Green At The Gills

The last general election, in May 2007, coincided with my final exams in college. Nearly all of my friends voted for Green Party candidates.

Sitting in the sun outside the Trinity College bar in Dublin after one of our last exams, we agreed that we were disgraceful parodies of ourselves: hippy-dippy arts students voting for the hippy-dippy party that stood for environmentalism and gay rights, at a time when all other politicians were banging on about tax bands and hospital beds and increasing the number of Gardaí.
My class, the class of 2007, was probably the last to graduate in Ireland in the full expectation of walking into a decent job. If someone had come up to us that afternoon in the Pav and said that in three-and-a-half years’ time, Ireland would be run by a SWAT team of super-capitalists from the IMF and 1,000 people would emigrate, ‘80s-style, each week… well, it just wouldn’t have made any sense to us.
This isn’t a sob story about the plight of poor Trinity graduates. With unemployment at 450,000 and the minimum wage and social welfare slashed, there’s plenty of people worse off at this stage than “Bavaria-drinking-girl” or whatever Dave McWilliams would have called us.
But where does it leave the Greens?
The party’s hippy-dippy core vote has been destroyed over the course of its three-and-a-half year alliance with Fianna Fáil. One major problem was the extremely limited success of the Greens’ attempts to alter Fianna Fáil’s pre-existing plans and policies on key Green issues like the Corrib gasline and the M3 motorway through the Hill of Tara.
Add to that the fact that the Greens were in government as the economy crashed into a brick wall and it’s no surprise that the party is on only two per cent support – or is it one? – in the latest opinion polls. As the country lurched from one crisis to another, and the full extent of Fianna Fáil’s mishandling of the economy finally began to dawn on a previously comatose electorate, the Greens continued to prop up Cowen’s cabinet, refusing to pull the plug on a spectacularly unpopular government.
Over to you, John Gormley.
“Sorry, we’ve pulled the plug to give people an election right now – that’s a year-and-a-half earlier than we could have done,” the Green Party leader fights back.
“We were in government during the economic crisis but we were not participants in previous governments which had sown the seeds of this destruction by doing this increasing expenditure, and decreasing revenue through taxation, which is a real recipe for disaster. I think to say that somehow the Greens are responsible for this economic crisis – we certainly are not.”
Defending his party’s usefulness in government buildings, Gormley claims the Greens staged a number of important interventions against Fianna Fáil and An Bord Snip.
“A major thing for us is protection of the arts. We stopped the major cuts going through. And we stopped the axing of the [Irish] Film Board. We are the party that stood up for education in government. We actually preserved class size, when all of the pressure was on to cut, cut, cut. We are the ones who stopped the introduction of [college] fees.”
Then there’s the Civil Partnership Bill – though Gormley admits that it fell short of the Greens’ real goal, which was gay marriage. But in that case, why didn’t the Greens take a stand for gay marriage? It wasn’t like Fianna Fáil cared that much about it either way.
“Oh no, they did. There was a huge problem with the advice from the AG [Attorney General] that you’d have to get a constitutional change. We wanted to go further but we recognise that it’s not always possible to get exactly what you want.”
Unfortunately for the Greens, when the country goes to the polls in a couple of weeks, these hard-won victories will be overshadowed by the question of the economy – and Gormley understands better than most its parlous state.
“When we were in government, on two occasions it really did look like there was going to be no money in the ATM machines and that’s pretty stark reality.
“Our banks were insolvent. The banks didn’t tell the truth about that – we didn’t have a regulator with his eye on the ball. So I don’t care who’s in government, once you have a situation where you have insolvent banks, you’ve got to try and solve that.”
The way the banking crisis was ‘solved’, of course, was through a blank-cheque bank bailout, which now means that good money is pouring out of the Irish exchequer after bad – and into an Anglo Irish Bank-shaped black hole. Why did the taxpayer have to pay for all the mistakes of the banks and the gambles of the bondholders?
“We did not know at that stage, nobody informed us. You have to remember that all of the political parties, with the exception of one, Labour, they all went with it – the advice was that the bank guarantee was the way forward. The advice, even from people like David McWilliams, was ‘go with the guarantee’.”
