The Cedar Lounge Revolution

The ghost of Christmas past… The Green Party. December 14, 2011

I purchased the Phoenix Annual review in the last few days. It’s an interesting enough read, though probably tells one little that couldn’t be guessed at already. A fairly perfunctory overview of SF, some intriguing points about the Independents which I’ll follow up later and… and… what’s this? Why a prescient piece on the Green Party, given that they ‘celebrated’ their 30th anniversary this week. A quite fair piece too which tots up their achievements and failings in government.

In regard to the former it notes that…

…while John Gormley failed on climate change, he scored a victory with the Planning Bill. This put an end to wanton rezoning of land by maverick county councillors and probably counts as the party’s most solid achievement in Government. Other headline grabbing moves were the banning of traditional light bulbs and the imaginative Cycle to Work scheme which gives employees a tax break of up to €1,000 to buy a bike. Their legacy will also include the adding of an environmental pillar to the social partnership; green NGOs now take part in partnership talks.

And it also notes:

Eamon Ryan bagged the other must-have Cabinet job for a Green: Energy. There his two major accomplishments were to impose a motor tax linked to a car’s greenhouse gas emissions and measures that increased Ireland’s renewable energy output.

These aren’t all mere details. The planning bill will have an impact beyond the lifetime of the last government. Whether the Cycle to Work scheme is that important in the larger picture is a different matter. But if social partnership survives an environmental pillar is a good thing.

But the Phoenix also points to the failings. The failure to introduce a Climate Change bill being the most obvious, but also a sense that in the spirit, if not the letter, of the law the GP simply didn’t act on a range of issues that had previously appeared dear to their heart, and didn’t appear to make any serious effort to pull back Fianna Fáil from acting in its predictably bad worst instincts on such matters.

And it makes the crucial point that now the Green Party, four years on from the 2007 General Election ‘now stands at 2%, all their Oireachtas seats have evaporated, along with their credibility. Many will remember them – rightly or wrongly – as the party that propped up the worst government in Irish history. They presided over the bank guarantee and the EU/IMF bailout. As part of their deal with FF, the party abandoned several issues that helped elect them: US military use of Shannon, the routing of a motorway through Tara and Shell’s inland refinery in Mayo’. And even if these latter were not in the written manifesto there was a strong sense of identification of the party with them. Indeed as I think was noted on the CLR in recent weeks the legalism of the apologia for the GP not acting on these matters because they weren’t in the manifesto is in stark contrast to the actions of Fianna Fáil in pursuing its interests while in government.

And the Phoenix reinforces that by noting that:

Inat least one respect the environmental agenda is in a much worse place than it was four years ago…. Leinster house is now a Green-free zone for the first time in 22 years. This has allowed the environmental agenda – already waning due to recession – to slip further down the list of priorities. There is nobody to kick up a fuss when, for example, [Phil] Hogan puts climate change on the back burner.

At best the green agenda in 2011 is where it was in 2007, which must count as a failure for the GP. At worst, they destroyed the credibility of Ireland’s Green movement. Had they remained in opposition, they might now be a Government partner with greater clout than they had with FF. Or they would be a strong opposition voice. Instead they have no influence over climate policy – or any other policy – at a time when Ireland and the planet desperately need it.

For years I somewhat dismissed the importance of parliamentary representation, even opposition representation. But I think the Phoenix makes a very valid point that in order to have a national voice it is necessary to participate in national institutions. And this doesn’t have to be in government. The point it makes about how in opposition the GP could have influence is well made. At the very least such representation in the Oireachtas would have a ‘push’ effect upon other parties, cogniscent of the reality that voters were willing to support a tranche of opinion. The effects?

Perhaps often little more than lip-service, but in truth in the current dispensation we appear to have less than lip service paid to climate change. And for all the good intentions it is clear that there is no other party in the Oireachtas today which has a particular interest in this issue. Which is in itself an exemplar of the dismal failure of the Green Party as the vehicle to represent and to promote this.

And that is what makes latest pronouncements from the GP so difficult to take entirely seriously. I don’t mean this in a personalised way, but by any measure the GP leadership that was failed. It failed at national and representational level [perhaps the only one who could be said to evade that blame, at least in part, would be Trevor Sargent who due incidental circumstances was taken out of play early on - and it was notable that of all GP candidates he was one of the few with even a slim chance of reelection earlier this year]. In any other party it would be near impossible that personalities associated with such failure would take the leadership, such as it is [though tellingly something of a similar process is evident in Fianna Fáil].

