Michael Clifford: Green divisions not helping the planet

Hazel Chu and Jackie Healy Rae may be from different planets, but in one respect they’re from the same side of the street.

TRACKING the progress of Hazel Chu during the week, the one person who came to mind was Jackie Healy-Rae. Hazel and Jackie may be from different planets, but in one respect they’re from the same side of the street.

Back in 1997, Fianna Fáil snubbed Jackie. He had spent decades labouring in the vineyards of South Kerry for the party and believed that his time had come. However, the lads with the clipboards thought he didn’t fit the party’s image at that point in its evolution. There was no nomination for Jackie to run in the general election.

So he resigned from the party, stood as an Independent and spawned a political dynasty, the sound of which still resonates around parliament today in tones wild and pure.

Hazel’s journey was a little different. She was first elected to Dublin City Council in May 2019. Eight months later, she was elected chair of the Green Party. In June 2020, she ascended to the office of lord mayor of Dublin.

Now, nine months into that job’s 12-month term, she believes she’s been hanging around long enough and her time has come for elevation to the Houses of the Oireachtas.

She is having her Jackie moment.

Brave and uncompromising

Ms Chu is running for a vacant seat in the Seanad. She is a person of substance who has plenty of experience of the real world outside politics, in both business and State agencies.

Since occupying elected office, she has also been a target for the nascent element of racist hate merchants who are trying to gain a foothold in society.

Ms Chu’s reaction to these cowardly attacks has been brave and uncompromising.

So what’s the problem?

Courageous and articulate woman from a minority background runs for seat in the house that was originally designed to specifically accommodate minorities. Who could be against that?

As it was with Jackie, the party has a problem.

The Green Party executive decided not to contest the election. The thinking is that if the party backs the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael candidates in this one — there are two seats in play — the gesture will be reciprocated if another vacancy arises.

If this were the case, the chances of a Green win in any such election would be greatly enhanced.

As a result, the Green parliamentary party is going to vote for candidates from its coalition partners.

That’s not good enough for Hazel. She is running as an Independent. Last Wednesday, she launched her campaign.

Strangely, there was no mention at the launch of her resigning the mayoralty, as would be expected now that she’s pitching for another job.

Neither did she feel honour-bound to immediately resign as chair of the Green Party.

What she has, she holds, just in case the Seanad thing doesn’t work out.

Ms Chu is not a rogue member of the party. Her candidacy is symptomatic of the division and dysfunction within the Greens, precisely at a time when unity of purpose should be the complete focus

Six of the party’s 16 parliamentary party members, including deputy leader Catherine Martin, nominated Ms Chu to run. Also among them is Ms Chu’s partner, Dublin South-Central TD Patrick Costello. In effect, they were thumbing noses at the leadership.

This messing should be good knockabout stuff.

However, for anybody interested in the climate and biodiversity crisis, the Greens are the most important element of Government, if not the whole body politic, right now.

Transitioning to a green economy and society is going to be tough. The main parties, including Sinn Féin, will follow public opinion, but certainly won’t lead. Political capital will not be expended on an issue that can be consigned to the never, never, beyond the next election.

Climate Action Bill

This week, the Government published its Climate Action Bill, the centrepiece legislation in attempts to arrest climate change.

The bill includes an ambitious target of a 51% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. There will be serious grief in attempting to implement it.

The bill would not have made it this far without the Greens. And it won’t come within an ass’s roar of full implementation without the Greens. The urgency that attaches to this issue is the reason the party achieved its highest vote and seat numbers in the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, some among them still can’t come to terms with having to govern with the civil war parties.

Ideally, most Greens would prefer to be in coalition with like-minded centre-left entities, but the numbers for that didn’t stack up. As a result, three quarters of the membership voted to go into coalition with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in order to implement policy.

Unfortunately, the purists who rejected coalition remain traumatised. Saving the planet is all very well, but nobody told them they’d have to get their hands this dirty.

Their only hope of salvation is to get rid of leader Eamon Ryan and replace him with Catherine Martin, who narrowly lost out in the leadership contest last year

Among Martin’s chief supporters are her TD husband, Francis Noel Duffy; her senator brother, Vincent P Martin, and Chu and Costello.

 Catherine Martin should replace Eamon Ryan as Green Party leader.

Within the party, some of the purists have set up their own group called the Just Transition Greens. The name alone suggests that they believe that the leadership, and the majority of party members, are unconcerned about the just transition to a green economy.

The purest of the purists have left in disgust at the Faustian pact with the civil war parties.

These young self-styled radicals were reported this week to be setting up a new outfit, called An Rabharta Glas, which translates as Green Left.

According to leaked documents, one policy paper instructs: “Don’t mention electric cars and read Karl Marx.”

The reports on the leaked documents also included an analysis of the Green party, with the heading “weaknesses to exploit”. It depicts a photograph of Ryan asleep in the Dáil.

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The inevitable domination of Irish politics by these fearless comrades is awaited with fevered anticipation.

For the purists who remain in the party, this week will have represented something of a victory. Ms Chu grabbed a lot of headlines. Sufficient contempt was demonstrated for Ryan and the majority who backed his leadership.

The credit he is due for getting a climate action bill this far after 30 years in politics was diluted. There has been talk that the whole farrago could undermine the coalition.

If the purists get their way, the party will one day be a constituent element in a left-wing coalition, with Catherine Martin leading from the front, electrifying environmental politics.

Only then will the purists be in a position to act with unity of purpose to address the climate and biodiversity crisis.

And if the planet can’t be saved under those circumstances, maybe the damn thing just isn’t worth saving.