Eamon Ryan is a man whose name trends on Twitter at least twice a week, and never for something nice or frivolous.
It’s never “Look at Eamon Ryan’s cute dog,” or “Eamon Ryan stuns Tonight Show audience with a beautiful rendition of Candle In The Wind.” When he trends, it’s typically social media users either ridiculing or berating him for some gaffe or statement he’s made, like when he endorsed “windowsill salad boxes” or said “drive slower to use less fuel.”
And this week was no exception, as Ryan once again found himself on the Twitter home page for saying there was “no end in sight” to the energy crisis.
As reported in the Independent last night:
Now, this prompted severe social media backlash against Ryan, with people saying that, because he’s the Minister for Energy, this is all his fault. He is, after all, the biggest cheerleader for green policies, which involve shutting down half the country’s fossil fuel power stations, right before a massive energy crisis struck. So when it’s time to point fingers, it’s easy to look at him.
And while this criticism is mostly deserved, it’s a little too narrow for my liking.
Eamon Ryan, after all, is not the originator of these policies. He’s simply their loudest advocate. He’s the hood ornament on the front of a very large machine. And so he naturally gets the most flak.
But one glance at the last manifesto of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael will show you that these were policies that were already being sought out before he came on the scene.
For example, the war on peat harvesting for power generation in the name of fighting climate change is a major source of controversy, particularly in rural Ireland. And many people blame Ryan for this.
And yet, we look to Fine Gael’s 2020 manifesto, before the Greens were even in government, and what do we see? Well, Leo’s party outlined how they want…
They also advocate for…
That was Fine Gael’s policy before they had any dealings with the Greens whatsoever.
Additionally, as Ireland faces a crippling energy crisis, Fianna Fáil had a similar policy of shunning fossil fuels and banning exploration for it in Irish waters, saying:
• Maintain a national ban on fracking in Ireland.
• Establish a pathway to phase out all fossil fuel exploration licences in Irish waters with an appropriate and transparent sunset mechanism for those already in place.”
Fianna Fáil even said they wanted to “Ban the installation of new fossil fuel-based heating systems in public buildings unless necessary,” and “Aim for a complete removal of fossil fuel cars
by 2035.”
I mean, everyone moans about the carbon tax, and rips into Eamon Ryan for it. But realistically, the carbon tax was introduced in 2010, and maintained for more than a decade by Fine Gael. They could have gotten rid of it at any time, and simply didn’t, because they agreed with it, and they still do.
Sure, in 2019, when Fine Gael was in government, Transport Minister Shane Ross explicitly said “We want to force private motorists out of their cars” to prevent a “climate apocalypse.”
And by the way, before you think Sinn Féin are going to come to the rescue, the Shinner manifesto explicitly said they want to close all peat and coal-fuelled electricity plants as soon as humanly possible as well:
They also called to end all offshore exploration for gas and oil, for what it’s worth.
The point here is not really to exonerate Ryan – he undoubtedly is chuffed with the green policies that have led us to this disaster. But based on these policies, almost any other party in the state would have done the same thing. They’re all fundamentally wedded to the same green mania, meaning you could swap Ryan for any other party leader, and you’d get more or less the same outcome. They’re interchangeable at this point.
By all means, criticise the Greens. But don’t let the others off the hook by letting them use Ryan as a scapegoat for universally supported policies.