Glamming up the Greens, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2004

‘You come from Iyyyyyyerrrland?’ the woman said.  ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Iyyyerrrland.  It’s so green, isn’t it?”
I looked around me at the pine trees and the grass and the bushes and things.  Varying shades of green, every single one of them.  In Seattle it rains a lot, and the grass is green.  But sure, she insisted the grass is greener in Ireland.
          Ireland, all over the world, it seems, is synonymous with green.  The forty shades we wear blending seamlessly with Paddy’s verdant shamrock shores.  Even our seawater is snot green.  But however sentimental our overseas visitors are, they are not blind to the mounds of bin-bags overflowing on our streets, and the coke cans and fag packets that flower in our fields.  They do notice the traffic and the fumes and the drinking water, after they’ve got used to our cheery charm.  And they tell their friends.  The Irish are quaint and amusing to look at, but they sure aren’t as ‘green’ as we thought they were.
          There was a time, perhaps, years ago when we didn’t need to worry about our lovely green fields.  We didn’t have pesticides or aluminium cans or bin-bags and we didn’t have global warming.  We rode donkeys and bicycles because we couldn’t afford cars and there was no such thing as a Big Mac.  We were healthy-ish, if we didn’t have tuberculosis, but we weren’t happy because we weren’t rich.  Now that we have lots of money, our green belts are disappearing as rapidly as our waistbands are expanding.
          There have always been those who worry about the environment, even in Ireland.  With the demise of the Catholic Church, there was a gap in the market for preachers and penance and hair shirts.  When I was a child, in the late sixties, Ireland had a small sub-culture made up of English, American and German hippies and a few natives, who styled themselves as the guardians of all things green, including both kinds of grass.  They lived in damp, smelly, freezing cold houses and baked their brown bread on old-fashioned open fires and they ate mainly lentils, brown rice and organic cabbages.  They seldom washed (no hot water) and they wore their hair long and tangled with beards being the norm.  The women never waxed their underarms or legs and the Brazilian hadn’t been invented.  Despite their lack of sex appeal, they managed to breed children, to carry on their cause.  And they lugged their children around in backpacks, while they lectured the rest of the nation about why we shouldn’t eat red meat and dump garbage in the sea. 
          The Irish have always been indulgent of cranks and weirdos, and so the hippies were able to co-exist quite happily, in their own communities.  Children naturally rebel against their parents and the children of the hippies emigrated to England, became yuppified and eventually returned to the Shamrock Shore, just in time to catch the Celtic Tiger. And just in time to discover that their parents were right, we were eating too much and dumping too much crap.
          Whether or not it’s too late for the planet to recover is an unanswerable question.  According to some, we will need five more planets, to sustain ourselves at the level of consumption we have become accustomed to.  We are buying new, gas-guzzling cars at an alarming rate because we never walk anywhere.   Ireland is fast becoming one big motorway and there’s a rubbish crisis, with landfill sites about to reach maximum capacity.  But there is a new breed of Irish person who may still save the day.  And this time they shave their legs.
          The new breed of Green Irelanders aren’t motivated by politics and they don’t join the Green Party.  They don’t even smoke dope.  They are not motivated by guilt, either. They are, for the most part, young women with spending power, but their numbers include a cross-section of society.  Many of them are parents, concerned for their children’s health and well-being.  They are not green because they feel charitable, necessarily, and not just because they care about the planet.  They are green because they want to have better bodies and better skin, because they don’t want to die of cancer, because they want to live in a cleaner country with nicer views.
The new Green Ireland is not a political movement, it’s a lifestyle trend.  More likely to have been influenced by the Sunday supplements than by the environmentalists, these people are often middle class and highly aspirational, and they aspire to a greener life-style. The modern Green woman follows the beauty secrets of celebs like Kate Moss- who may well subscribe to yoga, shopping at Planet Organic and wearing Dr Hauschka, (but have never been seen eating lentils while wearing underarm hair and a baggy jumper).  If this lady does decide to have a baby, she wants hers to be an eco-baby, but she still wants central heating.
 The home of the magazine-inspired domestic goddess has a well-kept organic garden, (bursting with rocket and coriander) and unspoiled surrounding countryside, for the kids.  There are no plastic windows, it’s a carefully restored cut stone farmhouse with underfloor heating, a yoga studio, solar panels and natural light .
When the new domestic goddess shops, it isn’t in a supermarket.  She visits her local farmer’s market for cheeses, breads, olives and  organic meat, eggs and fish.  She does yoga three times a week, has had the place feng-shuid by professionals and her children eat organic crisps from Terence Stamp.  Her skin is only ever exposed to Aveda and her cleaning products are by Ecover.  
The modern, more glamorous Green Irelander has been influenced by exposure to the multi-cultural society that is modern Ireland.  She (or he) is possibly of mixed racial and cultural heritage.  Part of a growing movement in the affluent West away from cheap, mass-produced clothes, away from processed foods and away from toxic chemicals.  She intends to live longer, age without wrinkles and stay toned and gorgeous. Yoga and meditation help with all of these things and allow her to spend less on facials and botox, as well as alleviating some of the stress of modern life.
          The new Green Irish may be motivated by self interest, but the hardcore environmentalists are delighted.  Who cares why we want it, if we all want the same thing.  The hippies were in the minority, but the new Greens, with their spending power could represent an influential market segment. And a Green Ireland might after all, become a reality.

