Greens and Fianna Fail

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Dot writes: today’s big headline in the Irish Times is ‘Greens agree on terms to join coalition government’. The Green Party leadership and Fianna Fail have put together a draft coalition deal which now has to be approved by the party membership. Fianna Fail have outright refused the Green demand to stop US military flights through Shannon Airport (admittedly the flights are now endorsed by a UN mandate); all new roads planned by the outgoing government will go ahead, including the M3 motorway right by Tara (this plan is like solving the traffic problems on the A303 at Stonehenge by upgrading it to six lanes); and no agreement has been reached on putting Greens in charge of the departments of environment and transport, with one feeble proposal being to hive off a slice of the Environment department, marry it to Energy and have a new department for ‘climate change issues’. The PDs were given two senior ministers, but the Greens have only been offered one senior, one junior and an ordinary minister of state. Frankly, it looks like a rotten deal for the Greens, and one wonders how that can be when it is surely Fianna Fail that needs to gather support to form a workable majority rather than the Greens – that notoriously unprincipled and power-hungry party – who would want to scrabble their way into government by any filthy means.

All this said, as a Green voter, and someone who voted Green to support the Greens and not for tactical anti-Bertie reasons, I am torn over what I think they should do. They can surely achieve more in government than in opposition. I was very irritated by an article by Stephen Price in the culture section of the weekend’s Sunday Times in which he talked rather sneerily about the preponderance in the Irish media of members of the ‘eco-classes’ (middle-class, educated under-45s, often with young families and working in the ‘creative or tech industries’: I can’t help feeling this profile fits Ken and me rather well, if academia can be associated with the ‘creative and tech industries’ and little Prawn counts as a family). Price said that such media types would give the Greens an easy ride, ignoring their feebleness over the economy, but that they would eventually spit them out ‘like veal at a vegan dinner party’. He compared the Irish Greens now to the German Greens who went into coalition government with the SPD in 1998 and are now back in opposition. My feeling is that it is the point of a Green party to make it plain that there are priorities higher than the short-term health (it is only ever the short-term health) of the economy. They should take what opportunity they can to carry through their agenda, and as soon as possible. I don’t care if it means doing a u-turn on some of the rude things they said about Fianna Fail during the campaign. But I do worry that Fianna Fail will bully and starve their Green partners out of any chance to make a difference; and in that case their entry into coalition will do positive harm, because Fianna Fail seem to have very little interest even in preserving the beauty of their own country, let alone in making a real difference to carbon emissions. The coalition deal includes a commitment to introduce a carbon tax at some point over the next five years, but there is no indication of how stringent it will be or when exactly it will appear. Meanwhile, the World Wildlife Fund has issued a report that criticizes a government plan to buy 270 million euro of carbon credits as up to 95% of the reductions it is committed to under the Kyoto agreement (i.e. Ireland won’t be making any significant reduction to its own carbon emissions).

I can’t help feeling that Fianna Fail are just better at politics than the Green Party. I wish having principle on one’s side was enough, but it’s not.

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