable development.