In the wake of the election result last week, the verdict of Green TD Paul Gogarty was that his party had been "too timid" in its campaign, writes Mary Raftery
It is a view that does not augur well for the kind of steel the Greens will need if they reach the point of serious negotiations with Fianna Fáil to form a coalition government.
The great potential strength of the Greens is that they do not have to be all things to all people. With a well-defined but narrow set of priorities, they can focus on a small number of specific issues and stick to them.
Any talk of being a watchdog for Fianna Fáil would be disastrous. As the Progressive Democrats and indeed Labour before them discovered, this catapults a small coalition partner into an impenetrable moral morass, where you're damned whatever you do.
The Labour Party's support for the tax amnesty in 1993 was a classic example. Driven by Fianna Fáil, and outrageously advantageous to the disgracefully large cohort of wealthy people who had failed to pay their full share of tax over previous years, it ran contrary to everything that Labour stood for. And yet they swallowed it in the interests of stable government, and subsequently paid the price at the polls.
How the Greens can avoid a similar fate will be a key dilemma for them. Their approach to it could be of great significance for the future of the country.
With galloping climate change and rapidly rising bills to be paid under Kyoto to offset our carbon pollution, a strong Green voice urging tough environmental measures is of critical importance in identifying what will always be unpalatable choices.
So far, the Greens have emphasised that environmental protection need not be at the expense of our prosperity or comfort. But in our hearts, we all know that there will come a time when sacrifices will have to be made, when our consumption of energy will have to be curtailed (by higher taxes, if necessary), when luxuries such as air travel and driving around in large, gas-guzzling cars will have to be drastically controlled.
It is to a great extent the raison d'être for any Green Party to place these stark choices before us. If Green politicians become fatally undermined in this country by a brush with coalition, their message will be all too easy to ignore.
Last Sunday, Fianna Fáil's Dick Roche was at pains on the radio (Newstalk FM's The Wide Angle) to argue that there really was very little difference between his party and the Greens on policy matters.
And in some areas, this may well be true. It will be revealing over the coming weeks to observe precisely which aspects of its policies the Green Party will choose to emphasise - those closest to Fianna Fáil, or the radically divergent.
In this context, it is worrying to see the Greens prioritise issues such as education and class sizes. Not that this is unimportant - far from it. But it is an area where agreement with Fianna Fáil would be relatively easy to secure, particularly as the latter have already promised to create 4,000 additional teaching posts.
On the other hand, the Greens' pushing of the Kenny report's proposals to limit the price of development land will be far less popular with Fianna Fáil.
Proper, controlled planning, rather than that which is driven by windfall profits to landowners, is a key plank in minimising energy and fuel use, and consequently appropriately central to the Greens' core environmental policies.
The implementation of a carbon tax on fuel, a longstanding Green policy, is also anathema to Fianna Fáil. If the Greens stick to their guns on this one, and insist on a tax large enough to make us significantly change our profligate use of petrol and oil, they will have made significant inroads towards making us take our fair share of responsibility for limiting climate change.
In order to achieve any of this, there is much to be said for the Greens' clarity of thought about ethics in politics and in particular their espousal of a ban on corporate donations to political parties.
For as long as politics is funded by those whose business interests will be most damaged by real and significant environmental control, we will see no major change. The Greens' strategy to alter fundamentally the entire basis of how politics is paid for would certainly be a lasting contribution to public life in this country.
All of this, however, presupposes that Fianna Fáil is willing to pay the price of coalition with the Greens, and indeed that the Green Party is prepared to demand a high enough price. Political parties with long experience of coalition become masters at fudging issues. Novices may not even perceive a fudge until it is too late.
Or even worse, they may get their fudges in first, compromising frantically all the way up the aisle in order to make it to the altar.