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An active member of the local community John is a founding member of the Transition Town movement in Holywood, which is one of a network of towns across the UK and Ireland planning for peak oil and the effects of climate change and seeking to encourage community-led and grass-roots based transition towards more sustainable communities. He is also an active member of the Holywood Steiner School and has been a member of the Management Council since 2005, and is currently chair of the Management Council. He is also a member of Holywood and District community Council.
John has been active within Green Politics in Ireland North and South, and the UK for 20 years, and was a key figure in re-launching the Green Party in Northern Ireland in 2003.
“After years of political frustration and tension, the electorate is finding the Green Party’s vision for the future fresh and innovative and more accurately reflects what Northern Ireland means today. The development of the Green Party in Northern Ireland is evidence of the emergence of post-conflict politics and the issues Greens promote, on protection of the environment, promotion of healthy local food, increasing our energy security through reducing dependence on fossil fuels and the jobs, investment and economic security from greening the economy reflect the concerns of local people”
Politics has always been John’s first passion. Graduating from University College Dublin with a degree in Politics and Economy in 1988, he returned and completed a Masters in Moral and Political Theory in 1990. Outside of the class room he mixed in socialist political circles in Dublin in the mid to late 1980s including The Workers Party and Democratic Left, but got bored of their doctrinaire and limited political vision. That’s when he first took notice of a new type of politics taking root in Germany – the Green Movement and its spread to Ireland in the early 1980s.
John worked as a lecturer at Keele University in Staffordshire from 1994 until 2000 and graduated with a PhD in Politics from the University of Glasgow in 1996. In 2000 John was appointed Reader in Politics in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University, Belfast. John is a prolific author and has written or edited over 10 books and is the author or co-author of over 50 academic articles and book chapters on green politics, environmental ethics, the politics and policy of sustainable development, the greening of the economy, renewable energy, and the politics of Northern Ireland.
His books include:
Environment and Social Theory, (2nd edition 2007);
Rethinking Green Politics (1999; which won the Best Book of Political Science in the UK awarded by the Political Studies Association);
The Global Ecological Crisis and the Nation-State (2005);
Towards a Model of Green Political Economy: From Ecological Modernisation to Economic Security’,
International Journal of Green Economics (2007);
It ain’t easy being green’: Sustainable Development between Environment and Economy in Northern Ireland’, Irish Political Studies.
He is the Party’s spokesperson on enterprise and trade.
John is married with two daughters.