Leader's speech (edited): It is an honour for me as leader of this party to thank Greens from every county in Ireland, North and South, who are here in Galway this weekend for this Ardfheis an Chomhaontais Ghlais i gcathair na Gaillimhe.
I, along with Dr John Barry, leader of the Greens in the North, especially welcome Greens who have travelled from overseas such as Reinhard Butikofer, co-leader of Die Grunen, the German Greens - a Green Party in government effecting change at home and on the world stage.
We gather here as members of the fastest growing political movement - people who are thinking globally, and are active locally in every community across the island.
Our sister parties in Germany, New Zealand, Sweden - to name a few - have demonstrated that our policies work in government - for people and the environment. Only this week we have seen the first Green prime minister elected in Latvia.
The Green Movement represents a set of ideas whose time has come. From globalisation and the inequities of international trade, to the creation of safer, child-friendly and sustainable communities: the Green Party is a party of tried and tested solutions.
The Green movement reaches beyond the tired ideological politics of left and right, and draws deeply from Europe's social movements for peace and justice, equality, solidarity with the developing world, women's rights, and the protection of our environment.
Above all, we are for a new and intelligent economics - putting people and planet before profit. Green politics is clean politics.
We need to rid ourselves of a Government which has become a byword for arrogance, corruption and false promises. If we want a green and sustainable future for Ireland, Fianna Fáil and their junior coalition partners must be put out of office.
Green Party candidates must win, and win well in the local government elections. We need to return Green MEPs to the European Parliament in June - to address the crucial international issues of social justice, environmental protection and fair trade. The Irish presidency of the European Union has demonstrated the Government's resolute failure of imagination. Their impoverished vision is limited to the narrow confines of the Lisbon agenda which is all about competitiveness but forgets about community.
For this Government the promotion of the interests of big business is sacred. Markets and market-led language are creeping into every facet of our lives and into our debates on key public services, including education.
It is the language- not of citizens - but of consumers and clients. It is the language of the internal market, choice, customers, and privatisation. The sad new world envisaged by the Fianna Fáil/PD Government is a hostile world of solitary individuals competing endlessly to outdo their neighbour in every field from higher education to the shopping centre.
Economic growth at any cost and the survival of the fittest replaces our traditional culture of watching out for each other.
Green politics is not just clean politics it is life politics - politics that address the everyday issues of life here in Ireland, for workers, for parents, for women, for children, for the able and the less able. We are alive to the new anxieties that preoccupy parents, mortgage-holders and tenants and those who live with job insecurity.
Indeed, in Ireland today we are seeing the rise of a whole new group: the anxious class. Even those who have done relatively well - economically - are still faced with a host of challenges and threats to true quality of life.
The Green Party will make sure that parents have the necessary free time and resources to get the crucial first few years of parenting right. To give them a choice, a parent should be able to afford to spend these years with their children as well as having the option of decent childcare available close to where they live.
We want neighbourhoods designed - from the earliest stage in the planning process - to be safe for children and their parents. That means designing streets for children rather than just for cars. That means, more playgrounds and parks. At the moment Ireland has just 200 playgrounds - roughly the number you'd find in one London borough. We also want smaller primary class sizes of 20 rather than 30 - so our young children can learn to read and write with ease.
To ensure our children have healthy lives we also need a good health system. The Green Party will concentrate on getting our primary health system right, and take the pressure off expensive high-tech medical services.
Our candidates around the country are campaigning in support of local health clinics and community hospitals, and campaigning against the downgrading of local hospitals proposed in the Hanly Report.
In spite of Fianna Fáil's election promise to end waiting lists within two years, over 27,000 are still left waiting. We have become the most car dependent country in the world. Irish cars now drive 15,000 miles each year - more than the United States and twice the German average. More schoolgirls are now driving themselves to school than are cycling to school.
And the only plan Séamus Brennan has to solve this crisis is to build more motorways leading to greater gridlock. Has no one told the man that petrol is not going to be so freely available in 20 years' time?
Does he know that we are supposed to be reducing the carbon emissions from our transport sector as our planet starts to warm and our seas rise due to the amount of pollution we are putting into the atmosphere.
Well let me tell you, the Greens in Government would massively invest in public transport to solve our traffic problems. We will bring in light rail in Cork, the Metro in Dublin, the Western Rail line and we will deliver new rural bus services throughout the country.
And then we have Minister Cullen. Minister Cullen is not a great fan of planning. With a sweep of his pen he regularly rejects requests from his Department officials who want to appeal certain developments to An Bord Pleanála to protect our heritage.
It is this Government's reckless and unthinking culture of decision-making that is fouling our groundwater, polluting our rivers and streams, destroying habitats and setting up unsustainable transport patterns, the consequences of which will only be seen in years to come. Only last Thursday the Government was condemned once again in the European Court of Justice for failure to monitor river pollution. For clean politics, Ireland needs Green politics.
The difficulty in getting affordable housing is something that young people in both rural and urban Ireland share. Has anything changed from the days when it took wads of cash as thick as bricks to deliver corrupt rezoning. Young people become slaves to a mortgage, while the land-owning friends of Fianna Fáil still hoard their land-banks without fear of any action from this Government.
The Green Party will establish a right to housing in the Irish Constitution. We will ensure that local authorities can purchase land and build quality housing.
We will place a charge on housing land that is undeveloped and zoned to reduce land hoarding. We will put the needs of the people, not developers first. We will provide affordable housing as a priority.
The Government has driven thousands off the land in a rush to replace mixed farming producing safe food with factory farms that have little or no connection to the local economy. As a result, farm incomes have dropped 8.5 per cent in 2002, while the price of agricultural land rose by roughly the same amount.
The loss of family farms has had the effect of increasing rural isolation. This has had a knock-on, choking effect of concentrating population in the Greater Dublin area, while towns and cities in the rest of Ireland are gasping for economic activity. The Government pretends to deal with this imbalanced development. However, scattering civil servants to the four winds is not decentralisation, it is cynical electioneering, and the cost of the exercise, if it ever happens, is going to be paid for in the long run by you and me.
Minister McDowell presides over a system that takes parents and their families from their houses in the middle of the night. These 21st century evictions stir up bitter memories for many Irish people. Ireland needs workers and we welcome those who have come to our shores.
We marched in peaceful and colourful demonstrations last year to tell the American and Irish governments that the war in Iraq was wrong.
Friends, I can tell you we will march again this summer when George Bush comes to town on his re-election campaign and we will unite with the millions of good American people who strongly disapprove of his policies and who do not want our airports used as a launching pad for his illegal war crimes.
We were all horrified with the appalling atrocity which took place in Madrid this week.
I would like to take this opportunity to convey our deepest sympathy to the people of Spain, especially those who have lost their loved ones.