Deirdre deBurca in Village Magazine - March 9th, 2010

The following are extracts from an Interview with Deirdre deBurca in Village Magazine on March 9th 2010.

"I have to admit that in my opinion – and particularly in our second year of government – weak leadership, an attachment to political office and a morbid fear of pro voking an election, has effectively paralysed our parliamentary party. Our government partners took full advantage of this situation and have managed to get us to support deci sions which I believe we should never have supported, and which possibly have inflicted irrevocable damage on our green political ‘brand’.

The Green Party began to get involved in the develop ment of policy responses to what might be called the ‘legacy’ issues of previous Fianna Fail dominated administrations. I believe that in relation to key measures that we supported in government – such as the Bank Guarantee Scheme, NAMA, and even the last two Budgets – the Green Party was only allowed by our government partners to have a rather limited impact. As a result, in my opinion, the party has found itself supporting legislation that con flicts with its fundamental principles, par ticularly in relation to NAMA.

There are many issues and policy decisions which I could highlight that I believe reflected the failure of the Green Party to properly assert its position in gov ernment. The willingness of the party to agree to allow the first, important stage of the Banking Inquiry to be held in private is in conflict with our original public call for a fully open and public inquiry. The exclusion of the establishment of the Bank Guarantee Scheme from the official remit of the bank ing inquiry was also a regrettable concession to the Fianna Fáil party.

In my experience, the Green Party has been prevented by Fianna Fáil from making a meaningful contribution to the last two bud gets. In fact we were bounced into many of the extremely unpopular measures contained within the disastrous Budget introduced at the end of 2008. This badly-planned budget saw the automatic entitlement to a medical card being removed from the over seventies, amongst other measures. My recollection of the processes surrounding the negotia tion of the budgets, is that our government partners steamrolled us into accepting the measures within those budgets without tak ing on board much of our input. Our willing ness to go along with the original reversal of the cuts to the salaries of higher-level civil servants in the most recent budget clearly conflicted with our repeated public commit­ments to ensuring that the better-off in soci ety bore their fair share of the burden of any necessary corrections to the government’s public expenditure bill.

There have been many other policy areas in which the Green Party has allowed Fianna Fáil to outwit and out-manoeuvre it, the orig inal vote of confidence in Minister Willie O’ Dea being the most recent. We supported enshrining the crime of blasphemy into the new Defamation legislation with Fianna Fáil’s encouragement even though we are a socially liberal party. We failed to protect the Equality infrastructure in this country from the swingeing cuts imposed by the Dept of Justice, despite our best efforts. Our attempts to influence the new Immigration, Residency and Protection Bill were largely rejected by Minister Dermot Ahern, occa sioning great annoyance in the party. Real Seanad Reform is unlikely where – given strong Fianna Fáil resistance to any serious programme of reform – John Gormley is now going to settle for a widening of the univer sity franchise (something which does not affect most Fianna Fáil senators) and possi bly minor changes in relation to the numbers on some of the vocational panels.

The reform of local government is also an area in which the Fianna Fáil party is strongly resisting Green Party policy initia tives. Despite John Gormley’s promises to transform local government – which is badly needed – there is already a revolt among Fianna Fáil backbenchers. The Civil Partnership Bill was another case in point. Under the orig inal Programme for Government, both par ties signed up to the introduction of the legis lation and the target date for its introduction was within the first year of being in office. Instead, conservative Fianna Fáil members delayed its potential passage for well over a year.

As I am now in a posi tion to reflect on the Green Party’s two-and-a-half years in government with Fianna Fáil, what is clear to me is that the balance between what the party is achieving in policy in government and what it has had to swallow from Fianna Fáil has become much too skewed in the direction of Fianna Fáil’s agenda. I do not believe it is in the Green Party’s interest to continue in government unless we can assert our selves and our agenda to a much greater extent. Our achievements in government must be weighed up against the many ‘hits’ that we have taken and the general damage that has been done to the Green Party ‘brand’. The brand reflects the popular per ception that we are not wedded to power and office like other more mainstream parties, that we are free of corporate influence and that we genuinely have the good of the community and the environment at the heart of our policies. If we continue to allow ourselves to be seen as desperate to stay in government regardless of what we have to support, the party will have to spend an awfully long time in the political wilderness before the public starts voting in numbers for Green Party candidates again. In short, unless there is a fundamental trans formation in the way that the Green Party is engaging in government, it is my considered opinion that it should pull out of government sooner rather than later."