Great news. 91% of members at a special meeting in Donegal have voted to split from the Irish 'Green' Party.
Thank god, real greens are active in Ireland and working for change. Greens across the world will be wishing them luck.
Fianna Fail has many a politician who has taken a back hander for some polluting project in the area and real greens really hate what they have done to the environment.
The Irish 'Green' Party voted to go into coalition government with Fianna Fail and things have gone from bad to worse, NAMA where bns is thrown to the pigs (i mean bankers, pigs as in the animal are great), the government continuing to build a motorway through Tara, cuts in the Dublin bus service, etc, etc.
Well politics involves compromises but for many people this went to far and if you think I am negative about them, I am nothing compared to irish voters who have deserted the Irish 'Green' party big time.
So Cllr Frank Gallagher and the good men and women of the Donegal Greens have voted to go independent and taken the brave step of building a new alternative green party.
good time for people to join the Irish Green Party and support moves to create a new green party.
With a bit of luck it will be John Gormley TD on his own and everyone else will be in a new Green Party...which is actually 'Green'.
If you know Frank Gallagher give him my kind regards, he is doing great work.
He is still up on the 'Green' party website, this is what it says
Frank Gallagher ( Cllr )
Contact information Phone: 086 3772913
Email: dlgreen (at) eircom.net
Postal Address: Rahan, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal
Frank lives in Rathan, Letterkenny and has been active in community politics for many years. He was chairperson of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed in Donegal and has been involved in trade union and anti-nuclear movement activities.
He took over from Neil Clarke as a member of Letterkenny Town Council in January 2009.
Sounds like a great guy give him an email and thank him, I am sure my mates in the Peruvian Amazon will be pleased that real greens are advancing not just in Latin America but in Letterkenny.
You may think Frank has the same name as the guy in Shameless but the shameless are those TDs who remain in government with Fianna Fail.
If you live in Donegal mail him and find out how to join the real Greens
10 comments:
Great, a split! Hurrah! Now we can be properly of the left, totally impotent and pointless.
In all fairness, "impotent and pointless" would be an improvement over actually malevolent which is about the only assessment any environmentalist or leftist can make of the government the Irish Greens are participating in.
I was reading a major Irish political blog yesterday and it is apparent that Derek's blog is being followed closely by both supporters and opponents of the Irish Greens. There were some very caustic attacks on Derek by government supporters there.
The Irish Greens at the moment are feeling very defensive and are not taking kindly to criticisms from the Left. They have even objected to Irish people in the Green Party of England and Wales making statements or even commenting on the situation there. The point is that we have every right to do so, and as I have said many times, the actions of the Irish Greens will immpact on Greens here. Green Left organised a fringe meeting at our autumn conference in September with Bronwen Maher, one of the founder members of the party, who resigned in disgust last January. She went through the process of what has happened to the party. At the time we met Bronwen she was a former Independent councillor, having lost her seat in the June elections - all of the Green councillors in Dublin also lost their seats. She has very recently joined the Irish Labour Party but told me that this was a decision she came to only recently. The problem is that she did not have the energy to go about completely starting up a new Green Party in Ireland.
However, there are some in the Irish Green Party who want to do this and the Donegal development seems to be part of that. My information is that about a third of the party membership is deeply disillusioned. And it seems that after they joined government two years ago, they were joined by a fair number of opportunists who have a very different agenda to those who were members for some time. What we are witnessing is a process which happens to many political parties. And it demonstrates the need for constant vigilance and ensuring that power does not become centralised.
Bronwen told me that one of the methods of ensuring loyalty is dispensing jobs with the party machine. This tradition of 'placemen' has a long history in Irish politics and dates back to the 18th century Irish Parliament which was encouraged to vote itself our of existence and pass the Act of Union in 1801 by a combination of bribery and appointments to sinecures.
The current party will suffer terribly at the polls but has made a Faustian pact with Fianna Fail which demands its soul. What remains after the next election is open to speculation.
Bronwen left cos she saw the writing on the wall: potentially saving her council seat was more important to her than anything else. didn't work in the end.
The GP in Ireland have had a dramatic impact here since entering government. For instance in the new programme for government there will be a 2:1 ratio spend in favour of public transport over roads! You would have to live here to appreciate how big a difference this is.
I would say to anyone reading this that if you want to learn about what the GP are doing in Ireland, inform yourself. Don't rely on Derek for your information. Critical voices have a place, but vindictive polemicists don't...
The Irish Green Party (and I am an ex-pat member) has make mistakes but has also matured. It still has a lot of very good people who are committed to change. The Left do not like Greens to think outside the box and get angry when we choose to be solution-driven rather than dogma-driven. The German Green Party has done this with the recent coalition with the CDU and FDP in Schleswig- Holstein.Traitors of course. Heard it all before.
"Taking responsibility" and "stepping up" are an important part of the political process. Principle does not have to mean populism. There are good things in the Irish Programme for Government which the Green Party negotiated. People should actually read it. We wanted more but we are a small party in a coalition. You play the hand you are dealt. If there was a viable opposition in Ireland then maybe things would be different but Fine Gael really is joke.
Ooops.. Before someone corrects me, I meant of course the state of Saarland not Schleswig-Holstein in my previous post.
Dermot, while I disagree with you thanks for commenting and putting forward a defence of the Irish Greens rather than a rant.
Yes I am broadly critical of the Saarland deal and yes I am aware of the far from attractive option of Fine Gael but the Irish GP does seem to have got into a car that even they said was going to crash.
The Scottish GP approach to the SNP government seems a better model.
Eamonn20Bn:
I am not a supporter of the Irish Green party although I agree with them on many issues eg., carbon taxes and mass transport. NAMA however is just too much. Independent experts say it will probably lose €20Bn by bailing out rich, reckless elites. I did share the widespread prejudice about the political & economic realism of Greens. I am delighted to see they are pragmatic. What they are doing on NAMA though is simply unprincipled. They have forgotten the difference.
Eamonn43Bn (formerly Eamonn20Bn)
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/property/2009/1119/1224259098941.html
These very nice apartments in the Dublin commuter belt (Newbridge, on motorway, railway) are down by 66% from peak. NAMA’s chief valuer wants to pay 50% of peak for everything (€47 Bn plus an LTEV). This would include development land which has fallen 70-80% in Dublin per Judge Kelly. If as NAMA supporters tell us the Dublin area is less oversupplied then NAMA is going to lose a gigantic amount. NAMA will now have to turn €31Bn (if there is a 66% fall on everything) into €74Bn in capital and interest in ten years. It won’t. NAMA will lose €43 Bn if we are lucky.
The worst thing: FF know the property market better than anyone. They know that they are stealing €43Bn from a country on its knees. The person who calculated the €74Bn figure is very knowledgeable about NAMA and I believe him.
http://www.politics.ie/economy/113049-what-nama-plan-really-means.html
When the chips are down the Greens have always betrayed the people in favour of the wealthy.
Greens are not a poltical party they are a condensation of various impulses and causes with a cross class and aclasse analysis
Greens have joined all manner of right wing and neo liberal coalitions.Their class sympathies always resurface in crisis they always side with the right and the wealthy
They cannot be trusted
The Irish are quite capable of organising resistance to the depression caused by the green/fianna govt.
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