ANALYSIS:Disaffected Green councillors who resigned from the party are withering in their criticisms of the Greens in Government, writes Harry McGee
THE RESIGNATIONS from the Green Party by two prominent councillors have turned a difficult week into a deeply uncomfortable one for the junior Coalition party.
As its two Ministers were closeted in marathon Cabinet discussions to curb public spending by a further pain-inducing €2 billion, the party was simultaneously forced on to the back foot to justify its existence and to deny that Fianna Fáil – like a bullfrog in a small pond – had swallowed the party whole.
There seemed to no concerted plan behind the successive decisions of Cork city councillor Chris O’Leary and Dublin city councillor Bronwen Maher to leave the Greens, though the reasons underlying the decisions were uncannily similar.
O’Leary’s resignation on Tuesday set off a mini-domino effect, prompting Maher to announce a decision she had almost certainly already made in private some time earlier. At her press conference yesterday, she was flanked by professionally produced posters hailing her as “Bronwen Maher, Independent”.
Maher was one of the small minority of its members, comprising 13 per cent, who opposed the original proposals in June 2007 that the party enter government with Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats.
There was a sense that she never bought into the coalition. When a party meeting decided to support controversial Government cuts in education last October, she let it be known she would table a motion at the party’s national conference this spring questioning the Greens continuance in power. She also campaigned against the Lisbon Treaty.
Chris O’Leary, in contrast, voted in favour of the arrangement but his sense of disillusionment has grown. While the news that he had tendered his resignation in December was a surprise, he had made no secret that he had been considering his position since last autumn.
Both councillors were withering in their criticisms of the party leadership. O’Leary asserted that the Greens had dumped its principles and would hang on in government “no matter what”. He added that the country needed leadership, not headless chickens.
Maher yesterday was no less critical of the party saying it had abandoned its principles to become a “centrist lifestyle-lite Green party” with which she no longer felt a connection.
Her net criticism was that the party was weak when pitching itself against Fianna Fáil and had no defined role. Its achievements, furthermore, were “corralled” into the policy areas of its two Ministers John Gormley and Eamon Ryan.
What’s more, she claimed, many of their “initiatives” were EU-inspired and would have been implemented anyway.
In a comment that was the political equivalent of the door being slammed on the way out, she implied that the party no longer wanted to tolerate diversity of opinion.
“It’s an indication of where we are. Let’s get rid of the squeaky wheels,” she said.
The cumulative effect of the departure of two senior figures has once again forced the party to defend its record and influence in government, and also to deny that the Greens, as another prominent rebel Patricia McKenna has claimed, are “in freefall”.
Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan was unusually forthright in rejecting the criticism yesterday.
“We have fundamentally changed the nature of energy policy in this country,” he said. “I see that we have fundamentally changed the nature of planning and housing in this country – a policy previously which got us into some of the economic difficulties that we have.”
The true position of the Greens in government is probably somewhere in between. The party had primed itself for government and knew – based on a simple numbers game of six Green TDs versus some 77 Fianna Fáil TDs – that painful compromise would be a recurring theme during the five-year term.
The party banked on the fact that it had two Ministers in preferred Green portfolios and that it won a number of key concessions on education, equality, transport and equality issues such as civil partnership legislation.
It also made great play of the Government commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 per cent by 2012 and also on the introduction of a carbon levy.
The Greens are not the first party to realise how difficult it is to swim in the deep waters of Government with Fianna Fáil. The party has unveiled some eye-catching initiatives – the changes in motor tax and vehicle registration tax being the most prominent – and has introduced tougher new standards in house- building and insulation; it has also encouraged green-tech and has promoted renewable and alternative forms of energy.
Overall however its record has been less impressive in its attempts to introduce a timely carbon levy (although one is promised this year) or to make serious strides towards the ambitious goal of reducing CO2 emissions.
As time passes, each of those ticketed items becomes more difficult to achieve.
The party was prepared for government and was warned by Green ministers from elsewhere in Europe to brace itself for ferocious criticism from within. In a sense, resignations were to be expected at some stage. While the party will ship some damage from this week’s events, it would take mass defections or the resignation of a TD or Senator for that to become a real existential crisis for the party.
Just three months before brokering a deal with the Greens in 2007, then taoiseach Bertie Ahern said in an interview: “In Germany . . . the Greens were in power and they got rid of them and they went through the floor. All of the places where they have never had power, they are doing well.”
It is certain that further such crises will lie ahead.
Harry McGee is a member of The Irish Timespolitical staff