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Buy Nothing Day 1997:
Report from Ireland

From:    Peter Doran [email protected]
Date:    Sun, 21 Dec 1997
Foyle Green Party Campaign:
Buy Nothing Day

We promoted the first Irish celebration of Buy Nothing Day on various radio stations, North and South. The campaign really appealed to the Irish popular imagination, with lots of callers pledging to donate to charity the money saved through buying nothing.
Indeed, the campaign in Ireland had a very strong social justice dimension and we strove to raise awareness about our unequal relationship with the Third World. Galway One World Centre responded to our invitation to introduce the campaign to the Republic and organised street events there. In Northern Ireland, there were guerilla street theatre events organised in Derry and Belfast and it was very warmly and enthusiastically received by the shopping public.

BBC Radio Ulster gave us lots of coverage with a lot of people phoning in unanimously saying that Buy Nothing Day was an excellent idea. I was also interviewed by Dublin's radical "Anna Livia" radio station which has a large audience in the Capital, especially among community activists. Then, we were contacted by a reporter representing the newest radio station in the Republic, 95FM, based in Limerick. She had discovered the Buy Nothing Day campaign through our Home Page on the Internet and I was interviewed live on 95FM. It transpired that they are politically very sympathetic and, since their maiden broadcast on November 6th, they have already covered topics like sustainable development. They were so enthused by our campaign that they have made a commitment to give full coverage to Foyle Green campaigns as they come up in the future! Indeed, our next campaign will be "Switch off the TV Week" in the new year!

Foyle Greens also released a specially commissioned Buy Nothing Day campaign song, "Shopping". To me it is almost a musical representation of something that could have been written by Beckett - very postmodern in a cyber world, computer programming language vein. We've had requests for the song from such completely disparate places as the New Zealand campaign, a Slovenian anarchist-libertarian radio show "Black Hole", based in Ljubljana and from RTE's Irish-language station, Radio na Gaeltachta!
I consider it something of a coup that the Irish Times featured on page two an article on Galway-based film-maker Bob Quinn's resignation from the RTE Authority in protest at their Christmas TV toy advertising campaign which begins in mid-August. He said such advertising posed ethical problems for any broadcasting authority: "To state it bluntly, the business of Christmas toy advertising on television colludes with a multinational policy of exploiting children as child labour in one half of the world and as child consumers in the other half".

We also got a request for information from a new Irish Language Newspaper based in Omagh, Northern Ireland. We were surprised that Sinn F=E9in's national broadsheet, "An Phoblacht" (Republican News) included a generous section on Buy Nothing Day. The article featured quite a long quote from myself (which they obviously cobbled together from my various radio interviews) as the BND 1997 campaign organiser in Ireland! To cap it all off, we even got a very special message of congratulations for introducing the Buy Nothing Day campaign to Ireland from some friendly people at the World Bank!

You can stay in touch with Foyle Greens at our Home Page:
www.ecology.u-net.com/welcome.htm. We are planning to publish Consuming Passions as a full-colour .PDF file on the Internet which can be read by Adobe Acrobat Reader. We are very hopeful that Buy Nothing Day will be really big in Ireland next year. The communications strategist of the Northern Ireland Green Party was a delegate at the recent climate change summit in Kyoto and had a meeting with the chief environmental correspondent for the Irish Times who undertook to give the campaign full coverage next year. The campaign has generated a lot of goodwill and people generally are hoping that the idea will really take off.

Peter Doran
University of Ulster, Derry, Northern Ireland
Earth Negotiations Bulletin, IISD, 212 E 47th. New York

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