Conference sketch: The T-shirts on sale outside the hall where the Greens met in Cork said it all. "Greens mean business," was the logo. And they did. This was a party intent on ditching its image of sandals, salads and bicycles for the whiff of diesel fumes from a ministerial Mercedes.
The possibility of being part of a Rainbow alliance was very much on the minds of delegates, although the party decided to go it alone at the next general election.
Even the election posters of local TD Dan Boyle, which nobody could miss climbing the stairs to the hall, had their own message. There were posters, going back a number of general elections, which showed a younger, leaner Mr Boyle. And there was the more recent election poster of a Mr Boyle who made the breakthrough for the party after years of the hard grind of constituency work in Cork South Central.
It was a lean and politically hungry Trevor Sargent who delivered his leader's address on Saturday evening. He was cheered by the delegates, although some empty seats at the rear took a little from the mood of optimism.
Echoing what other speakers said, he warned that the Greens would not be taken for granted in any political marriage of convenience with Fine Gael and Labour. He noted the advances that the party had made since Conor Fitzgerald won its first local authority seat in Kerry.
"We plan fighting this forthcoming election on the basis of our own positive values and proven policy platform," he declared. "We will negotiate with other parties and push our core policies based on the number of seats we obtain. The Green Party will be asking voters to give us a strong mandate to negotiate the programme for government this country needs." Dismissing the current Coalition as a crowd of "chancers", he went on to quote local poet and writer Seán Ó Riordan and Albert Einstein. Einstein, said Mr Sargent, had once said that significant problems faced could not be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.
Hands in the air, with a Churchillian gesture of victory, he declared: "We've seen the future and it's a Green future." Rattled by taunts from Ministers such as John O'Donoghue, the party's deputy leader, Mary White, suggested to Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney that they make way for the Greens in government. "Move over Darby and Joan, the Greens are coming," she said.
She spoke about her encounter with voters in the Kildare North by-election. She had been asked by a group of young boys about Bertie's colour. She told them Bertie's colour was not in any rainbow.
And she went on to quote Winston Churchill's summary of Stanley Baldwin in her assessment of the current Taoiseach. He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
"Well, that is Fianna Fáil all over," said Ms White. "Confessions by accident, deceptions by design, PR at the taxpayers' expense." Just as the logo on the tee-shirts indicated that this was a party ready for government, Ms White dismissed the view of the Greens as a party concerned only with environmental issues.
"Let me be very frank here," she said. "The Irish people will never exchange their newly-won prosperity for a dream of environmental purity. And a party which advocated that they should do so, would never have more than a handful of councillors and TDs." Perhaps as a concession to other days, the weekend's events included a poetry reading and music. But the prospect of power after the next election was ever-present.
The speakers included Pekka Haavisto, a former Green Party environment minister in Finland, where, as Mr Sargent noted, "the Greens have been in government for seven out of the last 10 years".
The delegates included Dublin councillor, Nessa Childers, daughter of former Fianna Fáil minister and president, Erskine Childers. Her late father, she said, supported Green Party policies when it was neither profitable nor popular within the Soldiers of Destiny.
