Greens ignored Gormley’s ‘ominous warnings’ about IMF arrival

JOHN GORMLEY hadanticipated the arrival of the IMF to Ireland but his Green colleagues ignored his warnings because they believed he was too pessimistic by nature.

Mr Gormley, then Green Party leader, wanted as early as August 2010 to pull out of coalition with Fianna Fáil, fearing the worst.

But his parliamentary party colleagues demurred, believing he was being too pessimistic and that the Government could still arrest the country’s economic slide.

In a new book about the Greens’ time in power, several of those colleagues now admit they badly misread the situation and ignored their leader’s “ominous warnings.”

Mr Gormley also raised the matter with his Fianna Fáil partners at cabinet, but says he was dismissed as a “Jonah” by then taoiseach Brian Cowen and finance minister Brian Lenihan.

The spiral of events is documented in A Deal with the Devil: The Green Party in Government, by Irish Times political journalist Mary Minihan.

The book documents how Mr Gormley realised from the summer of 2010 that IMF intervention was inevitable.

The book says that Mr Gormley reached the conclusion due to “strong hints from Germany through contacts forged during his stint at the University of Freiburg in the 1980s” and his “natural pessimism.”

It was the latter that persuaded his colleagues to play down his warnings and choose to stay in government.

“John wanted to go a lot earlier,” recalls former Green chairman Dan Boyle.

“He had a sense of foreboding about the whole thing and he felt the IMF was inevitable. Myself and (former minister) Eamon (Ryan) felt that the strategy could work if given an opportunity.

“John is more inclined to a negative reading of things but, that said, his political instinct is better than anyone else in the party,” said Mr Boyle.

Former Green junior minister Trevor Sargent concurs with Mr Boyle’s assessment.

“John is capable of depths of despair all right, but he’s also capable of great incisive and intuitive determination,” he says in the book.

The IMF arrived in November 2010, and the Greens pulled out of government in January of this year before getting wiped out in the February general election.

* A Deal with the Devil: The Green Party in Government is published by Maverick House