Irish Green party leader, Mr Trevor Sargent, at the head of an eight-strong delegation, signed the foundation charter of the new European Green Party here yesterday.
Mr Sargent, who was accompanied by MEP Ms Patricia McKenna, European East candidate Cllr Ms Mary White and European South candidate, Mr Chris O'Leary, addressed the conference on Saturday morning. He told the congress that the Irish Green party had "moved in its history from being a movement that is identified with protest, to one that is now more identified with solutions to problems that will be coming to a head in the 21st century".
More than 1,000 participants from 31 countries, including not just the 25 EU member and member-elect countries but also Bulgaria, Norway, Romania, Russia, Switzerland and Ukraine, attended a three-day conference which ended yesterday with the signing of a Foundation Charter in the Campidoglio, Rome's Town Hall.
Notwithstanding the presence of the non-EU countries, the new European Green Party's first political objective will inevitably be this summer's European parliamentary elections where it will campaign on a joint Europe-wide manifesto.
At a meeting with Rome's Foreign Press Corps last week, German Green MEP Mr Danny Cohn-Bendit, one of the main driving forces behind the foundation of the new party, explained: "We believe that European politics cannot simply be the expression of 25 national politics and that goes for the Greens as well."
Mr Cohn-Bendit, the 1968 student movement leader, argued that the foundation of continent-wide party was necessary, not just to give a more coherent airing to issues widely shared by individual Green parties, but also to ensure that the Green movement retains its current strength in the new, 732-member European parliament.
"Our idea is to have a group pretty similar to the old one, 45 to 50 members. We'll lose in some countries perhaps, but we'll gain in others".
The Irish delegation emphasised that on a wide range of issues, including energy resources, food safety, sustainable development, climate change and agricultural development, there was a broad consensus within the new European Green party. "You've got to remember that these Green parties have been in informal contact for a long time now, what is happening here this weekend is the consolidation of work that had been done by Greens for decades", Ms McKenna said.