There was considerable media outrage about this, yesterday. If you’re a Sinn Fein voter, you may as well drink it all in and enjoy it:
This isn't good enough https://t.co/W6tomNxHQR
— Cianan Brennan (@ciananbrennan) July 26, 2022
How can SF claim to care about young people, but not have a position on carbon targets? @sinnfeinireland are actively facilitating climate denial https://t.co/wK1JxpiyxA
— Ciarán Ahern (@ciaranahern) July 26, 2022
Shameful https://t.co/6FybbaNQvp
— Shona Murray (@ShonaMurray_) July 26, 2022
There’s much more outrage where that came from, but we won’t clog the whole article up with angry blue-tick tweets.
Sinn Fein are entirely correct, speaking in purely political terms, to adopt this position. They can read a poll as well as anybody in the business can. They know, for example, that voters are most concerned about the cost of living, housing, and health, so that’s where they focus their efforts. They also know, frankly, that all Government is achieving with this psychodrama about agri-emissions is to annoy everybody.
The baby, after all, will ultimately be carved in two. The Greens will not get what they want, while Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil backbenchers will have to vote for some kind of miserable poop sandwich of a deal that will infuriate rural Ireland. The left will claim that the Greens have sold out the climate, the right that the backbenchers have sold out the countryside. The middle will say “that’s all well and good, but my son can’t get a house”.
It will not come as a great surprise to readers to learn that my personal disposition towards Sinn Fein is relatively hostile – both on the grounds of their historical record in Northern Ireland, and their overt admiration for some of the world’s most destructive policies and regimes, like that in Venezuela. But I’d submit that my colleague Ben Scallan is mostly wrong when he writes, as he regularly does, that they’re “just the same” as the other parties. On social policy, that is certainly true, as it is on things like immigration and how they’d have handled the coronavirus pandemic.
But it is absolutely not true in one key respect: The other parties are all, frankly, terrified about what journalists might write about them and NGOs might say about them. The idea of not engaging in the climate debate when the climate debate is what the media have decreed will be talked about now – because we had three warm days last week and very important people globally want us to talk about it, don’t you know – is just anathema to everybody else. Sinn Fein don’t care.
Perhaps, in that respect, all the media bashing of Sinn Fein down the years has been to the party’s benefit. After all, they’ve gotten as far as they have without worrying about what Shona Murray writes on twitter, or what the political editor of the Independent thinks. They aren’t lying awake at night worrying that Amnesty Ireland might call their stance “disappointing”.
Yes, Sinn Fein will have to take a position on the climate bill when they are in Government. But they are not in Government now. It’s not their problem. And it’s not, they might argue, what the people who voted for them voted for them to worry about.
They’re smart enough, too, to know that they can get away with this. Sorry, now, if this offends you, but Irish voters love nothing more than being lied to.
That’s not what we say, of course: We say things like “we want honesty in politics and people to tell it like it is”, but that’s not how we vote. On this issue, and many others like it, we’ll vote for the person who promises cake, and having more cake. When Mary Lou comes to debate this issue at the next election, she will say “of course, climate change means taking hard decisions, but it doesn’t mean savaging family farms or disproportionately hurting the poor, so we’ll make the rich pay”. And a big chunk of voters will happily go along with that, and ask no more questions.
And this is, really, what we want. There are some fanatics like me, and on the other side, people like Matt Cooper, who are really genuinely invested in Irish climate policy. But most people just want to be told that we’re doing nice green things, and that they are helping by putting their milk cartons in the correct bin and sticking a few nest boxes up in the garden. They do not want to pay the absurd costs the Greens would impose on them because they sense (entirely correctly) that they are not the problem. They also don’t want to vote for the kind of open skepticism of this agenda that someone like me would advocate because, well, they’re nice people, and they do genuinely care about the environment and want their politicians to care, too.
So Sinn Fein will pay no price for this. It will annoy the commentariat no end, because the commentariat ultimately wants everyone to do what they say, and in this case that means “shaft the farmers, and feel good about losing votes in the cause of saving the planet”. Heck, if they just went along with what the media wanted, someone might even call them “brave”.
But the commentariat are not the electorate.
Sinn Fein, uniquely amongst the larger parties, seems to grasp that.