Penance by stripes

No child I’ve ever known has ever said it, not in the whole squalling history of the back seat, that sticky annex of grievance and melted Fruit Pastilles where somebody needs the toilet nine minutes after the last stop.

Eamon Ryan closes his Irish Times column (August 25th) on a question he imagines a child putting to a parent at the wheel: “Why are we driving a vehicle that is killing our planet?” 

And then the child, warming to the theme, adds that the better alternative is already so obviously here.

It’s the last bit that gets me. Not the guilt, which is at least something children actually do.

Children ask for crisps, fizzy drinks, ice cream. They ask the repetitive ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ and they ask it while you’re still reversing out the drive. What no seven-year-old has ever managed, on the road out of Ballina or Castlebar, with the rain coming sideways, is an existential query as to the fate of the planet. That’s a press release in a booster seat. It’s also the last line of the piece, the note he wants ringing in your ear as you close the tab, so he must reckon it’s the strongest thing he has. Powerful stuff.

The opening nearly works, mind, and I’ll give him that much. His kids in the back playing spot the coloured reg, black, yellow, red, scoring off each other. Now he catches himself at the same game as a grown man, hunting other people’s plates for the small green flash that marks an electric car, and the scoring never actually stopped.

I saw my first one at the Dunnes Stores car park in Castlebar and walked straight past it. Took a second pass on the way back to the boot. A green ribbon at the end of the plate, no wider than a bootlace, and me with a bag of spuds working out what I was meant to feel about it. Ryan says the band is so small you’d hardly see it, and that once you have you never forget. Half right. You notice it the way you notice a pioneer pin on the deceased at a funeral. Somebody has decided how they’d like the departed to be read, and you’ve been enrolled, without anyone asking, as the reader.

Now, to paragraph two. The plates are voluntary, he explains very nicely, because the Revenue Commissioners didn’t fancy the primary legislation that compulsory ones would have needed. He sets this down flat, the way you’d mention drizzle. The man was in cabinet. Four and a half years, transport and climate, both briefs, one pair of hands, and Revenue said no and that was the end of it. His party went into that government with twelve seats and came out with one when the clock struck midnight.

You can call the wipeout unjust if you like. I can call it inevitable and a form of welcome electoral justice. Coalitions devour the courting partner  and always have. The Greens bore the hiding with earnest virtue for decisions three parties signed together. Look at what’s left in the hand, a carbon-neutral nothing. The chastened minister went away, having risen without a trace, and eighteen months on, unbidden and unwanted, he’s in the paper of record, admiring stickers on other people’s bumpers. We cancelled Eamon but he didn't get the memo.

Volkswagen is better again. He confesses himself surprised at how many new VW electric cars go without the green mark, given that company’s recent history of undermining emissions standards. Dieselgate. Millions of cars rigged to lie in the laboratory and poison the street outside it, and the penance on offer is a stripe. Twenty quid at the plate-maker’s in Ballina and off you go, absolved. 

"We hath borne his stripes, and by his stripes we shall be healed."

God help us.

He doesn’t pretend the badge is innocent, at least. The people calling it virtue signalling are in many ways right, he says, because signalling is what the band is for. Two important signals, apparently. Then he’s away into the car industry’s marketing and the second one never turns up, which suits me, because the first, that you’re the class of person who bought the correct car, was the only one going.

Somewhere, in the middle, he mentions that electric cars have become the most popular type to buy, a sentence doing a fair bit of quiet work. It wins by carving the field into petrol, diesel, hybrid and plug-in hybrid, four slices, so the fifth can be crowned champion of a race nobody has finished. Every trade body pulls that stroke, and it’s no more honest coming from a former minister.

The privilege of a driveway, though, now that's rich. Ireland suits electric cars, he argues, because so many rural and suburban houses have somewhere to park, so eighty per cent of the charging can be done at home, cheaply, off the domestic meter. Lovely statistic if you happen to own the somewhere. Try it on the fella renting the upstairs of a house on Chapel Street who parks wherever there’s a gap that evening and comes out in the morning to find a clamp on it. That green flash isn’t a signal he’s being sent. He’s what it’s being sent about.

To be fair, he doesn’t dodge the infrastructure. Public charge points doubled between 2022 and 2025; the grid companies have dragged their heels, and there’s a bill coming that might sort out the kerbside crowd. Rural Ireland, which he regards as some profligate cousin to the responsible and virtuous urban dwellers, he takes issue with head on. Mileage, of course, highest out here, cost of motoring highest, two-thirds of the scrappage money ringfenced for outside the cities and spread like slurry in seconds. All probably true. All of it filling in a sandwich whose bread is a badge at one end and an invented precocious child at the other.

Which is the trouble, because the substance isn’t bad. He isn’t even wrong. My next car will likely be fully electric for the deeply unromantic reason that it’s cheaper to run and I have never once enjoyed standing at a pump in December with the wind coming off the Atlantic. The bit about a national fleet of car batteries feeding power back into the grid when things are tight is genuinely interesting, gets four lines, and he’s gone again. He doesn’t trust any of it to carry the piece.

If your argument needs an infant sock puppet it can’t stand up on its own. Make the case in your own mouth and take the abuse in your own name. Ventriloquising somebody else’s four-year-old into a witness for the prosecution against their own mother is what a man does when he’s out of levers and down to squidgy feelings. The green gospel according to Eamon was cancelled with his party.

And look who ends up in the dock. Not the data centres, pulling north of one fifth of the metered electricity in this state, courted for a decade like a lovesick teenager. Not the planning that put working people forty kilometres from their work and then billed them for the drive. It’s a woman doing the school run in a nine-year-old Focus, with the state’s witness strapped in behind her.

My own lad asked me a question from that seat once, the far side of Ballyvary, about what happens to us after we die. I lied to him. It was easier than the truth, which was that I was tired and it was too complicated, and that the car we were sitting in was the one we could afford.