Red card for the Greens

The fate of the Green Party in the general election is a salutary lesson for any small party contemplating an invitation to participate in government. The Greens went into the election on the back of a four-year stint as a coalition partner, with 12 TDs in the Dáil, and emerged decimated with its leader as its only surviving TD.

It has been a chastening experience, but then it’s not the first time the Greens have been scalded as a result of opting to take a place in government. In 2007, after an amount of soul searching and no little internal dissension, the party choose to join with Fianna Fáil as the junior partner in office. Four years on, it lost all six of its Dáil seats, including those of serving ministers John Gormley and Eamon Ryan.

There are those who would argue that any small party, if it is serious about having even some of its policies implemented, has no option but to go into government when the chance presents itself, whatever risk that might entail. The alternative is a lifetime on the opposition benches, there to carp and criticise but having no meaningful chance of ever seeing its agenda implemented. In the Green Party, such advocates would be labelled as the realists – those who accept that even a small measure of power is better then none at all, but that the risk of being punished by the electorate at term end is ever present and almost predictable.

And so it was in 2007 when the six-member group of Green TDs agreed to share power with Fianna Fáil. There were dire warnings from the party purists that such a move was a sellout. The TD, Ciarán Cuffe said it would be a deal with the devil, and that the party would be wiped out. The subsequent partnership deal involved many unpalatable compromises, not least the silence of the Greens on the Corrib Gas project. Prior to entering government, the party had been a vocal supporter of the Shell to Sea campaign; once in office, the Green Minister, Eamon Ryan, found himself signing off on the controversial project.

The problem for the Greens, as it was then, and as it is now, and as it will be in the future, is the inherent conflict between its sense of duty to the generations of the future and the more bread-and-butter business of winning votes in the here and now. If the Greens think in terms of humanity’s long-term future, the mainstream parties to which it must hitch its wagon think no further than the next election. And with an electorate more concerned with the bird in the hand rather than that in the bush, the idealists will always take second place to the pragmatists.

It has to be something of an irony for the Greens that so many of its core policies actually serve the dual objective of both climate change and economic improvement, but are never recognised as such. For example, investment in transport and energy infrastructure is key to climate change, but equally meets the needs of foreign direct investment, on which our prosperity depends, but on which we now find ourselves seriously lagging. The downside to such policies is that they fail to deliver the jam-today benefits which, in the end, win the electoral votes.

The Greens must grapple with the reality that, while every sector of society piously believes that the planet must be saved from itself, very few are prepared to take the corrective medicine. Farming, business and industry all pay lip service to the concept of reducing carbon emissions, but they balk at the extra costs or reduced profits that might entail. St Augustine’s famous prayer of ‘Lord, make me chaste, but not quite yet’ could readily apply to those who spout green concerns but at the same time rail against the green lobby as meddlesome and anti enterprise.

The voters’ rejection of the Green Party will not go unnoticed by the incoming government, which will be even less likely to put pressure on business and farming to cut harmful emissions. And the incoming administration will be more inclined to prioritise investment in health and housing, which are more likely to be rewarded at the ballot box, than in transport and energy, as espoused by the Greens.

And if, in time, the heavy hand of coercion has to be brought to bear on farming and industry, it will be because the European Commission demands it so, and not from any idealistic impulse from our national leaders.