A selection of Glamorous Greenies:
          We know who’s buying Green, but who is selling it?  There is a new paradigm emerging for business, as well as for consumption and the new paradigm says you don’t take out more than you give back to the planet.  There is a profit motive, but it’s profit with passion, because the new Green businesses care about what they produce or at least want to look as if they do.  There may even be a new paradigm for work, a move towards doing what you love to do, rather than doing what pays the best.
New Greens are everywhere in business and in the arts; working in publishing, in film, building eco-houses, baking, cheese making, farming organic vegetables, designing eco-outfits.  And they are attracting attention because they are sexy.  Jemima Goldsmith’s brother Zac is a case in point, a gorgeous hunk with a magazine about ecology.  But a new kind of sexiness is emerging, with the emphasis on health rather than on artifice. These New Greens  may be babes, but they are talented, creative and motivated as well.  I have selected a few faces to watch out for on the Green Scene in Ireland:
        Jennie Guy aims to do for Green what Nigella does for cuisine. ‘I want to be the Queen of Green!’ she giggles. One half of Guy Stuart Foods, purveyors of fine pestos and other delicious products in delis all over the country, Jennie became the first person to launch the Italian based ‘Slow Food’ movement in Ireland.  Slow Food is the opposite of fast food, in that it promotes small farmers and growers and makers of cheeses instead of Big Macs and TV dinners.  It is a concept that found favour with the Foodies in Ireland, when the Celtic Tiger allowed them to spend fifteen euros on a pecorino and parma ham ciabatta, instead of the old ham and cheese roll. 
        Jennie, like Nigella  is now turning her attention to writing books and when she’s not doing that she’s, teaching yoga and practicing Cranial-Sacral therapy from her home in Sandymount.  With dark eyes, luscious locks and a yoga-honed body, this is a girl who will inspire disciples.
        Like many of the others in the Green Renaissance, Jennie brings elements of other cultures into her lifestyle.  Born in Sydney, to an Australian mother, who grew up riding bareback, and an Irish father, she and her siblings played barefoot in the bush, as kids.
        Jennie never felt particularly Irish.  Or particularly Australian.‘ I’m a nay-man from no-land,’ she says. ‘I love indigenous cultures, but I embrace the world!’
        When she was six, her family moved to Wicklow and lived on a farm.  With no central heating.  Her parents were not particularly materialistic.
        ‘I used to really resent that, because the part of Wicklow that we lived in was particularly affluent,’ she says.  ‘But that’s what I admire about them now!’  Despite the lack of material values, the seeds of Jennie’s future career in business were sown at an early age.
        ‘I started my own business at the age of ten,’ she says.
        ‘I wanted pocket money, and my parents said go and earn some!  My mother had taught me to cook, but she had also encouraged me to experiment.  So I made my own date loaves and she would drive me around so I could sell them to health food shops.’
        Money started rolling in, but Jennie gave up cooking for a while, as a teenager when she was side tracked by the boys. After school, she studied English and History at Trinity and spent a year at the Sorbonne.  She also took up modelling.  But never saw it as a career. 
        ‘I never thought I was good-looking enough,’ she says. ‘But I was the poster girl for Mc Culloughs!’
        Soon afterwards, she launched Guy Stuart Foods, with her partner Lara Stuart.  This lead to a trip to Turin to the Slow Food festival and the decision to launch the Slow Food movement in Ireland with a weekend exhibition which grabbed lots of media attention.
        ‘What I wanted to turn my mind to was a whole package for living, one that wasn’t just about looking good, but about a healthy lifestyle.  I am trying to forge a lifestyle for myself, which I can extend to other people. That’s why the ethos of Slow Food appeals to me.  I like the idea of slowing down, living life in a gentler, more creative way.’
        This lifestyle extends to a current passion for recycling.
        ‘I have been storing up things and I haven’t been able to throw them away because of my Catholic guilt’, she says. ‘So instead of bribing the bin-man, I go to the recycling centre which is fantastic. You can look at in a spiritual sense and see it as clearing stuck energy in your life. It’s also a really good place to hang out and meet people, especially if like me you are a single mum!