Gormley accepts the need for renegotiation on the issue of bondholders’ exposure to financial losses. However, he scoffs at Fine Gael’s and Labour’s claims about the extent to which the EU and IMF will be willing to revise the bailout deal to allow a reversal of some of the more draconian measures in the last budget.
“If you get a change of government, is there going to be a miraculous transformation? I don’t think so; in fact I’d be quite sure you won’t. Are you going to get all these promises about reversing cuts to minimise wage? No. I can tell you that because I sat in the room with Olli Rehn.”
Speaking of Olli Rehn, when the European Commissioner visited Dublin last November, Fianna Fáil violently denied that it was a prelude to an EU/IMF bailout. Gormley believes that, like the Irish people, the Greens at that point were being misled.
“I felt that there was, as I said at the time, a serious lack of communication and this was something that was characteristic of the Government. The Green Party tried at every juncture to communicate but I think too often people were spinning to themselves, if you know what I mean.
“The only response I got back was ‘we’re funded up until the start of the summer, so you don’t have to worry about that until the start of the summer’. I think that was very much delusional.”
So were the Greens basically duped by Fianna Fáil about the extent of the crisis in the economy?
“I don’t know if the word duped… I do believe that there was an element of people convincing themselves, almost wanting to believe; in denial if you like.
“I think Brian Lenihan is naturally optimistic and upbeat, right, which is sometimes necessary in politics. But you have to try and balance that with a grasp of the reality. If the way had been prepared and people had said, ‘We do have a problem here, the IMF may have to come in’ – and I know how politically difficult that is – I think there would have been more respect for that upfront position.”
Now that the harsh 2011 budget has come into effect and people are feeling the impact in their pay packets and/or social welfare payments, the main issues Gormley is hearing about on the doorsteps of his Dublin South-East constituency are “pay, taxes and jobs”. But those aren’t things that the Greens have ever campaigned on – quite the opposite in fact. Aren’t the Greens basically an anti-growth party?
“You have to understand what growth is connected to. It is connected to the financial system we have constructed which is not sustainable and which goes through boom and bust cycles and which is ecologically damaging. To put it at its bluntest, you can’t have infinite economic growth on a finite planet and the only people who believe in infinite economic growth are madmen and some economists. It’s not feasible.”
Pulling the plug when they (finally) did, the Greens have had to abandon their Climate Change Bill, a piece of legislation they had dearly hoped to leave as their legacy. Fine Gael, however, have pledged to push through their own climate legislation.
“Yeah, great,” says Gormley, sarcastically.
“I mean it’s just going to be milk and water isn’t it? And nothing more. Look, you can publish any piece of legislation you like and call it whatever you like. You can say, this is the Climate Change Bill, and have a piece of paper with the words climate change on it.”
Ah come on, it’s a step in the right direction if Fine Gael and Labour accept the need for such a bill, isn’t it? In fact, isn’t there a sense in which issues like climate change and the green economy have entered the political mainstream to the point that a dedicated Green Party is no longer necessary?
“No, because it’s meaningless! If you want a tokenistic bit of environmentalism go and vote for these guys. It means nothing. They’re not serious about it.”
At the end of the day though, voters probably don’t care about environmentalism this time round, tokenistic or otherwise. In this election, the only cards worth playing are jobs and the economy and the Greens will find it hard to distance themselves from the catastrophes on both those fronts. Nor are voters likely to forgive them for the relinquishment of Irish economic sovereignty to indifferent international organisations. Does Gormley regret that history’s assessment of the Greens’ legacy might be so harsh?
“I have a difficulty with the whole question of sovereignty because we live in a globalised world and, in terms of Irish sovereignty, when we joined the euro that was a huge erosion of sovereignty. Likewise, as a small, open economy, you are a captive of international capitalism. The IMF intervention shows that in a very stark way.
“We will continue. We will always continue because we’re a group of people who have a solid belief system. I think history will be kind to us and now it’s a matter for the electorate, whether they will as well.”