The Green Party has held its first leadership hustings with both Roderic O’Gorman and Pippa Hackett pledging to win back voters who have drifted away from the party.
Mr O’Gorman and Ms Hackett were confirmed as the two contenders after Eamon Ryan announced that he would be stepping down from the role and would not contest the next general election.
The first hustings was held in Trinity College Dublin, where both candidates made their pitch to party supporters ahead of an online vote which will be held between July 4th and 7th.
Mr O’Gorman said if the Green Party relied solely on its core vote in the next general election it would lose Dáil seats.
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“I am not standing for leader to manage decline or head back into the wilderness. I will not accept defeat. I am standing for leader to hold our seats and grow our seats and win in every part of Ireland,” he said.
He said people felt the Green Party was “not speaking for their day-to-day concerns” and if the party did not do that “we will struggle to move beyond 4 per cent” in the polls.
Ms Hackett said: “I want us all to be unapologetically Green ... As your leader I will make sure that we keep public-transport fees low and that we will keep investing in public-transport infrastructure.
“The potential to expand our rail network is massive.”
She said while the Green Party had invested in active travel over the past four years, “our roads need to be safe too”; that should mean rolling out “camera-based enforcement at scale”, among other measures.
She also said climate change needed to come with a just transition.
“If the just transition isn’t working for the people of the midlands, then it won’t work for anyone.”
Mr O’Gorman said he had taken a tough line on a number of occasions in Government to stand firm on Green Party policies around the mother and baby homes redress scheme and migration policies.
“No one joins this party for an easy life. They join it to deliver on policies – and this is what I’ve done. No other minister before me had even reduced the cost of childcare. I halved it. No minister before me had to face the unprecedented humanitarian crisis – the largest war on the European continent since the second World War. I have housed 100,000 people fleeing here, looking for shelter.
“For decades adopted people were refused their birth information. It was seen as legally impossible to give it to them. I changed that. Has it been tough? Absolutely. The first week in the job, you might recall there were people outside the Dáil demanding that I resign and they had my image with a noose around it.”
Both candidates were asked which politicians from outside Ireland they admired most. Ms Hackett said former US president Barack Obama, and Mr O’Gorman said David Blunkett, who served in Tony Blair’s cabinet, who he said had been focused on the delivery of social policy.
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