Sargent attacks coalition

Green Party delegates voted on Saturday to fight the next election alone. However leader Trevor Sargent said the party is ready to serve in Government. Political Editor Harry McGee reports.

BESIDES there being a run on muesli in the breakfast room of the hotel yesterday morning, the annual Green Party conference in Cork was a very different affair.

The sense of where the party is now, and where the party is going and wants to go, was clear. Everything pointed to watershed.

There was the neat slogan, The Greens Mean Business (with its clever double message of ‘ready for coalition’ and not as crazy for the economy as Mary Harney thinks).

For the second-year running, the conference was addressed by a Green politician from a coalition government in Europe (this year it was Pekka Haavisto, the former Minister of the Environment in Finland). The blatant message was that it can be done, it has been done.

But most of all the sense of departure came from Trevor Sargent in his leader’s address. In his strongest and most forcible performance from the podium, Mr Sargent succeeded in putting across two key messages. The first was a complete dissing of the Government. The second was the unmistakable public declaration, that after 20 years, the Greens are now ready to serve in Government.

The surprisingly aggressive attack on the coalition was an eyebrow raiser. At times you had to take a double take, because the nettle sounded more like prickly Rabbitte than reasonable low-key Trevor.

“True chancers”, he mocked more than once when portraying the ruling ‘regime’. Out of a half-hour speech there were plenty of choice examples.

“This is a Government that does its business in builders’ tents at the Galway races. Such chancers will never rein in rogue builders and developers in the name of the public good.”

By an overwhelming majority of at least nine-to-one, the party’s grass-roots delegates voted on Saturday that it would fight the next election on its own, and negotiate nothing until after the election.

In so doing, it roundly rejected a counter-motion backed by some of its TDs that would allow the party to keep open the option of a pre-election arrangement.

This could not be portrayed as mutiny from hardcore activists. The Green Party, partly because it is smaller, remains closer to its grass-roots than other parties and this was an example of that democracy in action.

In any case, the party’s six TDs were divided on this key question. Eamon Ryan, for one, wanted the party to keep its options open.

“Sometimes in politics you have to be decisive and bold. You have to lead”, he said.

But John Gormley, Dan Boyle and especially Paul Gogarty said keeping options open was neither bold nor decisive, but a fudge.

“There’s something that’s worse than losing number two votes and that’s losing number ones”, argued Gogarty to loud cheers. It was clear from the first moment who would carry the vote. Mr Sargent’s own views were well-guarded, but were thought to sway in favour of early accord. But if he was disappointed with the outcome, he did not show it. Tactically, the decision was the smartest move, given the danger of a small party withering in the shade of its bigger partners.

The one danger of staying out of an accord is that if the party fares poorly in 2007, it will carry no leverage. But going down that road involves all kinds of negative assumptions for a party that may fare better than the current wisdom has it (lucky to hold, an extra TD maybe).

When you move from the tactics of timing to the principle, the party’s fundamental position has been transformed: the Greens want to go into Government.

In the key passage of his speech, Mr Sargent took all of this in: “We plan fighting this forthcoming election on the basis of our own positive values and proven policy platform. We believe that it is vital the Irish people have a strong Green input in future government.

“We will negotiate with other parties and push our core policies based on the number of seats we obtain.”

But not at any price: “I’m quite prepared to walk away”, he said.

“I don’t want any position in a Government that will be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Strong stuff. Strong, too, when he moved to head off the criticism that its ‘crazy’ economic policies will drive the economy into a vortex.

Yes, business will have to get real, he said, but countered: “The message must go out from this convention loud and clear that the Greens will also be good for business in any new government we form.”

The strength of his speech was founded on a powerful reiteration of what his party stood for and what it had achieved. He took Green credit for glass recycling, the plastic bag levy, wind power, and the gradual ‘greening’ of environmental policies.

“If we are to achieve real change then the time has come for Green politics to take a hold of decision-making”, Mr Sargent said.

THE party is working on its own shopping list. For a party whose being is so linked with core principles, government will mean painful compromises and fudges. We got a taste of that yesterday. A motion was tabled making a ban on military stopovers at Shannon a pre-condition of participation in Government. In the end it was referred to an internal committee.

But if the Greens enter government, its ministers will be more vulnerable than any others to the enemy within.

As Haavisto observed adroitly: “I can tell (Greens) that you can be in government and survive. But the worst part is the friendly fire that comes from your own Green colleagues.”