EDITOR - For several years, I campaigned alongside indigenous rights movement Survival International to stop a massive ‘green’ land grab.
Nature conservation NGOs, partnered with the world’s biggest polluters, together with governments sought to double the number of ‘protected areas’.
Millions of self-sufficient, indigenous peoples in Africa and Asia would have been displaced.
Across rural Ireland, grabbing lands under the guise of ‘green’ increasingly comes in the form of tarmacked ‘greenway’ infrastructure for tourists.
Whether it’s for a protected area in Africa or for a greenway here, what communities always stand to lose is their self-sufficiency, and the right to produce their own food on their own land, the most environmentally sustainable means of living.
Many nature lovers laud ‘wilderness’ and ‘the wild’. In so doing, they embrace a dehumanised nature, failing to consider those evicted to create green spaces.
In a recent interview on RTÉ radio, the director of the series Untamed Neasa Hardiman evoked with awe the ‘wilderness’ of Yosemite National Park. Little known is how Yosemite was created by evicting the Ahwahnechee people.
In The Invention of Green Colonialism, historian Guillaume Blanc details how the deeply rooted myth of an uninhabited ‘nature’ led to the eviction of cattle and sheep herders in Africa to create national parks.
Some 1,700 people live in the path of the proposed Cork-Kinsale Greenway. One has to ask if Cork County Council regards our countryside a wilderness too, as it pushes through ‘green’ infrastructure projects at the behest of the government and at the expense of entire communities who have lived in harmony with the land for generations.
By rejecting this green grab outright, communities can deny authorities the social licence they so desperately need.
Geraldine Ring,
Ballinhassig
Our reader says the local greenway plans are another form of land-grabbing.
Church needs to sever ties with Israel-linked insurance company
EDITOR - Now that an impressive, possibly comprehensive, list of reputable and credible agencies is lining up to use the difficult word ‘genocide’ to describe what’s happening in Gaza, a new clarity has exposed the frightening possibility of an absolutely catastrophic ending to a tragedy that, despite Israel attempting to block media coverage, the truth is to be seen in the images of dying children on the television screens of the world.
Like an infection, the Gaza reality is now seeping outside itself and engaging the concerns – social, economic, moral – of those caught in the slipstream of that calamity. Like Allianz, the financial services company headquartered in Munich, Germany, the world’s largest insurance company and the largest financial services company in Europe.
Questions are now being asked of Allianz, arising out of its listing in a report published in June this year on the website of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the UN of companies and corporations, it is alleged, help to sustain and pay for Israel’s actions in the Palestinian territories.
Little wonder that the GAA, in whose commercial concerns Allianz has been and continues to be deeply embedded, is already under the microscope of public examination. Already a petition for GAA members is being published on Change.org and has created a huge focus on the Allianz-GAA relationship and a demand that it be ended.
A similar demand is likely to emerge when the long and close commercial relationship of Allianz and the Catholic Church in Ireland becomes clear. For decades, Allianz has been the trusted friend of the Catholic Church, even to the extent of enjoying representation on the Allianz Board, with Catholic Church properties in Ireland including places of worship, schools, cars, etc almost all being insured by Allianz as a matter of course.
Coincidentally last Sunday, Archbishop Eamon Martin, the accepted leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, together with his fellow bishops led a ‘Day of Prayer and Reflection for Gaza’ in the parishes and dioceses of Ireland and Archbishop Martin has issued a pastoral letter in which he calls for ‘a renewed commitment by the international community for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East’.
In the light of that ‘Reflection’ and because the present sense of outrage in the Irish Catholic Church at what’s happening in Gaza will be increased exponentially by the revelation of the Irish Catholic Church’s connection with Allianz and Allianz’s connection with the state of Israel, we ask that the response of the Irish Catholic Church should be immediate and far-reaching in cutting links with Allianz.
Nothing less is acceptable as Irish Catholics will now be conscious of the Allianz connection, albeit by extension, and of our connection with the plight of the children we see on our television screens.
The ACP also encourages all Catholic religious congregations and dioceses to exercise high levels of due diligence in carefully scrutinising their investment portfolios to determine if any part of their investments is helping to sustain the appalling human rights abuse being inflicted on the Palestinian people.
Liamy Mac Nally on behalf of the Association of Catholic Priests
