Green TD on talks teamnot sure if she backs deal

GREEN Party TD Neasa Hourigan has said she does not know if she can back to the programme for government deal she helped to negotiate with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Ms Hourigan said that the agreement is the “best deal that we could get in the circumstances” but said it did not go far enough on housing or protecting the vulnerable.

The party’s finance spokesperson has spent the last five weeks in talks on the agreement that was published yesterday, but raised considerable concerns about the compromises that were made on Tuesday night.

Speaking to The Tonight Show on Virgin Media, the Dublin Central TD said she had concerns about the structure of the carbon tax proposals and said that they may ultimately end up hurting vulnerable groups, as well as housing measures including the failure to commit to scrapping co-living.

She also criticised the Taoiseach and Tánaiste’s comments in the past 24 hours that the emissions reductions targets would happen in the second half of the 2020s.

“It isn’t helpful that we have Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney telling their own parliamentary party that the climate emissions [reductions] we are trying to achieve will be happening in the last five years of the decade and not something that this government will have to deal with,” she said.

“That’s very difficult for me to explain to my members.”

Ms Hourigan was one of three Green TDs who abstained in the parliamentary party vote on the deal on Monday.

The others were Patrick Costello and Francis Noel Duffy.