Forever Is Now
Director: Neasa Ní Chianáin
Cert: 12A
Genre: Documentary
Starring: Eamon Ryan
Running Time: 1 hr 37 mins
It’s not easy being Green. Just ask Eamon Ryan. The leader of Ireland’s Green Party from 2011 to 2024 and minister for the environment, climate, communications and transport in the 2020–25 government was consistently criticised for coalition compromises, insufficient progression on transport alternatives and a failure to sell big-picture emissions goals to voters trying to make ends meet.
The film-maker Neasa Ní Chianáin followed Ryan during his final 18 months in power. It’s an apocalyptic reckoning for the Green Party, which would lose 11 of its 12 TDs in the 2024 election. Don’t expect grillings. In common with the Green Party, this clever fly-on-the-wall documentary is working on a macro scale as a portrait of the travails of the larger environmental movement.
Ryan wonders how to get “27 countries to agree on aviation tax, maritime tax” before a European conference. That is small change beside the Cop 29 summit, in Azerbaijan, where goals are derailed by representatives of the Global South who feel they have not been heard. “It’s a bad deal because it allows developed countries to walk away without providing finance to the developing world,” says one delegate.
It’s an impossible standoff. Things are no easier at home. Is there any place for green-branded diplomacy amid the Irish Lives Matter protests?
The lack of progress exasperates younger party members at a conference in Ballina. In the Dáil, Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, is among the most measured critics we hear. “Just tell us that this madcap, half-baked and unfair notion advanced by Eamon Ryan is now officially ditched,” she says. Ouch.
Important supporting players include Edel Hackett, Ryan’s formidable media adviser, who’s a series of TikTokable moments, whether briskly brushing his shoulders before a press conference or looking appalled by a social media campaign by Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair boss. Please put this woman on a celebrity edition of The Traitors Ireland.
Other dilemmas include the impossibility of being a parent and full-time carer: work and you’re leaving it to your partner; stay at home and there are no breaks. The most affecting scenes feature Ryan and his autistic son, Tommy, as they roam around the countryside and waterways. A vignette in which Ryan coaxes his son to draw the family dog (and scene stealer), Sooty, is a delight.
In cinemas from Friday, October 16th