The Greens have made a big mistake: they’ve won office but lost power

I have no doubt the Greens decided to go into government for good and honourable reasons, but they will achieve no real goals.

And as a consequence, the very things they believe in most will be set back and they themselves, as a party, will suffer

NOEL BROWNE once said that the moment you enter a coalition, you must start thinking about how to bring it down. The remark was seized on by his enemies as proof that he was nothing more than a maverick. But there was more than a grain of truth in what he said.

Power, so the saying goes, comes from the barrel of a gun. In a democracy, of course, that’s not true. But in any coalition, especially a coalition of unequals, power derives from uncertainty. If you’re the smaller party in a coalition, your partners must be made aware at all times that there are certain things you’re prepared to compromise on and certain things you’re not. Certain distances you’re prepared to walk, and certain distances you’re not. Certain lines they mustn’t cross.

And the key thing is that the smaller party must determine these things for themselves. There must be a leader who can be trusted not to crumble when the party’s back is against the wall.

And the leader must be trusted to know where the lines are and when they have been crossed. This is partly about core values, partly about relationships and partly about trust. But mostly it’s about the effective wielding of power.

It has been a tradition in Irish politics, for good or ill, that the smaller parties tend to be more interested in change, the larger parties in continuity. You can’t make change without power, and you can’t have power in a coalition unless you know exactly where you are going.

That’s why one thing is absolutely clear about the decision of the Green Party to go into government. They are in office, not in power. Their capacity to influence change will actually be less over the period they are in government than it has been in the past.

And that’s terribly sad. I admire the Greens, and I respect them individually. But in terms of the pursuit of their own agenda, they have made a series of terrible mistakes in the past couple of weeks.

I have no doubt they have decided to go into government for good and honourable reasons, but they will achieve no real goals. And as a consequence, the very things they believe in most will be set back and they themselves, as a party, will suffer.

This has nothing to do with Fianna Fáil. The Taoiseach has constructed the best government he could in the circumstances and has done whatever deals he felt were necessary. There is something odd — unhealthy even — about the written deals with individuals and the promise of preferment for Beverly Flynn, but what he was about was constructing a tenable and workable majority, and he has achieved that. But it’s all about the structures and dynamic of government. Unless a party is clearly focused on what it wants to achieve in government, and willing to stake its place there on delivering that, it will never be given a chance to set the agenda.

You can see it from the way the programme for government is written. It is simply not possible to see either a Green hand or, in fairness, even a Fianna Fáil hand as you read page after page of the boring text. It is a regurgitation of Towards 2016 and the already-published plans of the last government, put together by civil servants while the party negotiators went through the pretence of writing a programme.

The National Development Plan, Transport 21, even the decentralisation programme — all of them excoriated by the Greens — are all there in full. Whatever the negotiators were really doing, and whatever the Green delegates were voting on, it certainly wasn’t this.

What the language, style and priorities of the new programme for government demonstrate is one thing above all: there is a process that begins the moment a party enters government. Brendan Halligan once called it a process of absorption.

The dynamics of the cabinet process are unique, and surrounded by a certain mystique. They are designed to ensure that all cabinet members share a great sense of collective responsibility and duty, and they are effective in achieving that.

But they also have the effect of blurring party lines while people are actually in the cabinet room, thereby making the pursuit of singular objectives difficult. Ministers in cabinet constantly seek advice before they act, and always from civil servants.

The civil servants who advise them are trained to ensure that the cabinet acts collectively and seek to make the avoidance of mistakes a first priority. All of the senior civil servants involved are extremely skilled, for instance, at producing papers that explain why something shouldn’t be done. They’re far more reluctant to produce a paper on how it could be done.

That’s why a very clear focus is essential if you’re in the business of bringing about change. There is no Green focus in the programme for government — none at all. It is a continuation of the last programme for government with the Greens added for numbers. The absorption process I described usually starts when you take your place at the cabinet table. In this case it started the day the Greens entered Government Buildings to commence negotiations.

The absence of a party focus in the programme for government is a key mistake. In many ways, though, the decision of Trevor Sargent to step down, especially in order to take a junior position in government, is worse.

I know it has been said that his decision reflects the honourable man he is. I fully accept that. But he has left his party leaderless — or rather, he has forced his party to choose a successor from among their two ministers who are already getting bogged down in departmental work.

I suggested recently, in the context of Michael McDowell, that the moment someone is elected leader of a political party, they step onto the bottom of a steep learning curve. No matter how long they have served as deputy or been in the shoes of the leader before them, nobody understands how little they really know about leadership until they have to exercise it. They become the vision-maker, the attention-getter, the star performer. They have to know something about everything — a party leader can’t be ignorant about economics but brilliant on the arts.

It’s not an easy job, and nobody is ever prepared for it. When learning how to lead a party has to be combined with learning the ropes of how to be a successful minister in a coalition government, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

The right thing for Trevor Sargent to have done if he wanted to be true to his word would have been to retain the party leadership, but decline any offer of a seat in government, senior or junior. That would have put him in a position where, on behalf of the party but free of collective responsibility, he could have held the Government to account on a daily basis, while retaining the freedom to organise around the country. Now that just might have scared his coalition partners.