Former Green leader has no regrets about going into government despite election wipeout, writes MARIE O'HALLORAN
TREVOR SARGENT decided after losing his Dublin North Dáil seat that he would not be running again for election.
“I don’t want to be a political bed blocker,” he says as he reflects on the total wipeout of the Greens’ parliamentary party.
“I knew it was going to be a close call either way. When it came down to it though, the association with Fianna Fáil was just too toxic to overcome.”
He does not, however, regret going into government. “There’s no political credibility in being a virginal opposition party, talking about a perfect world. We had to do what we could.”
Now he is working for Sonairte, the alternative green centre he co-founded. He works there voluntarily and sells its produce at the Balbriggan Friday morning farmers’ market.
It is “retail therapy” for him, selling to the customer rather than buying.
He is also writing a book, to be published in the spring, on organic growing and food security.
He doesn’t miss the Dáil after 19 years as a TD and three as a minister of state. He never saw it as “anything other than a way to get things done. I’m getting things done in Sonairte. I’m keeping people healthy and well-fed.”
His interest is in a “healthy society” and it is immaterial to him “whether I can do that with an electoral base of 60,000 or a customer base of 60”.
He believes “genuinely” people who said to him recently, “they didn’t mean us to lose the election, they just wanted to teach us a lesson”. But “sometimes when you do get beaten up the consequences are more serious than intended”.
There is an infamous quote by a US California state senate candidate who, when he lost the election, said “the people have voted, the b*****ds”. When it is put to the one-time Green party leader (51) that this is the view he takes, he responds: “I would never use that language.”
The language he does use, however, is “the people, in their wisdom”. In 2007 the people voted for “the devil they knew”, he says of Fianna Fáil.
“Now [2011] in their wisdom they were voting in desperation for the devil they didn’t know in the hope that it would be different from the devil they knew.”
The people “have voted for leaders who don’t really care about the long term. They’re more fixated on short-term factors, which are all very important, but they should be thinking long-term,” he believes.
There is a lack of “preparedness for a much lower level of energy supply”. He warns that “we are going to be faced with a famine when it come to energy”. The Scandinavian countries that “see the writing on the wall”, countries such as Sweden “which has vowed to be oil-free by 2020, are the ones to keep an eye on. They’re not just doing it for the good of their health.”
The Greens made inroads in this area, he stresses, with the building energy rating system and the renewable energy home insulation grants. But it was “very difficult to get that message across, mainly because people were in a daze about their next pay packet”.
This Government is showing a “failure to answer underlying problems”, among them being “uncompetitive in the areas the future requires us to be competitive”, such as in “the import of €300 million of fruit and vegetables, that could be produced at home”.
He was a backbench government TD since February 2010 when he resigned as minister of state for agriculture over his interference in a criminal prosecution.
He is angry at the current Government for “unpicking Green Party legislation bit by bit”. The planning legislation, “to bring greater accountability to local authorities, has been smothered”.
Ireland is a “small island and there has to be an overall strategy”. But instead “we wait for a crisis” and then react. On water shortages, “rather than Dublin managing its water we wait for a crisis and then we look outside Dublin” to deal with it.
That was “sadly the consequence of thinking we’re mini-republics in each county. That might work in the GAA but not in national planning.”
But while disappointed, he is not despairing. There is still a “very dynamic Green Party organisation. It has to be tested electorally again but I’ve every hope that the Greens will rise again with the young people involved in the party.”
He notes the German decision to abandon nuclear energy after the Japanese tsunami. He believes that “it will be a pretty sudden shock to the system that will catapult the Greens” back into political focus. “I just hope it’s not too painful. The Green Party belief though is that it should be a transitional change rather than a phoenix rising out of the ashes.”
While he will not stand for election he will continue to work for the Greens. For the moment though he is concentrating on becoming an author.
And he will be on TV screens in the autumn as a judge on TG4's Feirm Factor. He enjoyed that experience. "It is nice to be judging for a change, rather than being judged."
LIFE AFTER LEINSTER HOUSE
Constituency: Dublin North
First elected: 1992
Dáil service: 19 years
Current status: Unemployed/Volunteer