Red-faced Greens still insist black is white... There's no limit what party will do to keep riding on Fianna Fail's coat-tails

From TimesOnline 7th March 2010 article by Liam Fay http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article7052461.ece

Harsh words indeed from Fay. Unfortunately, Fay is totally correct in everything he says. This is the Irish Green Party 2010.

From the article ... "In the Green party’s debating lexicon, a salty brew of vulgar abuse and pious condescension, the most damning epithet of all is “denier”. Part knave, part fool, a denier is someone who refuses to accept the scientific evidence of man-made climate change. Confronted with the inconvenient truth, the denier averts his eyes. Incapable of arguing his case on the facts, he spoofs, he dodges, he argues black is white and, when everything else fails, he runs away.

In other words, a denier behaves exactly as Senator Dan Boyle did on Wednesday night as he left Leinster House following the Greens’ parliamentary party meeting. TV3 News’s pictures of a shame-faced Boyle fleeing from the cameras while dodging questions from reporter Stephen Murphy were as instructive as they were comical. The tweeter-in-chief had become the retreater-in-chief, his formerly uncontainable multi-media chattiness supplanted by shifty evasion and blunt stonewalling.

Boyle’s reluctance to answer straight questions about the rotating cabinet seats controversy was understandable. The revelation that in 2007, while negotiating with Bertie Ahern, the former taoiseach, the Green’s parliamentary party agreed environment minister John Gormley would be replaced by backbencher Ciaran Cuffe midway through the government’s term is extremely embarrassing.

Having built their political careers on the claim that the Greens put policies before personalities, the party’s parliamentarians are now exposed as status-hungry hypocrites, for whom ministerial office is a merry-go-round on which they all feel entitled to a spin.

Viewed alongside the abandon with which Gormley and communications minister Eamon Ryan have dispensed lucrative state sinecures to Green stalwarts, the latest disclosure incinerates what’s left of the party’s pretence to be a standard-bearer for open, accountable and egalitarian politics. Even allowing for his intense discomfiture, however, Boyle lapsed into cute-hoor doublespeak with remarkable ease. Speculation about the proposed ministerial alternations had raged for days, so it was inevitable the subject would feature at Wednesday’s meeting and, as subsequent press briefings confirmed, it did.

In big ways and small, denial is now the trademark of the Greens. After TV3’s Ursula Halligan broke the story about the secret deal, party sources rubbished her report. Yet, while publicly insisting that no such deal existed, the Greens’ high command was conducting a witch-hunt to find the source of the leak.

The party’s propensity for denial is also evident in the inability of senior members to see themselves as others do. Despite the evidence that the Greens have become a wholly owned subsidiary of Fianna Fail, its parliamentarians continue to pose as conflicted sceptics.

Convinced that nothing less than the planet’s survival rests on their shoulders, the Greens are skilled at conflating their own advancement with the best interests of society. Hence the eagerness with which they concocted the ministerial rotation proposal.

Off the record, some Greens defend the wheeze as “good for democracy”. Democratic concerns were conspicuously overlooked, however, when party bosses were signing a pact with Ahern. The rotation plan is daft, of course. It reduces government to a game of musical chairs. It is Buggins’s turn politics.

What we learnt last week was significant not because it teaches us something new about the Greens, but because it highlights the extent of our ignorance about them. More opportunistic than hitherto suspected, they have not yet reached the depths to which they are prepared to stoop in order to indulge themselves in the spoils of office."