Sophie

Sophie Rieu is a fashion designer.  Being French, she adores beautiful clothes and in particular admires the great couture houses.  But unlike most of the fashion houses, she’s also ‘Green’ and proud of it.  With her label ‘Unicorn’, which is based in Wicklow, Sophie designs and produces clothes that are made from organic, fairly traded fabrics.  The fashion industry relies heavily on cheap labour, often using child workers in poorer countries to produce cheap, high street knock-offs of couture fashions.  But the alternative, up to now has been scratchy looking hairy hemp gear.  Some leading designers such as Katharine Hamnett are organic, but Sophie is still in a minority.  It’s a challenge that she feels is worth taking on.  It is possible, she firmly believes, to be glamorous and still be Green. 
‘I love Chanel, I love Givenchy, I love Christian Dior. I love beautiful clothes, but they are too expensive for the average person.  So what I produce is something elegant and original and stylish and glamorous, which is affordable and organic at the same time!’
She fell in love with our green countryside when she visited Ireland as a child, with her parents, for holidays in Connemara.
‘I just loved the wildness and the quality of the air,’ she says.  ‘And there is a growing awareness in Ireland about the environment. I get a lot of positive feedback from customers about what I do.  The majority of Irish people are interested and want to know more.’
           Sophie studied journalism here, and worked freelance for several news-papers, writing mainly about social and environmental issues.  This lead to becoming a press officer for Patricia Mc Kenna, the Green MEP.  But her real passion is for fashion.
‘ I love looking at clothes.  I have always had ideas about making clothes and about colour and fabrics, I used to knit when I was a teenager and I started to study design when I worked for Patricia.  I got completely hooked, every spare minute that I had, I would spend making clothes.’
One day, while she was walking in the Phoenix Park, her epiphany arrived and she made the decision to commit to combining the environmental ethic with her own clothing company.
‘ I decided to move to Wicklow, set up my own workshop and make clothes with organic fabrics.  And so I did it!’
          The business is taking off, and she sees herself as part of a growing movement in this country.
‘I am part of a web of people who look at the bigger picture, people who want to regenerate the soil, to have clean air, to work with the environment.  Making the world a better place for everyone.  And I would like to extend that to the world of fashion!’

