Emerald Isle plots green revolution  

The Guardian has an article on the possibility of a green new deal in Ireland - Emerald Isle plots green revolution.

Of all the world's developed nations, ­Ireland is the one that is closest to a depression. The banking system is shot, the housing market has collapsed, unemployment is expected to rise to more than one in six of the population. The deterioration in the public finances – and this is saying something – has been even more acute than in Britain. The Irish economy is expected to contract this year by just under 10%.

That's just a bit of the bad news. While Labour and the Conservatives at Westminster bicker about which party is going to make spending cuts, Ireland has already had four stabs at reducing its budget deficit in the past year. Spending programmes have been slashed and tax increases announced.

Green new deal

Without the measures announced by the government in April's budget, the deficit this year would have come in at 12.75% of gross domestic product (GDP). It is now expected to be two points lower than that.

The good news is that Ireland's predicament makes it a prime candidate for a "green new deal" – policies aimed not just at helping the economy through a difficult time but also to make it better able to face the twin challenges of a world where fossil fuels are dwindling and the temperature is rising.

Even better news is that Ireland appears quite keen to act as Europe's guinea pig for the green new deal concept, and is likely to reap a considerable dividend as a result. While the short-term outlook for Ireland is dire, the longer term picture is much rosier. As Eamon Ryan, a Green party minister in the coalition government, put it: "The crisis makes it easier … The status quo is gone. This is a moment when you can recalibrate everything."

Policymakers in Dublin see it this way. As a country on the western edge of Europe, Ireland is particularly vulnerable to peak oil and peak gas. It has no fossil fuels to speak of and is at the end of the pipelines that bring gas from Russia. Dell's decision to close its Limerick plant and move production to Poland underlines Ireland's vulnerability to the constant search by US inward investors to reduce costs.

But these weaknesses are outweighed by considerable strengths. The first is that Ireland's export sector, despite the loss of some big names and the impact of the global downturn, has come through the events of the past nine months relatively unscathed. Overseas sales are down, but not by nearly as much as in other export-led economies such as Germany and Japan. Although it has recently experienced the downside of footloose global capitalism, the Celtic Tiger period of the 1990s provided Ireland with a core of hi-tech expertise in sectors such as IT, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. The intention is to use this strong industrial platform as the springboard for a green manufacturing revolution. ...

Forfás, Ireland's national policy body for enterprise, will provide the expertise for a high-level action group on the green economy. It will look at four areas: renewables, water and waste water, waste management, and consultancy on energy and the environment. Given that Ireland is often battered by the wind and waves that sweep in off the Atlantic ocean, it is hardly surprising that Forfás sees ocean and wind power as crucial to having 40% of power generated by renewable energy sources by 2020.