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Deer factor highlights arrogance of Greens
04 July 2010 By Tom McGurk
Last Wednesday, as has been the statistical reality since the start of this year, another four small businesses went to the wall in this country.
Another four hopefuls had to shut up shop, bin the letters from the banks refusing credit and head home into unemployment and uncertainty.
I’m sure as they sat down on Wednesday evening and watched the news reports of another day the Dáil had spent arguing about the wildlife status of stags in Co Meath and exactly what constituted a breeding bitch, they will have been duly impressed.
What an interesting Ireland we live in, they must have reflected, where the deer of Co Meath are a lot safer than the entrepreneurs of the nation, at least in John Gormley’s political credo.
What a lesson in political priorities and good governance the leader of the Greens has given, as yet another Fianna Fáil deputy found himself looking over his shoulder at the party’s disappearing rural mandate.
Were Gormley’s hijacking of the national parliament a brave and singular attempt to alter radically the ways in which our free market society treats its animals we might have sat back and looked on in some admiration.
But no such luck, I am afraid; instead we were getting a risible lesson in public morality.
Here was a concern about animal cruelty carefully and politically sanitised.
Here the target was not the savage, organised and mechanised cruelty of factory-intensive farming, but rather an obscure deer hunt in Meath.
Not for Gormley was there any attempt to ‘humanise’ the industrial mass production of dead animal parts for our society at the end of their miserable existences, but rather a war on a bunch of people chasing not a deer at all, but its scent.
Just like the political bully he is now exhibiting for us all to see, Gormley then set off around the school yard to find the smallest and most insignificant example of our doleful relationship with animals to give it a good thumping.
It was essentially, of course, not a moral exercise at all but a political one, a sop to the Greens’ overall determination to teach the ‘boggers’ of rural Ireland how the suburban civilised live. Indeed it had formed part of the agreement with the lettuce only-eating wing of his party to get their approval for the Lisbon Treaty.
So, after Humanity John’s valiant efforts in the Dáil, has green and modern Ireland now radically altered its treatment of animals?
The morning after Gormley put manners on the Ward Union, has the way in which we treat our animals in this society changed fundamentally for the better?
Are there no longer to be thousands of hens, pigs, veal calves and bullocks doomed to spend their wretched existence locked up on slatted floors in tiny spaces no bigger than their body size, and trapped in lives beyond sunlight and green grass?
Are there to be no more electronic stunning or throat slashing of the hundreds of animals we process through our abattoirs every day?
Are Halal butchers who hang animals from the ceiling, cut their throats (sometimes with ceremonial swords) and leave them in agony to slowly bleed to death, to be outlawed?
Are dehorning, castration and gelding and all the other little tricks we employ for ‘good stock purposes’ to be banned?
What happens to cows forced twice a day to yield gallons beyond anything nature designed their frame for?
What happens to animals taken by lorry and ship en route to their slaughter?
By Thursday morning was Dublin Zoo emptied of all the creatures incarcerated there? The answer to all of these questions is, of course, no.
Even in the strictest terms of cruelty to wildlife, Gormley’s morality lesson becomes curiouser and curiouser.
How come the Ward Hunt can now lawfully saddle up and chase foxes and rabbits across the countryside, but not deer?
What’s the compelling moral difference between these animals and the deer in Meath (apart from the fact that a posse of outraged Fianna Fáil backbenchers might constitute a very different moral majority)?
Indeed, on the very same day that the Ward Union deer hunt was made illegal, Gormley’s own environment department was still issuing licences for deer stalking.
Can someone explain the moral/ philosophical difference between hunting the scent of a deer with dogs after it has been locked safely away and legalising groups of armed men with dogs to ‘cull’ deer on our mountainsides?
How many deer are ‘legally’ wounded and then escape to spend days dying slowly in agony? Indeed, can Gormley explain the ‘cruelty difference’ between the illegal hunting of a deer scent when the deer is already gone and the legal hunting of a wounded deer by dogs which the same Gormley still licenses? Is that an angel or a stag I see on the head of my pin?
The whole Ward Union business has been a political disaster - and not least for the Greens themselves.
What was intended to be a headline grabbing strategy to illustrate the superior moral philosophy of Green politics has instead become a vivid example of why environmental ideologues simply can never see the wider political wood for the trees.
Good government is actually a sophisticated art; a complex balancing act between competing demands.
Here was government by stunt - and it has hugely damaged whatever credibility the Greens had left.
From the perspective of our deepening financial crisis the wider public was left looking on in astonishment.
Who can ever take the Greens seriously again, as the opinion polls have already pointed up?
What is it about the Greens and their determination to teach rural Ireland that they know better when their experience with animals is probably to meet a cat on the corner of the street?
Is it prejudice, class consciousness or even envy?
Is it that old traditional authoritarian impulse that in other generations used to stop dances and couples kissing in cinemas and censored anything that moved on screens or could be read in books now breaking out in a new guise?
Most Greens are probably only a generation or two out of the country themselves.
Is it the lack of space or the traffic fumes, or the miles upon miles of concrete that has produced this very suburban morality?
Whatever it is, it will in the near future be dead and buried among all the other brief political hysterias that came and went in Irish political life.
And the Ward Union will still be galloping across the wonderful countryside of a land which we all unashamedly love.
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