“Ryan pulls plug on N17 Upgrade” was The Sligo Champion’s front page lead story on Wednesday, May 17.  The report by the newspaper’s editor, Paul Deering, outlined how Eamon Ryan, the Minister for the Environment, Climate, Communications and Transport and Green Party leader, had said there would be no funding available for the scheme for many years. The decision is effectively suspending the work, despite the project being included in the National Planning Framework and the National Development Plan.  

The road concerned is the N17, made famous by the Saw Doctors. It links Galway to Sligo.

It is used by the buses that bring students from as far away as Donegal to and from third-level colleges in Galway. It’s the route taken by the minibuses and cars that ferry cancer patients from Donegal, Sligo, Leitrim and Mayo for chemotherapy and radiotherapy to the region’s one centre of excellence in Galway. 

It passes by Knock international airport, recently used by Joe Biden, when he visited Ireland with much fanfare. It’s part of what some eloquent wordsmith within the State system named the Atlantic Corridor route.

Long sections of the N17 have a continuous white line, warning drivers it is illegal to overtake.  There is no alternative railway service in the area. The distances and the dangers mean cycling is not an option.

The route is a classic example of infrastructure that is not fit for purpose. The users, without choice, accumulate experience of disservice and dysfunction: patients, requiring treatment to stay alive, whose long journeys are delayed and who must live with the reality of stopping on the side of a road to get sick. Then there are the would-be job creators who get snagged in the lines of slow-moving traffic and decide: “This place won’t work for me.” 

Given Eamon Ryan’s proven pragmatism, it’s unusual for him to be associated with such a policy decision. It may help to explain why the Green Party struggles to build a support base in Connacht and the border counties.

Individual stories and collective irony

Close to the entrance of the village cemetery in Saint-Nexans, five miles from Bergerac in southern France, there is a small monument to an Irishman, John Donoghue. He died there in January 2013 when he suffered a fatal heart attack while digging a drain. He was 69. The inscription on the marble slab with the flags of Ireland and France reads, “in memory of our colleague John Donoghue – the local council of Saint-Nexans”. He was a member of the elected council of volunteers that serves a community of 900 citizens.

In Ireland, the Green Party traces its formal roots back to 1981 when a Dublin-based school teacher, Christopher Fettis, founded the Ecology Party of Ireland. Seán (John) Donoghue was following Green principles long before that. He was a serial recycler. He stored most things, down to nails and bits of wire, for possible later use. When Seán serviced the tractor on his farm in France, he would collect the waste oil from the engine, “sump oil”, and use it as a protective coating on the shed where his wood was stored. He had learned such waste not, want not principles in his native Co Leitrim.

Seán was one of a large family from Boley Hill in Manorhamilton. His father drove a truck for a local businessman. Seán was clever at school but like most of his contemporaries, he didn’t stay on for the full Leaving Cert cycle. He was glad to get a job in the small town’s hardware shop, Mitchells. 

On October 1, 1957, Manorhamilton and many places like it suffered an economic earthquake. The Sligo/Leitrim and Northern Counties Railway network closed. A service started in 1881, a 48-mile artery linking Sligo to Enniskillen in Co Fermanagh, was shut down.

Seán was in his early teens, but he could feel the impact of the railway closure in his area and draw conclusions about the linkage of infrastructure and opportunity for survival. So, he crossed the border and enlisted in the RAF. His heart would remain in Leitrim, but he was gone forever. 

A decade later, encouraged by his wife, Gillie, he began studying at night. He became a Cost and Management Accountant with the local authority in Swindon. When Margaret Thatcher was reducing the footprint of local government, he availed of an early retirement package and moved with Gilly to France.

Soon after they arrived, in the farmhouse they had purchased, they found a problem with wood termites. They had no choice but to knock their home and build a new structure. The couple did a lot of the work themselves. The locals saw them up ladders, tiling roofs and then in their fields, tending their vines and sheep. They noticed how the new residents had a deep respect for the environment and local traditions. They welcomed them into their community.

Immediately inside Seán’s front door, he had a black and white “Manorhamilton 7 Miles” signpost. On the January 2013 afternoon of his funeral mass, the 12th-century village church in Saint-Nexans couldn’t accommodate the numbers that came to remember him. His ashes were brought to Bath, not Leitrim, because it had become the family base.

