Green Party is heading for an early extinction and its death should be a source of unbridled joy
When you see intelligent, successful, wise people suckered by a fashionable but ridiculous idea -- then it's time to really worry.
For even under the now-departed Feargal Quinn, Superquinn was erecting signs in their supermarkets, declaring "No Genetically Modified Foods Sold Here." A fatuous but suitably sanctimonious statement that was untrue in almost every single department, and about every single item on sale, save for perhaps the sun-dried sea salt from Brittany.
Genetic modification is what mankind does. It defines us as a species. It turned us from being hunter-gatherers with rickets and a life expectancy of 24 to being the cultivator of grasses and the minders of livestock. It enabled us to invent the word 'home'. We chose our grasses and animals carefully, weeding out the ones with the genes we didn't like, and encouraging ones we did. Our modifications over time were such that our domesticated animals today are barely recognisable as kin of their forebears: who can look at a Clydesdale and see the wild Siberian pony as its ancestor?
But we genetically modified the wild grasses even more. Combine harvesters will soon be grinding across the fields of our eastern coast, collecting the wheat ears and binding the stems as straw. Come winter, the stubble will be ploughed into the fields, and wheat seeds sown once again, and the soils spread with chemical fertiliser.
Yet wheat is a grass. When you cut your grass, it grows again. That is a defining -- indeed miraculous -- feature of grasses. Constant cutting does not cause death but stimulates more life. Grass is one of the great wonders of the world, from the Serengeti to Oklahoma. It always regrows: except when we inadvertently genetically modified it into wheat, and somewhere along the line we bred out the ability for it to resume growing where the stem had been cut.
So now the harvester cuts and gathers. The stubble is ploughed into the field, and fresh seeds are sown, with waves of fertiliser following. But think of the savings if we were to modify the genes of wheat to restore to it the ability to resume growth where stems had been cut. It would then not be necessary to plough in the stubble, or resow the fields with seeds.
All those machines, trundling backwards and forwards, burning carbon fuels, would now remain in the barns. Better still, think of the benefits if we used GM to transfer the nitrogen-fixing skills of clovers or vetches to wheat, which would mean that there would be no need for the thrice-fold application of nitrogenous, oil-based fertiliser on wheat crops. There we have it: self-renewing, perennial wheat, with perhaps one-fifth the vehicle-time on the fields. And no more nitrogenous fertiliser coming from distant oil-wells, to be spread promis- cuously everywhere, with run-off poisoning fish and turning loughs into toxic pools of algae. No indeed, for the nitrogen will be precisely located where it is needed -- in the very roots of the growing plant.
Lovely.
Yet what do the Greens say about such a benign, waste-free food creation, without effluent, and with a vast reduction in cost, labour, and the use of fossil fuel? Why, they're against it, of course, as are all the nattering nannies who shop in Superquinn. Saying 'GM' to them would be rather like bawling 'up contraception!' at a High Mass for the Legion of Mary 50 years ago, and the same unthinking, platitudinous piety underlies both attitudes.
The Green Party is heading for an early extinction, like a short-lived animal species that failed to genetically modify to cope with climate change, and its death should be a source of unbridled joy. But it will nonetheless have left a toxic fossil of generalised and unprincipled sanctimony within our political consensus. The risible taboo over GM aside, 'renewable energy' -- namely wind-power -- is now deemed by all our nattering nannies to be a good thing, while nuclear energy is deemed to be bad. And to be sure, wind is fine and wind is free, and wind is often plentiful. But we began this year with the coldest, most wind-free winter in decades. How would we have kept warm if we had been dependent on wind-power only? By tying children to the turbines, and getting them to trot? A sound idea, Mycroft, but remember: those little calves don't go on forever, flog the little blighters though we may. And then we start to freeze again.
We have no choice. We must have GM, and we must have nuclear power. The Greens, who say 'No' to both, are merely putting dogma above people, and abstracts above reality. But that is the way of all ideologists: their theories come first. Though of course, as ever, in Ireland, the compromise of a central principle actually came first. For in an outstanding example of Green integrity, Eoin Ryan promised in the last election that Ireland would never, ever have nuclear fuel. And almost the first thing he did once he was a minister in government was to sign an agreement to buy nuclear power from Britain.
And from the massed ranks of our TDs at this astounding hypocrisy? Silence, as they furiously fiddled their expenses. Which is, of course, another story.
kmyers@independent.ie
