Around that 1976 meeting - not necessarily as a direct result of it, but more the times that were in it - about 30 environment-related organizations arose. (e.g., the anti-nuclear power movement was a particularly large expression of a belief in a participatory democracy and the need for a Civil Society to be an active ‘Third Sector’ to balance out politics and commerce.) Since the seventies until the mid-eighties, about thirty more groups and organizations arose - for example, Crann in 1986, who spoke up in very dark times for broadleaved trees. I would estimate that about another 30 organizations have arisen from 1986 until now. Obviously, a close look at the source directory indicated that bigger guestimates than this are justified, depending on the criteria used. The majority still exists today with active membership of anything from 30 to 3,000. But their coughs are well softened. These Civil Society movements all performed solidly and honorably, but only a few achieved a relevant scale of response.

It is only in latter years that organizations have arisen which took a multidimensional view, - moving away from a single-issue approach to viewing an utterly interdependent problem. Thus, organizations such as Voice, Feasta, the Sustainability Ireland Network, the Cultivate Center, and even Celt are a sophistication of the thinking of earlier groups as they cooperate very closely with one another and take an overview approach rather than focusing on any one thing to the point of exclusion of context. They are more a collegiate experience rather than being lobbying-single issues factions.

Ironically, tragically, (and, I would say, to our National shame) without the wisdom and determination of international developments (such as EU Environmental directives, regulations, courts, and money, or the certification of wood as sustainably grown and the influence of the Agenda 21 Process) very little of substantial good to our relationship with the environment would have happened in Ireland in the last ten years.

Perhaps when ecological historians look back at the general behaviour of the body politic, our educational institutions, our civil servants, our committees and structures, our media, our churches, and so on, they might be able to conclude that we were more dysfunctional than delinquent, more ‘schmart’ than prejudiced, and that “we were not responsible because ‘We’ were not responsible”. Either way, the post-war generation, who were adults by the late ‘50’s, and currently occupying the elder’s chairs, have a case to answer.

Whether it be one of simply low mental wattage or, of choosing to fail to distance the body politic enough from the one true faction of neo-liberal economics in order to be able to include and embrace sustainability, ecology, landscape issues, local economy and community issues, etc., one way or another, we have failed to insist that these civil society concerns, in all their diversity, be adequately addressed.

For years now I am dogged by a most uncomfortable thought, and it is this. What if there was an equal case to be answered by the environmental movement itself for the failure to evolve an adequate political response to our somewhat dysfunctional relationship to the earth and each other. What if the environmental movement wasn’t just ‘chumped’? sent to administrative limbo? played for a silly bugger?, smothered by fast-talking parsimoniousness and blather? What if, in fact, that array of committees were just enablers?

What if these organizations are the key to the problem, being inverted apologists of sorts, and not the key part of the solution, as was imagined? What if the environmental [movement] budge in Ireland was just the body Politic engaging in a cute maneuver to get around the ethical problems of what ‘We’ were going to do anyway? i.e., the idealization of that reducio ad absurdium perhaps best described as the creation of a city-state which is sparsely interspersed by equal numbers of S.A.C.’s and golf courses.

Just as the beehive mind spontaneously prompts some of the bees to guard the entrance or to start a new comb, perhaps the common unconsciousness / national super-ego / or the national mindset needed help with getting around its’ stewardship responsibilities, and so, perhaps, one morning in 1976, a few thousand young impecunious middle children of middle class families who hadn’t been hit all that much woke up with the intuition that participating in democracy in order to speak up for fundamental considerations which could not speak up for themselves, might not be a bad idea.

Perhaps we were not advocates at all; perhaps we were just a ‘vent’. Just a way of creating duality, providing a handy national service, allowing an adversarial majoritarian democracy to move the environmental issue outside of itself as not being its core responsibility anymore but that of civil society. While at the same time affirming neo-liberal psychotic logic as the absolute authority, the only pragmatic way to go.

By now, it’s just bureaucratic Darwinism. If something like 40 of the main environmental organizations in Ireland are currently normalized into subsisting in a queue to get between three and six thousand euros a year from the national budget, well, sure, one just has to do it to them. It’s the year 2005, and not only is civil society (in relation to the environment) harmlessly fragmented in its interaction with the State, but it’s wonderfully cheap to keep. How can these structures ever be apt or fit for their purpose? This process might just be a bad pantomime of the mind, while important men get on with the business of effective lobbying, stilted consultancies, bullet points, and generally being good for business.

So, in attempting to impose a low-tax economy and support dividends, modern political society has had little space or use or budget for, diversity, parallel complementary initiatives, or the strengthening of civil society. It needs all of the money and all of the power to deal with systemic mismanagement fallout.

And so, diversity and ecology must stay on the back foot and not be allowed to interfere with our contentedness with a no-plan approach to the reality of over 5 million people accelerating an almost entirely service economy on an island where we have limited natural resources to exploit, and little fuel, food, or shelter that we can create on our own.

There is an old legend about Eiru, the third part of the ancient Irish Godhead dying off because the other two parts basically excluded Her, So She withdrew, and the Lads therefore started dying also, so They re-included Her in order to survive. Typical, there we were, thinking we were forging a new trail and instead, all the time, we were trudging a worn track.

It is the direct responsibility of Government to capacitate the sustainability sector and to demand its reform into a structure that has a hope of serving well. Reform up to the point that the Governments relationship with the sustainability issue is neither adversarial nor majoritarian. - Well, either that or else I misunderstand the general intention of the Constitution, Common Law and the Social Contract part of Civics.