Greens would get into bed with anyone, admits Eamon Ryan

In politics, you have to be committed but open minded. For Eamon Ryan, anything’s possible. The Green leader is ambitious, you could say almost politically unrestrained.

“I’ve always said this, it sounds promiscuous but I’d get into bed with anyone. I would. It’s just honest.”

Politics does make strange bedfellows. Nonetheless, the Dublin Bay South politician admits the Greens — who returned two TDs in this Dáil after a walloping in the last general election — are open to doing business with almost any party or group of politicians if it involved going into government.

Floating between just 3% and 4% in some polls, the former government party is still in recovery — almost like the economy it left on the ground when chased out of power in 2011.

Nonetheless, Ryan, 53, in a wide-ranging interview with the Irish Examiner, is philosophical about why being in government matters.

“I’m terrible, they [the party] are always pulling me back. I’m the one who’d love to be in government because my experience of government is actually a positive one, even the most incredibly difficult time [we had].

“I found you could do stuff. I wouldn’t be shy about going back into government because my experience was actually very rewarding.” And how many TDs would he hope to return if there was a snap election? Six.

“The way to go into government is that you actually have that full Cabinet collective responsibility. You then have the power to say no,” explained the former environment minister.

And the full spectrum of parties would be options to share power with, he contends, including Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin, Labour and Solidarity among others.

The Greens are election ready. In last year’s general election, on top of two seats won in Dublin, the party won large votes in Waterford, Louth, Dun Laoghaire and Cork South Central. Membership is up 28% to 1,500 in a year and it hopes to triple its councillors to 36 in the next local elections.

“Even if we disappeared tomorrow and folded up shop and stopped operating as a party, the next month there would be green party because there is a space, a political philosophy that is going to be represented. And it is not just here, it is in every country in the world.

“I was at a meeting three weeks ago of the global greens in Liverpool and they were literally from all over the world. It was the Korean Greens sitting down with the Kazakhstan Greens. It is a global political philosophy.”