Green Party Senator Róisín Garvey has been elected as the party’s deputy leader, seeing off rebel backbencher Neasa Hourigan in a closely won vote.
Ms Garvey, who hails from Co Clare and was a taoiseach’s nominee to the Seanad in 2020, prevailed by a margin of 13 votes, obtaining 333 votes against Ms Hourigan’s 320.
The total valid poll of Green Party members was 653.
The number of eligible members registered to vote in the election was 917.
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Ms Garvey will serve as deputy to Dublin West TD Roderic O’Gorman, who won the leadership of the Greens earlier this month after Eamon Ryan stepped down from the position.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Ms Garvey said the first step to retaining as many seats as possible for the Greens “was to elect me as deputy leader to show we are an all-island party”.
She said there was “misrepresentation” of what the Greens had been trying to achieve for farmers. “We know the narrative is out there that we don’t care about rural Ireland,” and said that farmers needed more payments to adjust to climate change “We have to get money and pay them, bottom line”, she said, criticising lobbying by agrichemical companies and big farmers and arguing that “10 per cent of farmers are responsible for most of the pollution and most of the methane”.
She called for reforms to tackle vacancy and encourage living above shops, and said the two-tier healthcare system needed to be reformed – adding that she refused to get private health insurance.
“If you have private healthcare you lose touch,” she said, but said questions over whether that meant any of her Green Party colleagues with private insurance were out of touch missed the point she was trying to make. “The point is we need to make sure public healthcare serves everybody.”
“We need to keep our fingers on the pulse with the ordinary people who are getting up every day and struggling financially.”
She also said it was important that the Greens deputy leader was from outside Dublin.
In a statement, the Green Party said she would bring “strong, rural, social justice and climate representation ... as well as a rural woman voice from west of the Shannon”.
She replaces Catherine Martin who has been deputy leader for the past 13 years.
A statement from Ms Martin released by the Greens congratulated Ms Garvey, saying she will be an “excellent deputy leader”, adding: “I look forward to seeing all that Róisín achieves in the role”.
She sent “sincere commiserations” to Ms Hourigan, who has been outside the Greens parliamentary party since voting against the Government on the future location of the National Maternity Hospital in 2023. It was the third time the Dublin Central TD failed to vote with the Government, and also saw her losing her position as chair of the Oireachtas budgetary oversight committee.
Ms Martin said Ms Hourigan “is an important voice in our party and a huge asset to the Green movement”.
Ms Garvey was elected to Clare County Council representing Ennisimon in 2019, but was unsuccessful in the general election the following year, securing just under 9.5 per cent of first preference votes and being eliminated on the ninth count. After the election, she secured a taoiseach’s nomination to the Seanad, alongside Green Party colleague Vincent P Martin.
In 2021, Ms Garvey was one of three Green Party senators to put down a motion of no confidence in Hazel Chu, then the Lord Mayor of Dublin and Green Party chair, who had announced she would run as an Independent in a Seanad byelection. The issue led to a significant row internally in the Greens, with Ms Chu enjoying the backing of then deputy leader Ms Martin.
Ms Garvey has been a fierce defender of the Greens’ record in Government, on occasion blaming the media for their framing of the party’s records and Coalition partners for taking credit for its policies.
In 2020 she apologised to Ms Martin, her predecessor as deputy leader, after insulting her in a WhatsApp message after she lost out to Mr Ryan in a leadership election that followed.
In an interview last year, Ms Garvey told RTÉ radio she would not say if protestors blockading asylum seeker accommodation in Inch, Co Clare were “right or wrong” but later condemned the blockade in a tweet.
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