Heroes to Zeroes

The only people who matter have decided that the Greens are the one thing that the Greens thought no could ever accuse us of being – hypocrites. If the only thing that we change on foot of this verdict is the ribbon and wrapping on the irrelevance known as the “Programme for Government”, we will have proved them right.

Cabinet Government is, as the people know & understand, about joint responsibility. It is not acceptable to say there is no alternative or that we were outvoted. Those are excuses tantamount to “I was only following orders” or the “good Nazi” defences. It is not the case that things have been done in our name. These things have been done by US.

Name for me one thing outside of the “Green” agenda that we did right over the last two years? Name for me one thing on the “Green” agenda that was done with panache, brio or elan? (Actually, I know of one thing…only). We look like we are out of our depth.

In the pubs and over the kitchen tables of this land people saw us fiddling with lightbulbs and weeding vegetable patches while the classrooms were being stuffed to bursting, childrens wards closed and billion wasted to keep the developers in their ‘choppers.

If you want to play the blame game, look no further than ourselves. Every crisis is, according to the Chinese equal parts danger and opportunity. We have seized none of the opportunity afforded by FF’s dependence on us since Oct’08 and seem paralysed by the danger. Those on the ground in the party, saw this and, in one particular case at the Jan’09 Economics seminar, formally said it to the entire leadership from the floor -‘Please put some distance between us and FF now.’

We are almost a total irrelevancy to the vast majority of the people of Ireland. We have gone from being strange honest treehuggers to lickspittle incompetents in the space of two years. The parliamentary party have to work out their response for themselves – they are answerable to their electorate not to us. They are legally entitled to stay there for another 3 years. If they decide to stay in Government they had better get an enormous amount of real Green work done in that time. If they want to come out, that is fine by me.

But they need to know that they are ‘betting the farm’ on NAMA and that is something that they do not understand and it is something that goes against the grain of everything the Greens believe in and it is something that will determine every single other opportunity and decision in this State for the next 15 yrs.

We have more TDs than Councillors so what the Councillors get up to their own look out – whatever they can devise for themselves as a ‘modus vivendi’ is fine by me. They are to be hugely congratulated in weathering the storm that has taken down so many.

The ‘party’ – its rank and file – have to decide where we take the ‘Party’ from here. We are practically broke, tired and lacking in credibility.  It is however our Party. If we don’t like where it going, we can change that direction. I have a few suggestions but they are for private discussion initially.