Party leader's speech: The following are edited extracts from the speech of the Green Party leader, Trevor Sargent, to his party conference in Cork on Saturday.
Cork is where the Green mission first began for me, where as a young teacher appointed to my first school in Dunmanway, I joined the Green Party/Comhaontas Glas in 1982. It was known then as the Ecology Party of Ireland.
It was a great relief to find a political home where there were so many others who had arrived at the same conclusions and values that I also held. People who were committing themselves to turning those common values, aspirations and dreams into practical measures for positive change in our country and the wider world.
Only in the Green Party could I find an honest political assessment of the destruction of the natural world that we are witnessing. An analysis which put the very same worth on protecting and promoting a sense of community within our society.
Only in the Green Party was there a common view that economic growth on its own was not going to deliver, or indeed be a proper measure of, the quality of life that we seek to achieve. It was through the Green Party I could start to fulfil my own desire to tread more softly on this earth.
The Green Party have been proven right and we have achieved many successes, but I believe we should be honest and recognise that we have work to do to achieve the change this country needs.
Moving from the current situation where we are living as if we have three planets instead of one is not going to be easy. Rising to that challenge will require a new wave of Green political thinking. We are at a key point in the evolution of green politics.
If we are to achieve real change then the time has come for Green politics to take a hold of the decision-making process. If we want to build a clean green-energy economy we need to start investing in completely different energy, transport, building and farming systems and we need to do it now. This Government is incapable of making this transition.
It is time for us to move from being labelled as an environmental party to being a party of creative, practical solutions to Ireland's problems. Our business must be in affecting what goes into the Finance Bill, what goes on in our classrooms, how we look after our children, how we treat people in our prisons, how we build up the sustainability of every enterprise in this country.
Unfortunately, Fianna Fáil's future vision is never fixed beyond the day of the next election and the Progressive Democrats never seem to think beyond the next corporate quarterly profit and loss account. It is time that the incompetence and lack of vision within these two parties of government was brought to an end.
This is no longer a Government - it is literally a regime corrupted by power. The legacy of this Government is incompetence, corruption, neglect and squander.
If we have to use one word to characterise this regime then I would propose the term "chancers". Having had the good fortune to be in power when the investment in social capital by previous generations starts to pay off, they arrogantly put that success down to their own supposed wizardry.
The reality is that they have misspent the profits from our boom and are too long in power to even see the extent of their own extravagant waste.
Like true chancers, Fianna Fáil will break the rules as long as they think they can get away with it, whether ignoring EU environmental directives until the international courts shame us, or taking money from people in nursing homes until the Supreme Court says stop, there is never a sense of them doing the right thing simply for the sake of it.
Do you trust this Government to run the health service? Do you think they are providing the proper environment within which we can best raise our children? Do you trust this Government with an incinerator? Why can't they get a Disability Bill right? Can you stomach their bragging when Ireland still has one of the highest levels of women and children in poverty in Europe, and 80 per cent of people with a disability are still unemployed? This is a Government that does its business in builders' tents at the Galway races. Such chancers will never rein in rogue builders and developers in the name of the public good.
They have consigned too many of our young people to a daily sentence of traffic gridlock as they grind out a living getting to and from poorly serviced and badly planned communities.
For Fianna Fáil, "openness" in Government means the nicely-titled "Forum for Opportunity" - their latest fundraising wheeze where in return for €1,500 over the next three years, a businessperson can "network" with Ministers and policy advisors. So now we have Government access to the highest bidder. Well, I am here to tell you today: access to the democratic process should never, ever become a tradable commodity.
And then we have the Possessive Democrats who were meant to break the mould of Irish politics. The one reason the PDs were elected was to keep an eye on Fianna Fáil but they have failed to even do that. Now they have morphed back into the same old Fianna Fáil mould. The only crack between them is a squalid row over airport terminals.
Meanwhile, these supposed champions of competition have had nothing to say about the dysfunctional monopoly we have in electricity generation, which is costing everyone in this country dearly and is hindering the development of a renewable energy sector.
These phoney liberals allow the binge legislator Michael McDowell slip in a crude piece of surveillance legislation as a last minute amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill.
They are so misguided that they are now proposing to open schools from seven in the morning to seven in the evening, so that children fit in with the needs of the workplace rather than the other way around. No other party has so brazenly categorised the Irish family as a "unit of production".
This Government has shamefully presided over the decline of family farms in Ireland. In 1996, farm incomes were 75 per cent of average industrial earning, now they are down to 55 per cent. Farmers are now leaving the land at a rate of 5 per cent per year. A country which loses its farmers loses the backbone of its rural communities.
The Green Party is dedicated to helping family farms to be a viable part of the local food economy. For example, many farms are close to being organic and with support and advice could benefit from being fully certified. Sadly, the Government's record here is disgraceful. Ireland's organic acreage is less than 1 per cent compared to EU neighbours Austria who are at 12 per cent. Ireland is also the only EU country to lose organic acreage in the last five years.
It would be easy to despair that we are now condemned to such Fianna Fáil rule forever. However, I believe that there is a real viable alternative that we can present to the people. In over 15 countries, the Greens have now been in government. I know that we can learn and benefit from their experiences on how coalitions best work.
In relation to the new EU constitution, the Green Party has always taken its responsibilities towards the EU very seriously. Just as our criticism of legislation or Government policy in the Dáil does not make us "anti-Irish", similarly our constructive questioning of EU treaties and the current EU Constitution does not make us "anti-Europe". We are fully engaged with the EU project.
We are having open seminars around the country on the Constitution. This means that the Greens will approach the referendum later this year well informed on the real issues, a preparation which the other parties seem not to have even started. The Green's approach reflects our belief in promoting grass roots democratic involvement in decision-making. I look forward to our special convention in June when you, the members of the party, will have to size up the arguments and make a decision on where we should stand on the issue.
Our work on global justice must also ensure that we continue our strong support for the United Nations and UN peacekeeping. The folly of undermining the UN and violating international law - particularly humanitarian law - as we have seen in Iraq must be strongly opposed.
We plan fighting this forthcoming election on the basis of our own positive values and proven policy platform. We believe that it is vital that the Irish people have a strong Green input in future government. 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.
We need more seats, though. The more seats we gain, the more we will be able to implement changes and address the concerns of local communities throughout this country.
The Green Party/Comhaontas Glas is serious about the business of throwing this Government out of office and working with other parties to provide a businesslike, successful and genuinely caring alternative government.
Last year we learned a lot from the experience of our German colleagues when Die Grünen co-leader Reinhard Butikofer recounted the experience of the German Greens in founding a new coalition government. The main lesson we learnt was the need to present a specific number of positive changes we want implemented in government. This is work that we are currently engaged in which will be completed in advance of the next election. We will make sure the electorate know exactly what they can expect from the Greens when negotiations take place to form a government.
Meanwhile, the message must go out from this convention loud and clear that the Greens will also be good for business in any new government we form.
But I have one important word of warning: if the other parties don't appreciate the need for serious change in this country, then I'm quite prepared to walk away, let them think it over and come back to me. I don't want any position in a government that will be simply rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
As the Green Party grows, we are constantly attracting high-calibre candidates and public representatives. Our TDs are described as being of ministerial quality, (although considering some Cabinet members, I am not sure that is always a compliment).
Our policies prove that social justice, environmental protection and economic development are all holistically and fundamentally interlinked. Perhaps we should return to the Irish word for the environment which expresses this reality best.
"Caomhshaol", more accurately means "co-existence", not just "environment".
Today many more people are crying out for a long overdue Green programme for change. Let us rise to that challenge.