The rise and fall of the Irish Greens.

AuthorHealy, Joseph

Being Irish, one of the thousands who left the country during the 1980s economic crisis, I follow Irish politics closely. I joined the Green Party of England and Wales in 2002. In 2006, as part of a group of Irish Greens members in London, I visited Dublin to make contact with the Irish Green Party. We went to raise the issue of support for the Irish diaspora in Britain.

These were the days of the Celtic Tiger--the apparent runaway success of the Irish economy, which tempted many Irish emigrants to return home.

We met one of the party's TDs (members of the parliament, the Dail) John Gormley. However, it quickly became apparent that he was not very interested in the issue of Irish people abroad, probably because we have no votes to offer him.

The same year, I became the secretary of the Green Islands Network (GIN), which brings together representatives of the Irish, Scottish, English and Welsh parties. It was recently joined by the Comish Greens.

The network aims to share political experiences and ideas. It played a central role in working out relations between the Northern Irish Green Party, in the six counties that make up the northern statelet, and those in the southern republic. We finally got agreement, leading to the Northern Ireland Greens becoming a full part of the Irish party.

There were indications, however, that all was not well in Ireland. At the council meetings of the European Green Party, the Irish delegation was consistently outvoted in calls for a low rate of corporate taxation in Ireland and the type of economic model the ruling Fianna Fail (FF) party was implementing with the support of its property and financial speculator friends.

This model finally ran the Irish economy aground on the sandbank of greed and recklessness.

In 2007, I attended the Irish Greens conference as an observer. It was on the eve of the general election and the party leader, Trevor Sergeant, promised he would never lead the party into a coalition government with the neoliberal FF. Gormley gave a powerful speech in which he excoriated FF for its corruption and venality.

But it was also obvious that the conference was tightly controlled, including a strict dress code, and largely stage-managed. I told people in London I had felt distinctly uncomfortable. It suggested a party seeking "professionalism" at all cost and very thin on ideology.

It was perhaps indicative that international issues were not discussed at all.

Within a few months, following a...

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