Soon after Seán had left Manorhamilton after the closure of the railway in the late 50s, his parents and all but one of his siblings all left for England and settled there. Pim was an exception. She was training as a nurse when she met a student teacher from Kilkenny, Joe Dunphy.  After he qualified, they returned to his native Thomastown and settled there.

Sixty years ago, the journalist and author John Healy wrote about the circumstances that led to families like the Donoghues emigrating from Ireland. Healy’s articles first surfaced in The Irish Times and were then collated in a book, No One Shouted Stop (The Death of An Irish Town).

The material was drawn from observations and personal experience in the area around his native Charlestown on the Mayo/Sligo border. But it had resonance beyond the local because it charted the wider story of decline in rural Ireland, particularly in the west, during the decades that followed the birth of the new state.

It is more than an irony that Charlestown, the place that pushed Healy to write with such passionate anger more than fifty years ago, in on the N17 route, now at the centre of Department of Transport and Government prevarication.

The challenge of opportunity

On Tuesday, the Central Statistics Office published new analysis of the 2022 Census. For the first time since the 1850s, Ireland’s population (south of the border), is above five million. 

It fell below three million in the late 1950s/early 1960s when the Donoghue family and so many more were emigrating and when John Healy was channelling his anger through his typewriter.

For those who claim that “Ireland is full”, the latest figures don’t support the argument. 

In 1841, before the Famine, the population of the island (north and south) was 8.2 million. Some authorities suggest the actual total may have been 8.5 million. 

Today’s comparative figure is seven million – the island is not yet back to its pre-Famine population. At the same time, the population of Britain was 18.5 million. The 2022 estimate for England, Scotland and Wales is over 67 million.

The population of France was 34.2 million.  The current figure is 68 million.

The population of Denmark was 1.3 million. Its current figure is almost 6 million.

The population of Belgium was 4 million. By 2020, it had trebled to almost 12 million.

The census details and other facts explain why the island of Ireland finds itself with an unprecedented set of circumstances and possibilities. The population is increasing. The killing and mayhem associated with the Troubles are over. The Republic of Ireland is one of the most prosperous economies in the European Union, significantly helped by foreign direct investment and the corporation tax regime that attracts it. 

The Windsor Framework Agreement, and the access to EU as well as UK markets that it guarantees, enable Northern Ireland to significantly develop its economy.  Around its coast, it has the as yet untapped resource of wind and wave power.

The challenge over the next decades will involve making the best use of opportunity. 

The “flat Earth brigade” proved right

The Greens had lonely beginnings in Ireland. None of the seven candidates fielded by the Ecology Party in the November 1982 general election came close to winning a seat. It had become The Green Party in 1989, when Roger Garland won a first Dáil seat in Dublin South West. Three years later, he lost it but Trevor Sargent retained the party’s Oireachtas presence by winning a seat in Dublin North.

1994 brought a significant advance. In the European election, Patricia McKenna topped the poll in the four-seat Dublin constituency and Nuala Ahern won one of the four Leinster constituency seats.

From their earliest days, the Greens were actively pro-Europe. Many of their sister European organisations had an influential presence in their national parliaments. In Germany, for instance, Joschka Fischer would serve as vice chancellor and foreign minister in a coalition government led by Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005.

Those early Irish Green politicians were trailblazers. Their stance on issues like the recycling of waste, public transport, bus and cycle lanes and big-picture questions such as the impact of fossil fuels and the danger posed by global warming were an accepted part of political discourse in mainland Europe. But in Ireland, the Greens were sometimes dismissed as “the flat Earth brigade”. I knew Nuala Ahern and Patricia Mc Kenna during my Brussels-based years. They worked hard changing doubters, me included.

On many fundamental issues, the Greens were proved right. Many of their policies have become mainstream: Often other parties have moved to their position and claimed it as their own. Ireland is becoming a different country, partly due to Green Party influence.

There is now widespread awareness and concern about the obvious – the threat caused by climate change. There is a new respect for alternative, cleaner energy sources like wind, wave and solar power. Schools covet blue flags status. Awareness of the environment is now stitched into the school curriculum. Recycling is appreciated for its merits. The popularity of sea swimming, recreational walking and cycling grows. Sporting organisations built around volunteerism thrive.  Multiculturalism is becoming a norm.  

