Two shades of Green

The Irish government could potentially have collapsed last weekend when the junior coalition partner, the Green Party, was forced to take it’s amended programme for government to its membership. The new set of policies, agreed in an eleventh-hour meeting between the governing parties last Friday, was put before the Greens’ membership on Saturday, requiring a two-thirds majority of participating voters to support it.

Happily for the government, the Greens decided they preferred the trappings of office to the trap they would find themselves in were a general election called, but the party’s travails are far from over: convincing the electorate to give the party another turn at the tiller is something that will have to be faced in the near future and opposition parties are certain they will be able to both the Greens and Fianna Fáil overboard sooner or later. The question for members is whether or not compromising their positions on environmental issues has been worth it for the experience of governing.

Green Party minister for energy, Eamon Ryan: is the leadership winning or losing? Photograph: David Ruffles

Internationally, the Irish Greens are held in low regard, at least among more committed environmentalist campaigners. Ireland’s Greens have presided over a government that has betrayed key environmentalist principles, critics maintain. Derek Wall, former principal male speaker with the Green Party of England and Wales, has been a vocal critic of the Fianna Fáil-Green coalition government for failing to push forward the green agenda. Seen from Wall’s perspective, such an analysis is obvious. There is a battle for the soul of the Greens and the party leadership is firmly on the side of staying in power at any cost.

I called Wall on the day of the Green Party’s extraordinary convention on the programme for government and he told me the feeling in green political circles tended to be negative: “While I’m very critical of the Irish Green Party’s performance in government [I recognise] there are pressures on all small parties in coalitions. As Caroline Lucas has said, the Irish Greens show how to not go about a coalition,” he said.

For Wall, as for many Irish party activists, the governing Fianna Fáil is simply an unsuitable partner: “Most Irish commentators expected this to end in tears – Fianna Fáil has a reputation for corruption, particularly in building matters,” he said.

Not every green commentator shares Wall’s analysis, though. Writing this week for forth, science and social affairs journalist Lenny Antonelli argues that the environmental movement as a whole needs to face-up not only to political reality but also to the fact that green ideology includes sacred cows that are in dire need of slaughter. (1)

Antonelli, a Green Party member with a background in science, views the struggle as being one between those like himself who, while remaining committed to environmental politics, recognise a need to engage with modern technical solutions to environmental issues and a ‘hippyish’ element that is focussed on a romantic vision that, while having resonance in a modern society, is not a useful political goal.

However, the dispute could just as easily be characterised as being between technocrats and idealists. Ironically, as far as internal party politics goes, it is the idealists who are on the side of democracy.

One member, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, criticised the party’s internal structure as insufficiently democratic, noting that while the programme for government requires a firm two-thirds majority of party members to support it, Nama, the controversial Fianna Fáil plan for a ‘bad bank’, simply required one third of Green members to not support a motion rejecting it in order for the Greens to continue in coalition on Saturday.

Fractious arguments are nothing new for the party. Former Green MEP Patricia McKenna is the best known member of the Green’s ‘awkward squad’. McKenna, a thoroughly decent individual who is genuinely interesting to talk to no matter how much she and I may disagree about environmental issues, left the party in May of this year over a point of principle that neatly encapsulates one of the major difficulties facing the party: the Green Party in government is forced to make compromises on its policies.

Despite my own concerns about green politics allowing a ‘right-on’ coat of paint to be applied to old-fashioned misanthropy it is fair to say that few people get involved in environmental campaigning for explicitly anti-human reasons. Most, presumably, feel they are committed to doing good, however wrongheaded they may appear to their critics. From the party leadership’s perspective, the Greens have delivered just this: the party has pushed through significant legislation at national level and its renegotiation of the programme for government last Friday is a not inconsiderable political victory. A serious problem for the Greens is that nothing is ever likely to satisfy its hardcore supporters – not because they are necessarily ‘extremists’, but because the core of green politics is contradictory: green parties in government always disappoint their supporters as they cannot possibly deliver what supporters demand.

Oblivion awaits

There is more to the Green-dilemma than internal ideological rivalries, though. The Irish Green Party’s failure to engage with the wider electorate, a fact that follows from the green stance of moral rectitude, may yet see the party mired in worse trouble. Its much-predicted implosion at the next general election is not yet inevitable – but it is likely. Most pundits have put this down to the Greens working with the unpopular Fianna Fáil government, resulting in misdirected anger at the party.

What this ignores, however, is that the Greens failed to build a significant political base and, like its coalition predecessors, the hard-right Progressive Democrats, the party only managed to squeeze into government as a result of the vagaries of the proportional representation system used in Irish elections.

The fact that the Green Party has just three county councillors in the Republic of Ireland (and a further two in the North – the Greens, like Sinn Féin and now Fianna Fáil, are an all-Ireland party) indicates an almost total absence of so-called ‘grassroots’ support and exposes the Green vote for what it is: an easy, guilt-free last preference for liberals motivated by a desire to feel good about themselves.

Environmentalism remains a significant policy area in Irish politics but the Green Party has already had its clothes stolen by all of the other parties. Even its anti-development streak, largely abandoned by the leadership, has been adopted by the People Before Profit Alliance, a Socialist Workers’ Party outgrowth that has been polling well in the wealthy Dublin suburb of Dún Laoghaire not as a result of the economic crisis, but because the well-heeled denizens of this Irish clone of Hove don’t want their sea views to be spoiled by development. (2)

It appears that the Green leadership is preparing for the political wilderness. Dan Boyle, a member of Seanad Éireann, Ireland’s upper house of political appointees, is rumoured to be seeking a position on the European Court of Auditors and former leader Trevor Sargent has been mooted as a potential Ceann Comhairle, a move which would result in his automatic re-‘election’. Likewise, party leader John Gormley, currently the minister for the environment, is under pressure from both within and – more seriously – without. Gormely won his seat on the final count by just 304 votes.

Much has been written by kite-flying Irish journalists about how the other all-Ireland ‘green party’, Sinn Féin, is facing electoral wipeout come the next general election – a favourite canard of conservative commentators who fail to recognise that Sinn Féin is now no more republican than they are. Undoubtedly there are stormy waters ahead for the Shinners, but republicanism, no matter how hollowed-out and rhetorical, has a strong constituency in Ireland. The Green Party’s environmental rhetoric, on the other hand, while certainly popular with a section of the public, has failed to transform into a solid vote – the Green Party simply has nothing to offer that its rivals can’t mimic.

Whether in or out of government, the Green Party is in trouble.

By Jason Walsh

(1) Policy versus preposterism, Lenny Antonelli, forth,  October 12, 2009

(2) In fact, the People Before Profit Alliance almost beat the Greens in 2007 general election in the constituency. Since then the Alliance has had a number of councillors elected and is increasingly visible in the political scene.