And it is difficult to envisage a circumstances where this history isn’t going to come back again and again to undermine whatever efforts are made to reposition the GP. Can it take seats in the future? I’d be a little surprised if it took no new council seats at the next local elections. A smattering more at least. But it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that that dynamic, alluded to by the Phoenix where environmental issues are off the table, operates in some way. Which might leave them high and dry. As for TDs? I’d be a lot less certain. It is true that there may be a weakening of certain LP voters, and perhaps FG ones too that might see one or two GP candidates succeed. But the environment in 201x is going to be radically different to that in 2002 and 2007 when the GP began to win seats in numbers. For a start there’s a much fiercer degree of competition. The ULA sits on the left ready to sweep up votes. SF sits on the centre left. FF on the centre right. Any or all those formations could start to talk ‘greener’, and perhaps should for electoral purposes [indeed in respect to FF, they might profitably consider the Tories under Cameron where ‘green’ issues were all the rage for some time prior to the last election].

And memories of the last government are going to last. The GP can’t walk away from them, at least not with its current leadership.

Moreover look at what is being proscribed, a sort of weak repositioning that seems to ignore their handiwork between 2007 and 2011 and an attempt to place them somewhere apart. The latter would be fine, well actually it wouldn’t – it would be an absolute cop out, if it weren’t for the fact that in Government the GP acted broadly in a right of centre fashion, albeit with some modish but half-hearted tilts towards equality, etc. This latest piece in the Irish Times, by Eamon Ryan, is masterful, but perhaps not quite in the way it is intended:

So is that it? Is there no more room for a Green perspective? Will we continue to simply ignore the fact that the first capital is environmental capital? Will we be content to grow the world economy any way we can and hope that climate chaos won’t happen in our lifetime? Or will the other parties just steal our clothes? That final question is easily answered. In their nine months in Government, Fine Gael and Labour have shown that whatever they stand for, it is not sustainability.
They have abandoned all the major public transport projects: Metro North, Dublin’s rail interconnector, the western rail corridor. They have sidelined climate change legislation and clear emissions targets for different sectors. They have weakened incentives for low emissions vehicles. They have excluded solid fuels from the carbon levy, reducing it to a revenue-raising tax, rather than an incentive to low-emissions living. They have scaled back support measures for retro-fitting energy efficiency in our buildings.

What’s most telling is that FG and the LP are berated for not being ‘green’ enough when in truth neither of those parties has presented themselves as first and foremost saviours of the environment.

Whereas for three and a half years, almost four, the GP was actually in government, actually had some degree of executive power. And it continues:

Representing labour and capital, they seem locked in a battle over the division of economic spoils. They ignore the fact that our activities are causing our planet to burn.

But the reality is that the LP and FG functionally represent capital, not labour. And it’s a false use of supposed binary opposites to present them as such. Moreover the article positions them as if these are equal players when by any reasonable metric it is clear that labour – in the broadest sense of the term – is very much in a secondary place to capital in our current socio-economic and socio-political structure. And it is this which leads to some fairly strange elements of the analysis:

On the Opposition benches, the clientelist and nationalist culture in Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin will make it difficult for them to adopt to Green thinking which is instinctively more liberal and international in its nature. A radical international vision is vital as Europe edges towards the kind of integration which, with the right leadership, could allow it to steer the world towards sustainability. We don’t just need to live within our fiscal means; we need to live within the means of the planet.

Clientilist and nationalist as against liberal and international? Astounding stuff when one considers yet again less than a year ago the GP was in government with FF. And note the point about ‘living within our fiscal means’. What’s telling is the following:

For the developing world, it means a climate which doesn’t destroy life before it has even begun. It means having a chance of getting your kids to adulthood and through education. It means ending the shame of global inequality.

But this is to ignore entirely the reality of national inequality in this state which by any measure is also a source of shame. And the final summation shows up how far has yet to be travelled before there’s a smidgen of credibility in the message:

At this time of crisis we need new thinking and a new economic model for this country.
But that too is to ignore the reality that when in government the GP cleaved to the most orthodox interpretation of the orthodoxy.

It is this I suspect that will sink any efforts for the GP to re-represent itself, because there is little here to suggest that genuinely ‘Lessons have been learned from the mistakes which were made in government.’. The article doesn’t bother to mention any, and given the corporate centrality to those mistakes perhaps that’s not such a surprise. There’s no hint of genuine radicalism, no hint that the party might reposition itself on the left of the political spectrum (and there might be good reason why it won’t from electoral reasons, Dublin South is hardly an hot-bed of radicalism at the best of times) and that being the case it’s difficult from a left perspective, a red-green perspective in my own case, to hold out much hope for the future. Which leaves those of us who are red-greens in a situation where there is no explicit vehicle for our politics either inside or outside the Dáil, and on the face of the latest rhetoric emanating from the GP unlikely to be one anytime soon. That’s problematic in itself. On the broader front of climate change it’s absolutely disastrous.