Cork man at the heart of EU environmental policy

A Cork environmentalist is to take up a leadership role later this year in a European Union body that has a central role in how the EU works.

It brings together people from the voluntary and community sector from all over the 27 member states and is consulted by the EU Commission on proposals which could impact all of us.

Despite the fact that it was established by the founding charter of the EU, the 1958 Treaty of Rome, and is a consultative body for the EU Commission and Parliament, little is reported in Ireland of the European Economic Social Committee (EESC).

Cork environmentalist, Cillian Lohan is going to be the next president of Civil Society Organisation Group and will take office next October for a term which lasts five years, pending the results of a midterm review. The EESC is one of the pillars of the European Union superstructure, alongside the Commission, the Parliament, the Council of Ministers and the Committee of the Regions.

It is made up of three different groupings, the business sector, workers and organisations, which includes community groups, environmental groups and other voluntary sector organisations. It has 329 from all parts of the EU and they meet regularly to discuss their own policies and to be consulted on policies of the other EU bodies.

Mr Lohan, who hails from Togher in Cork but now lives and works in West Cork, has been a member of the EESC since 2015 but as it’s not a full-time position, he also has a day job and, as he says himself, a very understanding employer.

“I studied Environmental Science in UCC back in the 90s and I was doing tree planting projects, we still do them, a project called ‘Trees on the Land’. We planted just over two million native Irish trees around the year,” he said.

“Every year we do a planting and at the weekend, when I’m at home, I will be planting in Ballydehob so that’s the day job. Through that I ed the Irish Environmental Network. It’s based in Dublin and it’s an umbrella body for all the environmental groups, big ones like Friends of the Earth and BirdWatch Ireland and small ones like our one, the Green Economy Foundation, which is based in Leap.

“The Government sent a letter saying there was an opportunity for environmental groups to be represented out here. I applied for it and got selected and was appointed in 2015.”

Cillian took on the appointment as he wanted to see if he “could influence things on a EU level instead of just a national level”. And, so far, it’s going well.

“The EU is a huge apparatus, all the institutions, all the different bodies that are here. The EESC was established by the Treaty of Rome in 1958, and it’s a very long standing body. The idea was that when you have politicians making legislation that you have a space for ordinary citizens to input into it.

“They don’t just go to people on the street, they go to people working in an organised space — so the business sector is represented through Ibec and Chambers of Commerce, the trade unions have a voice here and then civil society organisations — non Government organisations, consumer groups, Seamus (Boland) from Irish Rural Link, myself from the environmental sector; so we come out here from all our different perspectives.

“Whenever a piece of legislation is initiated, while it’s being debated between the Commission and the Parliament, we do our work here to see if we can get farmers, business people, entrepreneurs, [and] environmentalists, on things that would improve on what’s being proposed — so that it’s acceptable to everybody.”

While people in Ireland are positive towards the EU, if polls are to be believed, there’s also a sense that national and local politics are the main events and what happens in the EU is of marginal importance — except when the EU is being blamed for something going wrong.

Cillian acknowledges the positivity towards the EU but also recognizes that there’s a sense that Irish people who go to the EU are enveloped within its structure. However, he points out that while he travels to the EU for the monthly meeting of EESC, he’s back at home at the weekend. Although he’s a member of the EESC organisations section and will become its president in October, he gets no salary but does get his travel and accommodation in the EU capital paid for.

His focus is on doing things in the EU which have an impact on what he does at home Ireland.

“Here, on a very practical level, I wanted to work on an initiative of the Commission called the circular economy. It’s a practical example of me being here and going ‘how can I connect with communities back home?’ and not just communities in Ireland but, from an EU perspective, all communities working on this.”

He proposed the establishment of what he calls “in very Brussels speak” a stakeholder forum to bring people together, “who are not part of politics, not part of the Brussels bubble, people working in real life, in communities, in businesses on the ground, people who are doing it, and give them ownership of this group of people, give them the space to meet and the facilities to get together and talk to each other, providing translation and whatever’s needed”.

“We put you directly with the Commission and they can tell you what they’re planning and what their intentions [are] but, importantly, you get to tell the Commission, here’s the reality of what happens when you’re in a community, 500 miles from Brussels and trying to implement this – and that’s worked for seven years now, where we do an annual conference, there’s a whole load of mechanisms around how it works.

“Here at the EESC, I rapporteured, wrote an opinion, saying we need this. The Commission said lets do it and put the money together to make it happen, not a lot, to allow people to travel here — enough to cover 24 people to travel here twice a year, a small budget out of the Commission.”

The most important thing is that policy has changed as a result of this forum.

“We’ve had at least 10 pieces of legislation around waste management and definitions and this group would feed back,” he said. “For example, this is what we need, this is what we need to see in here.

“For example, you have a circular economy action plan, we need a new one, we need a second level of it that goes beyond recycling, at a thing called eco-design, at where you’re measuring recycling rates, some technical things at what you define as waste and how we can be more flexible with that and all of those things appeared in the next action plan.

“This group weren’t the only people saying that but they had a bit of extra weight because they were from actual communities. They weren’t lobbyists for an industry, they were stakeholders working on the ground, from universities, from businesses and trade unions.”

One of the bodies to be involved, the Ellen McArthur Foundation, is the body established by the round the world yachtswoman who put her money into the circular economy.

