The Political Tipping Point, can we prevent runaway collapse of the Green Party?

No doubt there will be members of the Green Party that will not have welcomed my comments as reported in the Sunday Tribune today. Some will say the Party have never had so many members nationally. The reality in West Cork is that the number of members in the local constituency group have dropped from over 80 paid up members to less than 50 in the past year alone. Facts do not lie.

On average over the past 14 months the local group now get perhaps 3-6 members attending monthly meetings. The local group could only get a handful of members, and I mean a handful, to canvas the public in the recent local elections. Paid up members simply refused to participate as they did not support what was happening in Government or at parliamentary party level.

My comments in the Sunday Tribune do not just reflect my own personal attitude; I was asked by the reporter what was the view of the local party members?

While I cannot speak for all of them from my communications with members I know many are totally disillusioned with what happened within the party in the past year and in particular more recently at the NAMA convention.

They feel the convention was manipulated, they believe that the parliamentary party (PP) has by passed select committees within the organization such as the energy group, the sustainability group and the social and economic policy group who have been largely totally ignored by the NEC and PP. This week Tony McDermott, co-convenor of the Economic policy group resigned from his position for this very reason.

Many of the local members have said they believe the local branch has no role to play any more in the current political climate as the PP do not communicate with local organizations, consult with local organizations and seem to largely ignore party procedures to suit their purposes.

The parliamentary party has always said that it has a bottom up approach to management and policy development, however recent experiences do not support this view.

While it may be claimed by some that membership numbers reflect support for the GP in government, in reality you need to take a closer look at the membership statistics to test this claim. While a lot of new members joined the GP in the past two years, this has plateaued out dramatically or is scued on the basis of recent attempts at political lobbying which probably saw, for example, more student members join to lobby on education cuts at the recent convention.

Yet at the same time the party has lost some of the longest serving and most loyal members including former councilors and many active green members. How many more will they lose in the next year?

One also needs to look at the geographic spread of membership. The numbers may show a rise in membership in Dublin for instance yet not one recent candidate got elected in the capital or in any other major city. This is a travesty for the party. If the GP cannot get one green candidate elected in Cork city (15% city population are third level students) or indeed Dublin, Galway or Limerick when green global issues are to the fore, the party, as a political movement, has a problem of enormous magnitude.

The morale of the local branch is without doubt very low, they could not get a candidate to stand for the county council in local elections for my area and I at a late stage accepted the challenge to offer the electorate an alternative political candidate.

The party had an excellent candidate and community activist in the town council elections for Clonakilty, but through no fault of her own only managed to get 54 votes; and this in Clonakilty! the heart of West Cork, a self-proclaimed model green town with an active sustainable community group, numerous national tidy towns awards and the first fare trade town in Ireland to boot.

In Kinsale, the founding location of the transition town movement, the party had a standing green councilor who only managed to get elected on the eighth count. Moreover this was achieved by the candidate not promoting herself as a Green Party member to begin with.

I took up the challenge for the county county elections and canvassed a huge constituency with a few friends who were not Green Party members. Members were either too afraid or too disillusioned to canvas given the national mood of the electorate. I did manage to increase the Green Party vote by 20% from the last election receiving a respectable 3,500 votes which included 1-5 preference votes in a seven seater with 13 candidates standing that included two strong independents.

Some Green Party members may feel that my comments may influence morale negatively in the local group further. I would answer, you don't need to tell me about morale; I took a month off work to canvass, largely paid for the entire campaign myself and erected every single one of my posters and most of those for Senator Dan Boyle in West Cork, an area the size of most other counties. To boost my morale further when the counting was finished I had to take them all down again. How’s that for morale busting!

I'm a realist, a pragmatist, a real life environmental professional who has worked in the environmental field for many of the largest and most successful companies in Ireland. I have been active in climate change and environmental initiatives all my professional life. I know the challenges we face as a society and it scares the hell out of me.

I want people to embrace green politics, but the public right now have largely closed down the shutters on the Green Party; they just aren't listening.

What worries me more than current morale is that we could be left with no Green parliamentarians after the next election based on current public sentiments and surveys.

What are we as a political party and green movement supposed to do if this occurs?

There is no doubt the Green Party have shown themselves to be ahead of the game on environmental and sustainability issues, climate change, energy security, peak oil etc, the very reasons I joined the party in the first place. Notwithstanding this, right now they are totally failing to manage their public relations and what is most important, the sustainable development of the party.

What have the Parliamentary Party achieved that makes this worth while? A ban on stag hunting and light bulbs is what the public now associate with the Green Party and a Programme for Government (PFG) that is neither radical enough nor has enough concrete deliverables. The PFG had 200 pledges of which only 9 have any timeframes for commencement, the rest can be largely seen as aspirational.

And then we have NAMA, a delusional NAMA business plan, a newly conceived Special Purchase Vehicle (SPV) and a mountain of private financial sector debt that some believe we can manage with access to cheap credit. Have we not learnt already that credit is not cheap? I am worried that NAMA and its ramifications will bankrupt the nation, we do not have the means to protect all institutions and attempting to do so will ruin any possibility of us addressing the issues that are so critical right now.


Martin Wolf, former senior economist with the World Bank and former fellow of the World Economic Forum, stated clearly yesterday that Ireland does not have the national balance sheet to bail out all the institutions in trouble, yet we plough ahead regardless.

So, is support for NAMA REALLY worth the Green Party committing political hari kari, the clock is ticking not just on Copenhagen but on the current government and we may well have passed the tipping point to prevent runaway collapse of the party.