The issue of Ireland and the Irish general election result raised its head several times at conference. Patrick Harvie, the Scottish Green MSP, referred to it in his speech on Saturday – the Lib Dem activist speaking at the Political Pluralism event yesterday, when asked about the parallels with the LDs, said it was “worrying”. There was a speaker from the Northern Irish section of the Irish Greens on the platform on Sunday about devolution, which I attended, but he only spoke about Northern Ireland, although I left before the session ended, so he may have been asked about the result in the Republic.At our Green Left fringe meeting on Saturday night in Cardiff, Lucille Ryan O’Shea, from the Irish Greens, whom I have known for some time and who was at conference as Treasurer of the Green Islands Network, spoke about the “disaster” which the Irish Greens had created for themselves and said that an attempt by their party to form a Green Left a year ago, was defeated by the conferences committee saying that there were no rooms available at their conference. She took copies of our 'Watermelon' newsletter back to Ireland and said that she would be attempting again to set something up. Lucille is based in Mayo, on the more sparsely settled West coast of Ireland, whereas most members were in Dublin.
There is currently a lot of speculation in Ireland about what will happen to the party leadership after the total wipeout – a leadership election has to be held within 6 months. I will be in Dublin in late April to escape the Royal wedding and will try to meet up with some political activists there. Their parliamentary representation is totally gone and because they got under 2% in the polls, they also lose all state funding. Lucille also told me that they recently signed a 2 year lease on an expensive party office, so they are in serious trouble on several fronts.
Some press reports here about what is happening in Ireland now, including a good piece by Fintan O’Toole the radical journalist, who was one of the first to blow the whistle about the Celtic Tiger and its inevitable outcome. The news of the Irish emigrants in Canada is fairly typical.
The following quote from the Guardian should be compulsory reading for any councillors considering voting through cuts after next May.
Finally, the Greens. The former coalition partners have been obliterated, as the previous minor coalition party, the Progressive Democrats, were in 2007. The Green tenure in government was a failure, and they also suffered from guilt by association with Fianna Fáil. It seems unlikely they will ever be a force in Irish politics again. The country, the voters have decided, is green enough as it is.
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