ANALYSIS:Despite dismal results, party leaders are unlikely to make a rash announcement about its role in Government, writes MARK HENNESSY, Political Correspondent
NIALL Ó Brolcháin was not a happy man when he appeared late on Sunday night on RTÉ’s election special, just hours after he had lost his seat. Stern-faced, determined, in just a few minutes the former Galway city councillor created a strong impression the Greens were thinking of pulling out of Government.
He suggested his party could, and should pull out of their alliance with Fianna Fáil and enter an unlikely combination with Fine Gael and Labour.
And then he went on to suggest that party leader John Gormley had told him that “all options” were up for discussion in the election postmortem.
In reality, the Greens are going nowhere, and Ó Brolcháin’s negative attitude on the alliance with Fianna Fáil – while not unique – is a minority one within party ranks.
Faced with catastrophic local election results, Gormley and Eamon Ryan will spend much of the early summer speaking to defeated candidates and the party’s grassroots. However, the ambition for now is to calm nerves and to ensure the Greens do not take hasty decisions.
“The important thing for now is not to rush out with announcements, but to take our time. We need to explain ourselves better,” said Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan. Unlike some parties, the Greens are utterly democratic, daring to ask their own members questions that other party leaderships would never consider.
It can sometimes be an uncomfortable experience for the leadership, as happened when it failed to get the majority needed to campaign as a party for a Yes vote on Lisbon.
Under the party’s rules, a special delegate conference must be held if five constituency organisations or more call for one. Its national executive’s only role then would be to decide on the timing, and then only by agreement with the grassroots.
In 2007, delegates gathered in the Mansion House and overwhelmingly agreed to entering government with Fianna Fáil, despite the strong misgivings of a minority.
A new Mansion House-style gathering is months away, though one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given some of the hysteria of recent days. The situation is helped by the fact that some of those who would be leading a charge to quit, such as Patricia McKenna, have already left the party.
Fianna Fáil and the Greens will begin looking in detail at a review of the programme for government in July, once the Commission on Taxation’s findings are out.
However, some of the judgments will be left to September after Ministers return from their summer break.
The Greens’ Senator, Dan Boyle, proposed the review, causing wobbles in relations with Fianna Fáil during the election campaign – when the Greens believed that Fianna Fáil, not them, would be the biggest losers. This prediction did not come to pass, and much will depend on how well both parties understand their mutual dependence.
Given the desire to buy time, a special delegate conference is off the agenda until October.
In the meantime, the Greens will be allowed to vent their anger.However, a decision to stay in Government does not mean that all Greens believe everything will turn out right in the end.
“The Greens have no choice but to stay in Government. We must appeal for political maturity from voters. Even if we don’t get thanked for it in the end. This is about patriotism, frankly,” said Cllr Brian Meaney from Clare.
While most party councillors were voted out on Friday, Green TDs may be the next to fall, whenever the election comes, Meaney said pessimistically – even if the programme for government is substantially changed.
“People want the party they see as responsible for the mess out. Simple as that,” said Cllr Meaney, who strongly backed the decision to enter government on the first day.
Up to now, the Greens have believed that they were not being targeted by the public for the mistakes of Fianna Fáil in the past.
The opinion polls tended to agree up until the point when the pension levy was imposed on public servants and extra taxes affected everyone in May.
“They saw us as a prop for Fianna Fáil and they kicked the prop away,” said Tom Kivlehen, one of four Green councillors to fall in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown council.
The suggestion by Ó Brolcháin that there be a rejig in the Dáil – even if it would not happen because Labour and Fine Gael would never agree to it – would not work, even if it did happen, he suggested. “I spent the last five years on a council with Fine Gael and Labour. Fine Gael doesn’t give a s**t about green policies. They are so tied into the farming and business blocs.
“Labour sees us as holding their seats and they want us gone. We won’t be there if Fine Gael and Labour get in,” Kivlehen commented.
Describing the party as “very wounded and suffering”, former MEP Nuala Ahern said it might have decided differently about entering government in 2007 if it had known how bad things would get.
“We knew that there was a slowdown coming. The housing crisis was predictable. We warned about it. But the financial crisis wasn’t,” she told The Irish Times.
However, Ahern, who served in the European Parliament between 1999 and 2004, added: “I do not see that the Greens have any option but to stick in Government for the present time.”
However, she raised a caveat: “I don’t foresee an election before the next budget.”
Others in the Greens yesterday raised a similar warning.
So far, the accepted wisdom is that the Government will have to cut spending and tackle soaring social welfare costs when they produce the December budget.
Despite all the talk of acting in the national interest, both parties now have a political imperative to pull punches when they come to making these decisions.
In the meantime, the Greens will seek some consolation from the substantial list of legislation they hope to advance in coming months, including seismic changes to planning laws.
In addition, John Gormley is working on legislation curbing noise in residential areas, the tax on second homes and a White Paper on local government reform.
In the longer term, however, the Greens must find a way of re-inventing themselves, now that so much of their agenda has been cherrypicked by political opponents.
While the party wants significant changes in the programme for government review, it may go further, with some in the Greens looking to universal healthcare, or a graduate tax to pay for third-level education, rather than fees, for example.
Significantly, perhaps, long-mooted water charges offers Gormley, the Minister for the Environment, the opportunity to make life uncomfortable for Fine Gael and Labour on local councils, and open up a new, and badly-needed line of local funding, if he is just a little bit Machiavellian. Although the decision to impose them, if taken, will be made by Cabinet, Bills will however be issued in the name of local councils – councils that are now almost entirely dominated by Fine Gael and Labour.