ELECTION 2020: "It's more fulfilling working for people than shareholders" - Meath East's Green candidate is not so green

For Sean McCabe, running in this General Election was not a decision taken lightly. It necessitated him upping sticks and moving from Dublin home to Bellewstown, where he grew up.

The Green Party leader, Eamon Ryan, was in Ashbourne to canvass with his Meath East candidate, a 35 year-old who has worked internationally with voluntary and climate justice organisations.
"When I see how people in Meath have mobilised to canvas, it validates that decision to run," he says.
"On any given night we could have 20 to 25 people out knocking on doors, and what impresses people is that these people aren't politicians or politically minded, they are simply grandparents hoping for a better future for their grandchildren, or college students looking forward. We have hundreds of volunteers, and there's people of all ages."
It's not the activist's first time to run for election – in the local elections in Dublin, he ran in the Cabra/Glasnevin ward, where he was living at the time, and was asked by neighbours to run as an independent community candidate.
"I did, and we ran an exciting campaign, but it was difficult as a first timer," he says.
But he never thought he would be back home in Meath running for the Dail.
"A friend from Julianstown, where I went to school, had become involved in the Green Party, and asked me would I be interested in running for the party."
He thought about it, and the communities suffering, and people at the pins of their collars since austerity, as well as the climate change issue.
"And I thought there's five years to make a difference, and this could be the most important election in our history, so I decided to run."
He moved home last August, and began planning a strategy.
"And I'm really glad I did - there seems to be an incredible desire for change amongst the people," he says.
McCabe says he has spent the last decade working for people.
"I find it much more fulfilling working for people than for shareholders," he explains.
He had worked in insurance, but around 10 years ago moved to Kolkata (Calcutta), India, to work with communities living in acutely vulnerable situations.
"There is never a day that goes by when I don't think of the needless loss of life I witnessed there," he says. "I don't want to speak of the suffering I saw, but the experience transformed how I viewed the world and my place in it. The cruelty of poverty, class and marginalisation left an indelible mark on me. When I got back to Ireland in mid-2011, I was burnt out, but determined to work for change."
He returned home after a year and a half, and started working with Jigsaw, the National Centre for Youth Mental Health before going back to study international development.
"My hope was to return to India and work in a more sustainable way. Over the course of my studies an opportunity arose to travel to Sierra Leone and work with the Environmental Protection Agency there.”
There, he saw more injustices, and says he truly began to understand how environmental breakdown undermines the rights and dignity of people.
"One particular experience really stands out - on a visit to communities living near the city of Kenema, we met a mother and son panning for gold, working 12 hours a day, six days a week. They showed us the gold they had found that day and it was barely visible. On a good week, their 84 hours of labour might return $20."
Back home, McCabe began to work with the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice, engaging in negotiations for the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals as well as working with the members of the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council.
"We were talking all the time about community participation and decision making, and systems of governance that would respect people's priorities and respond to their needs," he says. 
"And I realised - not much of this goes on at home. Sometimes, when we are going abroad to help out people in poverty, we do it in a different way. Maybe in Ireland we need to do things differently.”
He highlights the erosion of powers of local authorities over the last 30 years as an example of the centralisation of decision making which leaves the councils then unable to respond to priorities in their areas, especially in areas that exploded during the Celtic Tiger, with no infrastructure to support them.
"People just want a work-life balance, where their kids can grow up safely, and the elderly have some dignity," he says.
He says he didn't come to the climate issue from the perspective of climate, but from the perspective of people.
"Undeniably, we are facing an enormous crisis, but we face another crisis in how uneven and unfair our society is, and if we don't solve them both simultaneously, we won't succeed.
"The simple fact is unless people see their lives getting better through the actions we have to take, we won't want to take them."
He says that we all know that there deep challenges in agriculture, and that emissions have to be reduced.
"But the current conversation is poisoned by the suggestion that farmers have to lose their livelihoods, and that's not the case," he says.
"There's a blame game going on, and it's hopeless, And I see the climate movement as being responsible for that as much as the industry that surrounds farming – ultimately the family farm is not responsible."

He says he is not banging some environmental drum on the doorsteps.
"We are talking about saving people – not about saving the planet. The planet will also be there. It's easy to say very cliched things about the Greens.
“After five years the Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice wound down and I joined TASC the Think-tank for Action on Social Change. My work with TASC focuses on securing a just transition for rural communities - that means protecting peoples livelihoods and empowering communities as we take action to combat climate change. I spent a month living in a campervan and visiting farmers from Cork to Donegal, listening to and learning about their hopes for the future in the face of climate change."
And on the campaign trail, he has met farmers, "including three who have stopped farming in the last three months. And they say more will follow. So the status quo simply isn't working. We need to have the courage to stand up to the vested interests. Farmers have a lot more to fear from billionaires in suits than from the Greens. That's the message I'm trying to get out
"I want to stand with farming communities and say if we plan now, we plan a very positive future, but if we bury our heads in the sand on this, it will be the farmers who suffer first. We saw it with the fodder crisis - they are the ones closest to nature, the ones impacted most.
“The current Climate Action Plan that the government has brought out is very irresponsible - it has no plan for farmers, that's because they don't want to upset farmers, but they are putting something on the long figure that is catastrophic."