A green party cannot justify sitting on the sidelines for five years
THE Green Party veteran was unequivocal. ‘For some of us, what we’re witnessing is a coup,’ said the unnamed man or woman talking to the Irish Times. ‘The party that I knew in the late 1980s and 1990s is being overturned, decision by decision, vote by vote, by a bunch of keyboard warriors. They want to be in government with Sinn Féin and Labour and the Soc Dems. No one else.’
Well, ten out of ten, Sherlock, because what he or she is talking about is as clear as the hand in front of the face of most of us – the party no longer seems to know exactly what its purpose is. When the Greens first came to national prominence with the election to the Dáil of Roger Garland in 1989, they largely were a well-heeled, affluent lobby. Garland was elected in Dublin South, followed in the Nineties by Trevor Sargent in the former Dublin North constituency (centred on staunchly middle-class Malahide), and John Gormley (Dublin South-East).
Problems
Nowadays, the grassroots not only seems more diverse in its make-up, it also has become more divergent from the core message of environmental action, and more vocal in its opposition to the leadership’s intention to enter government in coalition with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.
Where once, you got the impression that a heated debate at a Green Party meeting would do little more than cause the voile curtains to twitch and a faint ripple to spread across the Earl Grey in a china cup, there now seems to be a much more militant stance among the younger members who have been likened to the Momentum movement in the UK Labour Party.
It is hard to see why this is happening. The Green Party was wiped out at the 2011 general election, with three of its six outgoing TDs even losing their deposits. Eamon Ryan was installed as leader and in 2016, the Greens won two seats, the first time any party had recovered from a total wipeout. At last year’s European elections, he guided the Greens to 11.9% of the national vote, its best performance ever (declaration – I gave Grace O’Sullivan my own No.1 here in the South constituency). Last year, the party won its first by-election and in
February it quadrupled its Dáil representation from three to 12 TDs. So what did the party do? Yes, it launched a heave against Ryan, with deputy leader Catherine Martin throwing her hat in the ring.
Now, I often have been critical of Eamon Ryan in the past, for obvious reasons. Suggestions of a fixed number of shared cars for everyone in small towns, or reintroducing wolves to the wild, are not vote-getters – but when his unfortunate utterance of a taboo word in the Dáil during what was a well-meaning contribution on racism was seized on by a councillor in his own party to somehow paint Ryan as racist himself, it clearly illustrated the headlong rush from gentility to bareknuckle politics.
The party’s big problems are geography and demographics. Over the years, Green Party TDs have included Ciarán Cuffe and Ossian Smyth in my native Dún Laoghaire; Dan Boyle (Cork South-Central); Patrick Costello (Dublin South-Central); Francis Noel Duffy (Dublin South-West); Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid-West); Neasa Hourigan (Dublin
Central); Brian Leddin (Limerick City); Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown); Steven Matthews (Wicklow); Malcolm Noonan (Carlow-Kilkenny); Joe O’Brien (Dublin Fingal); Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford); Roderic O’Gorman (Dublin West); and Mary White (Carlow-Kilkenny).
Sorry if I’ve bored you with the list, but are you seeing a pattern here? With the exception of the Carlow-Kilkenny successes, the Greens are very much an urban and suburban force; their voter base largely in cities and, in the case of Wicklow, a rather affluent satellite county of the capital.
Taxes
As for demographics, support is highest among those aged between 18 and 24, at 14.4%, but drops away in every subsequent age group, bottoming out at 4.6% among those aged 65 and over. The simplistic interpretation is that older voters don’t care about the environment and the immediate challenges climate change will bring, because they won’t live to see the worst effects, when in truth it’s far more likely the older among us just can’t afford ever increasing carbon taxes.
After his election, Waterford TD Marc Ó Cathasaigh enunciated the party’s core aim pretty clearly. ‘On a national level, we are unapologetic about putting climate action and action on the biodiversity loss front and centre in terms of all of our policy platforms,’ he said.
Younger Greens are moving away from that stated ambition though, and seizing on the policies of the alphabet soup left wing. For them, social justice has become the buzzword. The Greens always were committed to it, but it never was the prime focus. Previous manifestos have been thin on detail on housing and homelessness, but since those issues were foremost in the minds of the electorate in February and Fine Gael took a hiding for its mismanagement of them, they have become central for younger Greens too.
What that means is that when you hear Green members such as the unelected-to-anything Saoirse McHugh talking about their party, in truth they sound like the opposition. If the Programme for Government is approved by the party memberships this evening (and that is by no means a given), it will be hard to bring those factions together, and perhaps impossible with the demands for intellectual and political purity from a faction within the Green Party itself.
The greatest problem of our age is orthodoxy, as evidenced by social media. You can hold nine out of ten commonly accepted viewpoints on social issues, but if you dare take a different stance on the tenth, you immediately are cancelled, and berated until you atone for the sin of departing from the herd.
Downturn
Anyone with any political savvy, though, knows that to get something, you have to give something, and while the Greens might hold the balance of power, they do not hold all the cards. We live in a new reality. Our world has been upended in three months, and the luxury we had of voting for environmental policies now seems a distant memory.
Hardest hit by the economic downturn will be the young, the very people who delivered the Greta Thunberg halo effect in the first place. If we face another general election, will a cycle lane still exercise their minds as much as getting a proper third-level education or a job? Who knows?
It would, however, seem reasonable for them to, at the very least, ask one question. If, as we have been told, we have only ten years to sort out the planet before its demise becomes unstoppable, who in the Green Party thought it was a good idea to sit out five of those years on the sidelines – and why?