Davie

        Davie Philip is environmentally aware, but has more than his fair share of street cred, too.  He’s no trendy D4 lefty, he’s a working class Glaswegian, who left school at fourteen to be an apprentice welder, before becoming a professional skate-boarder, in his twenties.
‘ In 1977 there was a huge skate-boarding craze,’ he says.  ‘Every male from thirteen to twenty-two in Britain had a skateboard.  The skateboarders that stuck with it grew up and took over the industry.  In 1988 I opened a shop in Glasgow that sold skate-boards, surf-boards and snow-boards, as well as clothes that I designed’.
        Clothes, in the mid eighties were pretty horrible, he felt, all big loud prints and nasty fabrics. He wanted plain simple clothes, made from natural materials.  So he began to draw designs and get them made up for the shop, under the name Poizone.
        ‘Well before Boyzone!’ he assures me.  ‘I designed hoodies and hats and shorts and things and they sold very well.  We won the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in Britain, which was about five thousand pounds and we got on Breakfast Telly and the Clothes Show!’
        But the allure of fame and success soon wore off.
        ‘The year after we won the award, I decided that I didn’t want to be a businessman any more.  Our company was at the level where we would have had to start using manufacturers in South East Asia, to compete and we had to start being real businessmen, which wasn’t what I wanted to be at that time.’
        He was also ready to give up skate boarding by then.
        ‘ I was twenty eight.  To keep getting sponsored, you have to keep competing and I was fed up with the whole thing.   I was hooked on travelling and I just wanted to go away and not come back, so I sold everything, split up with my girlfriend and went to India.’
        There were some big questions to be answered, Davie felt, meaning of life questions and he needed to find himself and find the answers.
        ‘I had a quest.  I was really excited about the idea of going to India and meeting the masters and spiritual leaders.  Now that I’ve been to India, of course, I realise that I didn’t need to leave Glasgow.  You don’t have to go anywhere to find yourself!’
        For a year, he did the ashram tour, and partied.  And pretty quickly got his answers.
        ‘All these people had been meditating for thirty or forty years, but I really felt I had found what I was looking for.  Something happened which I can’t describe in words but it was the end of my spiritual quest.’
        Now that he had found himself, he needed to find out where he fitted into the world. So he moved to Donegal, took up surfing, and bored the arse off anyone who would listen to him going on about the Oneness of the Universe.  Then off he went to Maynooth, to study anthropology. While he was there, he organised the first Sustainable Earth Fair in Ireland.
        ‘I left college knowing that what I wanted to do was to organise events and learn about sustainability,’ he says. 
None of these things would make you any money, it’s true, but Davie never worried about money, having always managed to make a living.
After the Earth Fair, he produced a guide to sustainable living, the Source Book, in 2000.  And together with one of the editors, he set up a centre called ‘Cultivate’, in Dublin’s Temple Bar, -a shop selling eco-products and an information centre for sustainable development in Ireland.  He also runs the annual Convergence festival, the biggest festival of sustainable living in the world.
               ‘  When we started we were just three people with one computer and one phone,’ he says.  ‘Now there are twenty people and we have another book coming out in the summer.  Our passion is to promote sustainability and to make it palatable to people.’  And it looks like they are succeeding.

Pavitra Chalam, another blow-in, comes from Bangalore, India.  She’s only twenty two, but already has several documentaries under her belt, including one about the effects of GM on Indian farmers.  Like Davie, Pavi was also an athlete, roller-skating was her thing from the age of five.

‘My father’s family are all professional athletes,’ she says.  ‘So my dad was a very good coach.  I won all the national competitions. At the age of eighteen, you finish school and you have to decide whether or not to commit to sport as a career.  I didn’t want to do that, so I quit.’
When she left school, Pavi studied Economics and International Relations. 
‘And one of the teachers spotted me and suggested I audition for a television channel.  So I went to the audition, said my piece and left.  The guy who interviewed me said he thought I was quite arrogant, but he gave me the job anyway!” 
After presenting a TV show right through college, she
 went to train with the BBC, as a broadcast journalist and got interested in documentary film making. 
‘I joined the National News Network in India and went to Pakistan as a journalist. We have an organisation called the Youth Initiative for Peace and they selected some young people to go to Pakistan and make a film.  It was very amateur, but it was a statement about just how little we know about each other’s cultures.’
She was then sent to Morocco, to cover the World Youth Congress, where a thousand young people from a hundred and forty eight countries put together the Casablanca Declaration, to present to the UN.
‘It was very difficult, because it seemed to be the Arab countries against the rest of the world,’ she says.  ‘We couldn’t agree on anything, even though we were very idealistic.’
While she was there, she met Michael O Callaghan from Global Vision Ireland, who invited her to come to Ireland and work on a film for Peace Child.
‘I really believe in the cause, so I said yes.  Peace Child is launching in Ireland in two months, so I would like to add the voices of young people in Ireland to the film.’
Pavi doesn’t preach, but she is refreshingly enthusiastic about her causes, for one so young.  Irish youths, she hasn’t found to be all that political, but she  has been speaking at the Convergence festival about the effects of GM farming on the cotton growers in India, and getting a good reaction.
‘People are shocked because there is so little understanding of the issues here in Ireland,’ she says.  ‘In 2002, they planted the first GM cotton crop in India, and within four months, it had failed completely.  The effect was devastating, we lost millions and two hundred and fifty farmers from my village committed suicide in protest.’  So she made a film about the farmers and is currently travelling the world with it.
‘I wanted to present my information to the Irish farmers, so that they will take it into consideration.  I really believe that Ireland has a green image to uphold and you should be inspiring the rest of Europe!’