Mr Lohan has also been deeply involved in measures focusing on young people and is happy with the progress he’s making there. The week before the Civil Society Week saw young people from all over the EU come to Brussels to have their own summit to offer their views on how to move forward.

Now that he’s about to become president of the Organisations body, in succession to fellow Irish man Seamus Boland, the director of Irish Rural Link and the next president of the overall EESC, he’s hoping to continue the work.

There are a lot of presidents in the EU — everyone it seems is a president or vice president of some committee or other. Cillian’s explanation is that the chairperson of a committee is described as president as this is the equivalent French word.

“I’m hoping it will last for five years — there will be a renewal after two and a half years but I would hope to be renewed as I have a five year plan for what I want to do.”

Cillian’s five year plan is to take the project he has been working on and those that have worked – the circular economy, and youth work, and the practical things that have changed as a consequence, and create more of those projects. He hopes to get the 108 from all the different states involved in this work.

“I will say to them, rather than just coming here and doing a report and staying within the institutions; and that’s an important part of the work because you have to try and influence the institutions to do the right thing.

“The added value for me is trying to connect back with communities and connect them with Brussels —that would be one of the core objectives for me over the five years because I’d have enough authority to be able to direct that a bit more.”

Brussels forum fosters cohesion and tackles polarisation

Over 800 delegates from community, environmental, youth, non government organisations, and journalists from all over the European Union came together recently in Brussels for Civil Society Week. The aim of the event, held in the Jacques Delors building on the Rue Beillard in the heart of Brussels, the EU and Belgian capital, was to address growing polarisation across Europe.

While the press release for the forum blamed the impact of the financial crisis, growing income inequality, and climate change; the backdrop of misinformation, fake news, and the shadow of war in Europe and political upheaval in the USA was an undercurrent throughout the four day event.

The presence of journalists from all over Europe in front row seats for the discussions was designed, perhaps, to help ensure the message that the EU is combating what’s happening around us would get back to the citizens of the different member states.

The event, which is in its second edition in 2025, is the brainchild of the European economic and social committee (EESC), one of the main pillars of the EU alongside the commission, the parliament, and the council of ministers. As the EESC President Oliver Röpke, from Austria, pointed to, the growth of polarisation and decline in democratic institutions meant there was a growing challenge to which society must rise.

“Participation, dialogue, and solidarity are not just ideals — they are the foundation of a resilient and united Europe,” he said.

“Civil society has the power to bridge divides, to empower voices that feel unheard, and to rebuild trust in democratic processes.”

Mr Röpke was speaking at a morning briefing for journalists at which some of the issues being faced by the media in Eastern Europe were to the forefront.

Belarussian journalist Hanna Liubakova, who had been investigating corruption by searching through openly available judicial documents, was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment after being convicted of incitement to hatred, being a threat to national security, hip of an extremist organisation, and conspiracy to seize power. The trial was held in her absence.

“After that they went further, they called me a terrorist and extremist and I’m on the wanted list in a number of Eurasian Economic Union [a trading bloc of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan],” she said. “I found out about my wanted list — they don’t announce it publicly because they think the will catch you — when I travelled to Armenia in 2021 and I was arrested there.”

Due to pressure from Washington, where she now works in a think-tank called the Atlantic Council, she was released.

The threat to the press was underlined at an awards ceremony the following day, when three organisations working to combat polarisation from Slovakia, , and Belgium were recognised for different projects that are combating misinformation, promoting constructive journalism, and fostering debate.

The civic society prizes were presented to the Slovak Debate Association, which organised the Critical Thinking Olympiad with participation from 300 schools across the East European country; the Prix européen jeunes Reporters d’Espoirs (the European prize for the young reporters of home), an educational programme created in in 2020, which has built up a community of nearly 800 young reporters aimed at promoting solutions based journalism; and to a Belgian project that is an interactive game aimed at enabling students and young people to combat the rise of far right ideologies.

When presenting the prizes, EESC president Oliver Röpke said civil society played “a vital role in safeguarding European society from harmful polarisation, both online and offline, and in protecting our democracies from the rise of authoritarianism”.

He said the decision was taken to recognise organisations “that actively prevent or combat this dangerous trend of division”.

During plenary sessions of the conference, issues such as housing were discussed in a way in which we would find common cause in Ireland.

Renting property in cities like Paris and Berlin was getting more expensive, students were finding it difficult to afford accommodation, people who did up their rented homes were facing “renoviction” — landlords increasing their rent and eventually evicting them after they refurbished their homes.

Other sessions dealt with funding issues for the different organisations and using technology for the common good, a hot topic now given the rise of artificial intelligence.

The European Citizens Initiative was one of the projects highlighted — it’s an EU participatory mechanism designed to strengthen direct democracy by allowing at least one million EU citizens (with a specified minimum number of nationals from at least seven member states) to ask the European Commission to propose an act in an area where member states have transferred powers to the EU level.

Little is known of the project in Ireland but the feeling is that while there have been some successes, it hasn’t lived up to its potential.

It was introduced in 2012 and since then, 119 initiatives have been launched across the EU — but only 11 have been validated with 10 receiving a response from the commission. Of interest to us in Cork is the fact that one of the successful initiatives was the call for a EU-wide drinking water directive.

It’s very difficult to do anything but take the temperature of what’s happening Europe wide over a couple of days in Brussels.

At this conference, the delegates seemed to be operating at a different level to what we’re used to in Cork County Council, looking at issues globally rather than locally. But then again, it’s all politics.