Diarmaid Ferriter: Ireland needs another social revolution to tackle climate change

The backdrop to Niall Williams’s tender and lyrical coming of age novel, This is Happiness (2019), is the electrification of rural Ireland. The village of Faha in Kerry, a place that has “long since accepted that by dint of personality and geography its destiny was to be a place passed over, and gently and wholly forgotten”, is being connected to the national grid, a cause of some wonderment and excitement as well as apprehension and scepticism in the early 1970s.

Williams does a fine job capturing the rhythms of village life in all its crankiness and quaintness and the constant preoccupation with the weather which is too often wet: “Faha isn’t used to sunshine, the sky mostly grey, the colour of distillate.” But for all the nostalgia and changelessness, Faha is on the cusp of transformation. The electricity board is keen on the hard sell when it comes to this new source of energy, offering, in conjunction with Catholic Church leaders, a free Sacred Heart lamp to every household that signs up. Some, of course, take more convincing than others.

When he came to writing the ESB-commissioned history of rural electrification in 1984, Michael Shiel titled his book The Quiet Revolution. It was a roughly 30-year project, from 1946-76, costing more than £140 million and involving the country being divided into 792 areas, with, by its end, 98 per cent of houses connected. The costs were always contentious, and the plan had to be revisited and restructured at various stages, creating considerable tension between the Department of Finance and ESB over subsidies.

There needs to be an acceptance that we need an updated revolution within the 30 years identified as bringing us to a climate-neutral economy by 2050

Extra costs meant higher prices for consumers; there were also the social and cultural challenges and the educational and promotional campaigns to convince dissenters it was in their, and their communities’, interests to embrace this modernity. It was part of what, in the early 1960s, minister for local government Neil Blaney suggested was a gender issue: the “breaking down by the farmer’s wife and daughters of the farmer’s traditional conservatism” in relation to new methods.

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William Roe from Kilkenny was one of the engineers with responsibility for overall management of the project; he also had a strong commitment to social justice and community self-reliance. When he died in 1982 his obituarists noted his leadership role in an achievement “that changed a whole way of life”. The scale of the project – connecting over 450,000 houses – meant that the use of the word revolution was inevitable. And Roe suggested it was the most important revolution in rural Ireland since the land war of the previous century.

The starkness of the report unveiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this week along with the Status of Ireland’s Climate Study for the EPA are a reminder of why electricity, this time green, will once again become a prime focus. As observed by this newspaper’s environment and science editor Kevin O’Sullivan, decarbonising power generation needs to “catalyse an electrification revolution across the country”.

Many of the challenges that were apparent during the rural electrification crusade are relevant again and need to be confronted as we tackle climate change: education, challenging sceptics, stressing the need for community buy-in and self-reliance, changing the thinking about how agriculture is practiced and managed. There needs to be an acceptance that we need an updated revolution within the 30 years identified as bringing us to a climate-neutral economy by 2050, only it cannot be a quiet revolution, such is the urgency.

For all our obsession with what we too often mislabel 'bad' weather, the impact of climate change is likely to make us yearn for an old Ireland

What we define as “progress” in relation to infrastructure, transport, home comforts and land use needs to be reimagined. It is also a process that must be above and beyond regular changes of government and economic cycles to cement the imperativeness of a scientific framing for action to get to net zero CO2. Enlightened political leadership – from the Department of Finance and all other government departments – will be critical in relation to that in tandem with community effort. Social justice must also be thread through the process to make it fair and broad based, another leadership and ideological challenge. Ireland has exceptional renewable energy resources but our reliance –in the region of 90 per cent – on fossil fuels for transport and heating is jaw dropping

For all our obsession with what we too often mislabel “bad” weather, the impact of climate change is likely to make us yearn for an old Ireland when the issue was regular, moderate changeability rather than extremes. Movement of weather and pressure systems from the Atlantic makes us gripe about quick shifts from high to low pressure but they will seem like a hell of a better alternative to extremes that will generate both trauma and huge material cost.

In the absence of revolutionary change, novelists of the future will find much material in nostalgic looks at traditional Irish weather as we have in truth been very lucky with our temperate climate.