Ireland’s Greens can justifiably claim they’ve played a role in significant attitudinal and policy shifts in recent years. 

Now an intriguing question is what role might the party have in a changing Ireland?

*****

Eamon Ryan will be 60 on July 28.

Resilience that matches his ambition has served him well in the tough trade of politics.

It’s 25 years since he was co-opted to Dublin City Council, taking the seat vacated by John Gormley. He first entered the Dáil in 2002 as a TD for the Dublin South constituency. The party’s upward trajectory was brutally interrupted nine years later. After a four-year period in government with Fianna Fáil, they were savaged by an angry electorate and left without a TD or Senator.

Five years later, under Ryan’s leadership, the Greens managed what no party had done before. Ryan and deputy leader Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown) re-established a presence in the Dáil.

The Lazarus-like revival was trumped five years later. In the 2020 general election, the Greens secured 12 Dáil seats. Add in four members of the Seanad, two representatives in the European Parliament plus a network of councillors and that’s why the Greens can state they are the fourth-largest political party in the state.

Compared to their colleagues in neighbouring jurisdictions, Ireland’s Greens are on a growth spurt. North of the border, the then party leader, Clare Bailey, lost her seat in the 2022 Assembly elections. Her successor, Malachai O’Hara, failed to hold his Belfast City Council seat in last month’s NI local elections.  There is no Green Party representative in the 90-member Assembly or among the 18 Northern Ireland MPs at Westminster. 

In the 650-member House of Commons, there is just one Green MP, Caroline Lucas (Brighton Pavilion constituency).

Eamon Ryan’s likability as well as his competence are factors in the Green Party’s success. With a general election less than two years ago, what are the party’s prospects under his leadership? 

The scale of the dramatic growth achieved in 2020 is unlikely to be repeated. The Greens will be determined to avoid the wipe-out that occurred after their first coalition experience in 2011.  They’ll be aware that in some constituencies in 2020, Sinn Féin ran out of candidates and Greens benefitted from transfers.  Mary Lou McDonald won’t let that happen again. 

The policy of not ruling out entering a new coalition with any party, Sinn Féin included, may be influenced by the Greens’ interest in receiving transfers from all quarters, current coalition partners and all other parties included.

In a number of recent interviews, Eamon Ryan has made the case to learn the lessons of the past and to better prepare for the future. He argues that as the state grows, it must have the services to support it, health, education and local government sectors included.

Seven of the party’s 12 TDs are from Dublin constituencies. Ossian Smyth was elected in Dun Laoghaire. The other four representatives are from Wicklow, Carlow-Kilkenny, Waterford, and Limerick. 

Imbalance in regional growth

On some of the positions articulated by Eamon Ryan in recent times, such as the N17, the Greens are making themselves untouchable in some parts of rural Ireland. The policies don’t just make the Greens unpopular. They actually have the potential to damage their two main partners in government, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, and create platforms for rival candidates, independents included.

Is it sensible that Ireland, with a growing population, should not have a proper motorway from Cork to Limerick? Is the “Atlantic Corridor”, linking Galway to Sligo, set to be parked as no more than a proposal? Is it adequate planning for the future that there is no safe, efficient road infrastructure from Dundalk on the east coast through the border counties and midlands to the northwest? 

Galway, increasingly clogged by traffic, is a spectacular example of bad planning – growth without the infrastructure to support it. In the past, Leitrim was the county most adversely affected by emigration. Nowadays Carrick-on-Shannon has a growing problem of lines of vehicles queuing to use the town’s only bridge over the River Shannon.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition how at a time when the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, is confirming the government will help to fund the badly needed road between Aughnacloy and Strabane in Northern Ireland, his coalition partners are stalling the digger on road infrastructure in Connacht.

The Green Party, under Eamon Ryan’s leadership, may well stick to the view that in order to pursue Ireland’s climate target commitments, the squeeze on roads infrastructure projects must continue. 

One possible consequence of that stance is continued imbalance in regional growth that, from a number of perspectives, is unsustainable.

There are growing numbers in rural Ireland with the instincts a young Séan Donoghue had in Manorhamilton in the 1950s. The test of the emerging Ireland is to provide the services and the opportunities that allow them to remain at home.

A revised and updated paperback version of Tommie Gorman’s memoir, Never Better, published by Allen & Unwin, is now available.