This Party ain't big enough for Both of Us

When I was up in Rossport last week I heard a joke that went somewhere along the lines of the following:
What do you get if you put 2 anarchists into a room?
A: 3 Splinter groups.

It’s unfortunately close to the truth that people who are on the left tend to be somewhat confrontational by nature whereas people on the right have such a need for order that they always toe the party line no matter it might go against the better part of their natures.

So I have to admit a certain degree of schadenfreude at the schism in the soi-disant progressive democrat party at the moment.

It seems that our good friend Micheal McDowell isn’t happy being a millionaire lawyer who’s running the justice system even though he’s in a party that received 3% of the vote at the last election. It looks like he’s just as fed up as the rest of us at seeing Mary Harney take up so much space in the media and he wants the top job for himself.

This is a bit like 2 bald men fighting over a comb except that only one of them is a bald man and instead of a comb it’s the leadership of a party that’s doomed to go the way of Clann na Poblacta within the next few elections.

Baldy McD is telling us that Harney promised him that she’d step down and let him fill the considerable space that she’d vacated. Yeah, well, politicians say stuff that they don’t really mean sometimes. Year before last Bertie claimed he was a socialist, but this week he dismissed socialism as a “failed ideology” and the leader of the socialist party as a nitwit who presumably couldn’t hold an intellectual candle to the man who said he wanted to bring posterity to Ireland when he took the leadership of Fianna Fail in the ‘90s.

We’re obviously going to hear 2 completely different accounts of the so-called leadership pact between the PD heavyweights. Famously, Tony Blair took Gordon Brown to a posh restaurant in London to carve up the labour leadership between them and some hacks over there have been writing about nothing else ever since, though in the bigger scheme of things it hardly matters as they’re both going to do whatever George Bush tells them to.

It’s quite possible that Harney did the same with McD but that he had to wait so long for her to finish eating that he was so groggy that he didn’t really know what she was saying.

Yesterday they went to lunch again together and insisted this wasn’t to clear the air, which isn’t surprising as I’ve never known a big lunch to have that effect, especially if you order the three-bean salad.

But if McD really wants to lead the most unpopular party in the country, he’s going to have to make a heave for the leadership pretty soon. Well, good luck to him, I say, as it’s not going to be easy pushing Mary Harney out of her place and he may need Tom Parlon to bring a few of his strongest oxen up from Offaly to help displace her.

Of course, once she’s gone I’m going to have to write about something else, as I can hardly go a posting without pointing out how overweight, surly, arrogant and extreme she is.

The good news is that her removal could help avert an economic downturn as Harney will no longer need to try to look good for her job, which will provide an enormous boost for the chocolate cake industry, while the governments savings on restaurant-based expenses will allow them to bring in more tax cuts.

Mmmm….Tax Cuts.

Go to hell, Shell

While I was backpacking around Spain a few years ago reading Hugh Thomas’ excellent history of that country’s civil war, I was shocked to find out that the Observer, a paper I’ve read religiously every Sunday since I was about 15 supported the fascists.

I didn’t know at the time that it used to be a right-wing paper for about 200 years until it was taken over by a wealthy, noblesse oblige type who turned it into a liberal paper that became required reading for vegan types like myself.

But, like Bono, who once sang “When I was three I thought the world revolved around me, I was wrong”, the paper seems to be reverting back to it’s former position.

It’s partly that genuine left-wingers like Nick Cohn have gradually moved to the right on issues like Iraq where he’s in step with the ludicrous Euston group. It’s partly that they keep supporting Labour at every election. But it’s mostly the supplements they keep publishing in association with big business interests.

Recently there was a Pravda-like supplement on animal testing which may have contributed to a hardening of attitudes against opponents of vivisection. This week, they published a supplement about energy efficiency in association with Shell.

I’m sure some jokes about this have already been made, that it’s like having a supplement on human rights in association with the Taliban or a healthy eating supplement edited by Mary Harney.

Oddly enough, I actually agree with most of the stuff that’s actually contained in the supplement. There’s a piece by James Lovelock who argues that the Earth, which he regards as a living, breathing organism is on it’s last legs though as he’s 79 himself one wonders if the great anthropomorphiser is merely having intimations of his own mortality.

Things get a bit more suspect with wildly over-optimistic pieces about bio-fuels and solar. It’s not pointed out that ethanol, the bio-fuel of choice for companies like Monsanto isn’t really all that energy-efficient at all compared to the more environmentally friendly but less profitable woodchip.

Then there’s a piece called Here come the caring, sharing millionaires. And there was me thinking that Shell were doing this out of the kindness of their hearts.

It seems that it’s hip to be green again, just like it was in the late 60’s and late 80’s. In the last few months we’ve seen the ludicrous spectacle of David Cameron flying in a private jet to witness the effects of global warming at first hand. We’ve seen B.P. change it’s name to beyond petroleum. And even George w Bush has told America to use less fossil fuels.

I’m not old enough to remember the 60’s but I remember how dissiliusioned I was in the early 90’s when the economic recession wiped the environment from people’s minds as if we were all stepford wives, and I can’t help feeling that when the current economic bubble bursts we’ll all be more worried about our mortgages than about Gaia.

Except maybe that people will make the link between the cost of oil and the environmental effect this time.

Those of you who’ve seen that excellent documentary The Corporation will know that Shell are no strangers to this sort of corporate eye-washing. In it their CEO has a cup of tea with some prostestors and tells them he shares their concerns, but that he works for a corporation where money is always the bottom line.

Last weekend I went up to Rossport in mayo to find out just how cynically Shell pursue this bottom line.

For an extra €200 million Shell could put the proposed new gas pipeline offshore and leave the people of Rossport free from fear of an explosion potentially a third the size of Hiroshima. That’s a lot of money to you or me, to Shell it’s peanuts.What’s worse is what Shell regard as “acceptable risk”

To them, if 1 in a million people in the affected area die, that’s acceptable. But the affected area is considered to be the whole country which will benefit (though not a great deal, thanks to Ray Burke) and the project will be there for 30 years, so it’s OK for 120 people to die, just so Shell can save €200 million.

So that’s what our lives are worth to shell. €1.66 million. I almost wish we worth as much as the victims of 9/11 ($200million), or the people of the Falklands (£10million).

Of course I’m sure we’re worth a lot more than, for instance, the people of Nigeria which is really reassuring. After all, we are letting them have all that gas almost for free even though we’re a rich western country and not a banana republic, though we will be if Enda Kenny gets elected, according to Bertie.

Unlike many of the people who mooned at the bemused security guard up in Rossport, (that’s me, second from the left) I’m confident that if the greens have a government ministry after the election, (environment, ideally) that the shell pipeline will be forced to go offshore. I recognise that we need the gas as we’re the 7^th most fossil-fuel dependent nation, although we seem to be ignoring the a huge resource of bio-fuel in Mary Harney’s stomach which could be tapped in a single liposuction operation.

Yet if we stopped listening to people like Shell and started driving smaller cars and living in smaller cars, we could probably leave both the Corrib Gas Field and the Tanaiste’s gut alone.