Keeping the Rural in Sight: The Future of Environmental Politics in Ireland

“Ecopopulism”—a term coined in 1994 by the American sociologist Andrew Szasz to describe the widespread, if not always closely coordinated, phenomenon of community groups coming together to protest against a variety of environmentally damaging threats—has long been a feature of Irish life. But in Ireland, more than in many countries, such conflicts take place in a context in which rural life and continuity with the past have historically been highly privileged. Among other forces, the exaltation of the peasant by the Literary Revival; the “rural, Gaelic, and Catholic” ideology of the new nation; and the construction by tourism promoters of an idyllic image of Ireland have all worked to sustain a prominent role for the rural dimension of Irish life.

For many, changes in Ireland over the last half century reflect an ongoing disengagement from the traditional patterns of life that had embedded a set of values and practices that allowed rural communities to coexist with their surrounding environment. The grievances of the wider population, which emerged from this perception of a loss of community, have contributed to the growth of populist environmentalism in Ireland, based on “rural sentiment”—a collective resistance born of the community’s inherent understanding of its place in the hinterland, away from the urban center. During the pre-boom decades of the 1970s and 1980s, such ecopopulism was manifested within the rural-based discourse that characterized disputes over toxic substances and the activities of multinational disputes, among them lead and zinc mining at Tynagh, County Galway, and gold mining near Croagh Patrick, the County Mayo site linked with St. Patrick.

Some feel that strong rural sentiment contributes to the lack of acceptance of official environmental organizations in country-based disputes; as communities attempted to mobilize grievance based on local understandings and relationships, their concerns do not travel well. Such localism has also left many populist environmental groups open to the accusation of being merely cases of NIMBY—the familiar acronym for “not in my back yard”—when opposition to industrial or infrastructural projects in a community’s “backyard,” rather than in a larger systemic context, is identified as the primary rallying point for campaign mobilization. Populist campaigns often face the problem of translating rural discourses into normal legal hearings. In the Rossport campaign discussed below, for instance, local farmers’ attempts to explain that it was unsafe to construct on bogland were simply not understood by those from outside the region, while to the locals building anything on a bog was patently unsustainable. Their point, rooted in rural experience, was reinforced when part of the bog and local cemetery washed away after being disturbed by the development of the refinery site.

While specific populist environmental campaigns may wax and wane, the significance of each campaign’s contribution to an articulation of community grievance has created a movement of sorts, from which outcomes can be measured through an understanding of the extent to which populist fundamentalism has come to be seen as the very basis for traditional rural identities in the postmodern era. The well of grievance that provides much of the underlying discontent for populist campaigns to exploit is the basis for an understanding of exactly how the various environmental campaigns over recent decades can be characterized as components of an overall social movement. That movement constitutes part of the social capital of all rural and rural-urban communities. As such, it carries far greater significance than simply the impact of protest campaigns on policy implementation, such as the building of a pipeline, or the construction of a heritage center in the middle of the Burren. Rural populist discourse in some ways shape the nature of the populist Irish political system itself.

Even before the recent downturns, communities in Ireland having enjoyed the benefits of extraordinary growth—the so-called Celtic Tiger—had also begun to witness the downside of the economic boom. Infrastructural projects had come to be perceived as threats to locals and their health and environment, or to the heritage of the nation itself. Such offshoots of rapid development as hyperconsumption, a buoyant property...