THE Green Party is used to jeers and sneers. John Gormley recalls that when he became Dublin's first and only Green Lord Mayor, he found himself ridiculed by a tabloid newspaper. He had given an interview to the newspaper and it was going well until he confessed that living in the Mansion House meant he was minus a garden because he couldn't make a compost heap.
"Gotcha!" thought the paper, which then ran a jeering piece suggesting that the Lord Mayor was about to create a virtual dung-heap outside his official residence on Dawson Street.
Yet Mr Gormley was trying to make a serious point. It is a fact that over 40 per cent of household waste is organic and, therefore, capable of being turned into compost.
If all of us made a nutrient-rich compost heap out of the organic waste we generate, there would be thousands of tonnes less refuse to be deposited in "landfill sites" - dumps or holes in the ground, if you prefer.
This is just one of the ways, acting individually, we could reduce the environmental impact we make on the planet and make our personal contribution to help achieve the elusive goal of "sustainable development".
The Government has a strategy on the issue. Launched last month by the Minister for the Environment, it talks about putting the environment "centre stage" and integrating it into every level of decision-making.
It seeks "to ensure that economy and society in Ireland can develop their full potential within a well-protected environment, without compromising the quality of that environment and with responsibility towards present and future generations and the wider international community".
There are some cynics who would suggest that the Government is simply trying to steal the Green Party's ecological clothes and that its sustainable development strategy is no more than rank political opportunism on the part of Fine Gael, Labour and Democratic Left.
Fianna Fail, according to this cynical thesis, has also got in on the act, beating Brendan Howlin to it by issuing its own comprehensive policy to protect the environment. Among many other things, it pledges to introduce a "binding plan for sustainable development" which would apply to every economic sector.
HOWEVER, there are genuine forces at work. Sustainable development, defined as "development which meets the needs he present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs", has been part of the international agenda since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro.
Next month in New York, the UN General Assembly will hold a special session to review the progress made since Rio and some 50 heads of state or government are expected to attend. In December, the third Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention will meet in Kyoto to agree on a protocol to reduce "Greenhouse" gas emissions.
The EU's current environmental action programme is called "Towards Sustainability", though the European Environmental Agency has warned that we're still a long way from achieving it.
The reason for this gap between objective and achievement is due largely to a lack of political will. This is because most politicians simply haven't got the guts to take unpopular courses of action, especially when they are also being resisted by powerful vested interests, such as the fossil fuel lobby.
Last week the ESRl brought out a book, The Fiscal System and the Polluter Pays Principle, which proposes that Ireland should unilaterally impose an energy tax and use the estimated £700 million it would ultimately raise to reduce PRSI contributions. The authors also favour higher VAT on heating fuels and a road tax based on the fuel efficiency of vehicles, rather than the cubic capacity of their engines.
Quite sensibly, they also propose increasing the costs of urban parking as well as giving tax breaks to commuters using public transport. And they also favour water meters to raise £271 million per annum and encourage conservation.
BUT what chance is there that any government would impose energy taxes across the board when the present one caved in so spectacularly by abolishing flat-rate water charges?
Some politicians will concede privately that providing every household in Ireland with "free" water is simply not tenable because it encourages people to waste a valuable, and scarce, resource. It has also transpired that Mary Harney was right about the dim view taken by the European Commission of our shameless profligacy as she forecast, it has retaliated by cutting overall EU grant-aid for Irish water schemes from 85 per cent to 80 per cent - rightly so, in my view.
The ESRI's book has also provoked predictable bleatings from vested interests. Hot on its heels, the Society of the Irish Motor Industry issued a statement warning that the implementation of the ESRI's proposals on road tax would "seriously affect the social and economic structure of the country" because "the fabric of Irish society depends on the car".
But the SIMI's tear-jerking hyperbole seems to be based on a misreading of the ESRI's intention, which is merely to tweak road tax to favour more fuel-efficient, less polluting vehicles. What it shows, however, is that any attempt to change the status quo will be resisted.
Nobody should pretend that moving towards sustainability can be done painlessly. It will involve making sacrifices. What hotelier or B&B owner, for example, is going to rejoice at the proposal to control tourist numbers in ecologically-sensitive areas? How many farmers would welcome the imposition of VAT on fertilisers to reduce the damage done to rivers and lakes from agricultural run-off? And would airlines - or their passengers - be thrilled to bits if a levy was imposed on currently tax-free aviation fuel to recognise the stratospheric pollution which increasing air travel is causing?
Few but the Green Party are prepared to accept that the present economic model of growth for its own sake is largely responsible for degrading the environment - precisely because it is still treated as a "free resource".
Alone among the political parties, the Greens maintain there is a "basic contradiction" inherent - in the thesis that economic growth and sustainable development can go forward together, hand-in-hand, without causing further environmental damage.
Nonetheless, at least they can claim some credit for the fact that the other parties - jolted by the Greens' success in the 1994 European Parliament elections and fearful of further gains in any general election - are now talking about the "green agenda".