Book review: Greed and duplicity pollutes our politics and environment

The Irish farm and food lobby enjoys an incredible, anti-democratic influence, that has had a disastrous and escalating impact on our countryside, our waterways, and our mountains

Author John Gibbons questions the influence of industrial lobbies in Ireland when it comes to environmental policy.

• The Lie of The Land: A Game Plan for Ireland in the Climate Crisis 
• John Gibbons 
• Penguin/Sandycove, €22.99 

One of today’s common coping mechanisms is the idea that American politicians are in the grip of an all-powerful Israeli lobby.

The implication is that good-old-apple-pie-and-mom ’Merika would not be complicit in genocide without the influence of amoral Zionists. 

This guff may assuage those Americans clinging to the belief that their country is still seen as a beacon on a hill. 

It may surprise them that the rest of the world has moved on from that star-spangled naivety.

That shift accelerated when American-endorsed atrocity became everyday in Gaza. 

Be that as it may, John Gibbons, in his dystopian The Lie of the Land, points to an Irish lobby every bit as trenchant, self-serving, and embedded in our public life as the Israeli lobbyists buying whatever integrity survives in American politics. 

He details how the Irish farm and food lobby enjoys incredible, anti-democratic influence, influence that has had a disastrous and escalating impact on our countryside, our waterways, and our mountains.

Increase of nitrates in our waterways

The latest EPA report detailing a 16% increase in nitrates in our waterways in the first six months of this year confirms this. That report also shows the promises around reform and environmental protection for what they really are — self-serving guff.

He details, too, how our EU peers increasingly see us as unreliable outliers because of our failure on climate collapse. 

He points out that state agencies — Teagasc and An Bord Bia — set up to serve all citizens (guffaw) are just greenwashing adjuncts to the farm/food industry. 

He points out that their boards are utterly skewed in favour of the sector and that any involvement by other voices doesn’t even reach a threshold to allow them to be described as tokenism.

The preparation of government policy document Food Vision 2030, published in 2021, shows how this insider-trading works. 

The committee that produced it was made up of more than 30 representatives of the farm/food sector. 

Apart from a single member from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the environmental sector was represented by a lone voice, one selected by the Environmental Pillar, an umbrella organisation representing 26 NGOs.

That lone voice resigned six months before the document was published. They quit as their input had been ignored.

That should not have been a surprise as then Bord Bia chief executive Tara McCarthy admitted the plan’s predecessor Food Wise 2025 was “industry owned”. But there’s much worse.

In July, 2023 three EPA scientists gave testimony to the joint Oireachtas committee on agriculture, which was chaired by then Fianna Fáil TD for Tipperary Jackie Cahill. 

Mr Cahill was earlier president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association. He is also a former member of Bord Bia, the National Dairy Board, the National Dairy Council (of which he was chair), and the European Milk Board.

It is worth pointing out that the National Dairy Council, despite its official sounding title, is a private organisation dedicated to advancing the sector’s interests.

Mr Cahill was as embedded as embedded can be. Though his published CV does not refer to any scientific qualifications, he attacked the scientists, as did Senator Victor Boyhan, who suggested, astonishingly, that the EPA report was “not scientific and its integrity was questionable”.

Jumping on the bandwagon, Fine Gael’s Michael Ring described the EPA as “a necessary evil”. 

Cahill later described An Taisce’s efforts to block a venture between Glanbia and a Dutch cheese maker with a Supreme Court appeal as “a revolting act of treason”.

Deriding environmental advice and scientists

Just to show that deriding environmental advice and scientists is an equal-opportunities mantrap for all politicians, Gibbons points to the shameful record of former politician and serial minister Simon Coveney. 

While in opposition, he was a strong advocate of protections but once he had a cabinet seat, he, as agriculture minister in 2011, told EU commissioner for climate action, Connie Hedegaard, that our government had no intention of limiting infant formula production to comply with climate targets.

There are few rays of hope in this shocking book, but that Cahill and Coveney have retired from national politics is one. 

Despite that, their parties are pressing ahead with efforts to extend the disastrous nitrates derogation.

Gibbons opens his book with a focus on agriculture — because that’s where the meat of this issue lies — but he is equally sharp about other sectors and points to contradictions in policy. 

He points out that we pay Vat on retrofitting homes, but that jet kerosene for commercial aviation is exempt from both excise and carbon taxes. Airline tickets and aircraft leasing are Vat exempt, too. 

Is it any wonder that Irish aviation’s emissions have grown by 500% in three decades? These subsidies, Gibbons argues, means it is cheaper to fly from Kerry to Dublin than it is to drive. 

Pointing to the inequity around access to air travel, the author suggests non-transferable rationing of air miles cannot be too far away.

If you think you hear screaming right now, that’s probably Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary screaming about the “eco twit” and “eco loonie” Gibbons, terms he directed at the author through a letter in The Irish Times. 

O’Leary accused Gibbons of publishing “nonsense”, “false claims”, and “fictional statistics” though he made no effort to substantiate his argument. 

Gibbons’ wife thought the letter so comically deranged that she had it framed as a birthday present for him.

In a short section dealing with our national parks, one more neglected than the other, Gibbons describes how, within 48 hours of the announcement of the state purchase of land at Kerry’s Conor Pass and the establishment of Páirc Náisiunta na Mara, minister Malcolm Noonan assured farmers that they did not face any “additional burdens” because of the purchase. 

Housing minister Darragh O’Brien echoed that when he promised “anything that took place yesterday will take place today and will take place tomorrow as well”.

So what was the point in buying the land for a national park if sheep could to graze it to death?

Unfortunately, that vignette is symptomatic of our politicians’ duplicity on environmental protection and measures needed to fight climate change.

Thankfully, Gibbons did not include our abuse of the seas and the impact that has on climate. Had he, the book would have been altogether overpowering.

It’s 27 years since Anthony Beevor’s magisterial Stalingrad was published. I was going through a Russian phase at the time and devoured the book.

For months afterwards, I had a recurring nightmare wondering what a father of a young family could do if he, his wife, and his children were caught in that maelstrom. How might they survive? Could they survive?

The Lie of The Land is the first book since then to keep me awake. 

Its descriptions of the culture wars and greed that are making environmental recovery, much less protection, a remote prospect push the survival question centre stage. It demands real action as well as real answers.

It is unlikely to be a corporate Christmas gift from the Irish Farmers’ Association or have been a good seller at the ploughing championships, but anyone who wants to understand why Ireland, this rich island on the edge of a quickly-changing Atlantic, has such an appalling record on climate protection should read it.

John Gibbons has indeed done the State and generations as yet unborn some service.

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