Vote For Climate & Progressive Values, Both Are At Stake

On Friday, Ireland goes to the polls, and the decision on who to vote for is a difficult and multi-faceted one. Gone are the days of party majorities, or even parties that you can easily tell apart.

Were you to rely on party manifestos to tell the difference, then you enter into an even more confusing minefield of comparison tables full of green ticks and red crosses. If you tuned into the debates on RTÉ to inform yourself, then good luck trying to divine a decision out of them.

It's looking like the shape of a new coalition government will most likely be Fine Gael + Fianna Fáil + others, or Sinn Féin + others (which may include Fianna Fáil, stranger things have happened). In looking at the two coalition options, one has proven they can't manage multiple crises well, some by design and some by mismanagement. The other hasn't had a chance to show how well or not they would fare yet. More of the same, or time to take a chance. Not great options on the face of it.

However, when we look a few weeks ahead to January, we see that the geopolitical chessboard is about to change drastically with the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

The orange wave of hate that Trump and his acolytes are due to unleash on the progressive values of western democracies should not be underestimated.

The same goes for the climate denial and delay policies they have promised to enact. He nominated an oil & gas CEO as Secretary for Energy for goodness’ sake. Donald Trump will be a disaster for global Climate Action, and will put the final nail in the almost sealed coffin of keeping 1.5 alive.

How does this impact on the Irish election?

The last time he was in power across the pond, his hateful, racist, and misogynistic comments and actions gave licence to those of the same backward mindset in Ireland to start mobilising and spewing hate. It hasn't really stopped, and they will be emboldened again. It also gave further licence to the political class to ape Trumpian politics, dial up populist talking points, make decisions for the good of the few to the detriment of the many, and to down-right lie. This shift in the Overton Window is unfortunately not reverting anytime soon, but now Ireland has a chance to vote against it.

Ireland has a chance to vote left and transfer left.

Voting left won't fix everything, and may cause a few problems in itself, but is the only option to uphold the progressive social and democratic values that took so long to wrestle out of the hands of the Catholic Church, Éamon de Valera, and all who came after them. I'm talking about human rights, and all equality, social mobility, and economic freedom built on top of them. They are coming for it all.

When the pressure comes, who do you want making decisions?

Parties that believe in a neoliberal ideology of profit, deregulation, rentier capitalism, landlordism, and vested interests, that will do deals for the benefit of the few? See Shell to Sea, mobile phone licences, toll road agreements, convention centre leases, national children hospital contracts, OPW construction project receipts, eviction ban lifting arguments, and dilution of agriculture climate targets, for form. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are not centrist parties any more, they are parties of the prevailing winds, and those winds are about to blow a storm through democracy.

Alternatively you can choose parties that have demonstrated empathy, compassion, a willingness to support everyone in society equally, and are actually informed about the scale of the Climate Emergency and serious about Climate Action. Parties such as The Social Democrats, People Before Profit, Labour, The Green Party (albeit with very poor form), and selected Independents.

Thread carefully with Independents though, it's hard to pick through the headbangers and the far-right (help on that can be found here) to find the good ones like Thomas Pringle, Clare Daly, and Catherine Connelly.

But what about the economy, you say? We need the American multinationals, you say? That is true, but only because we have been complacent in our economic growth, and haven't worked to diversify our economy away from that dependency while making hay. We have the perfect opportunity now to create a green economy, with plenty of jobs in the transition. Soon we may have no choice but to diversify, if Trump demands an exodus of U.S. profit recording back state-side. If that happens, would you prefer the neoliberals who have sold the housing market to institutional investors for a song, making similar decisions?

As for climate, we have our heads in the sand. We will face crop failures, devastating floods, mass migration, social unrest, the AMOC turning, and much worse. Every month that we fail to take emergency measures to kick society off fossil fuels and adapt our lives, businesses, and communities for this shift as fast as possible, the worse the size of the devastation waiting for us in 20 years will be. Parties that are happy to keep using fossil fuels like LNG instead of turning us into the wind power capital of the world, are delusional to think they can do what is needed to address the scale of this challenge.

The beauty of PR-STV is that you can use your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or however many votes to support your preferred candidates, and you can use the rest of the transfers towards the formation of the coalition you would like to see. This means voting for Sinn Féin, warts and all, because the alternative coalition is not actually more of the same, it will be worse than what Ireland has gone through already.