Eating Greens is good

Over the last week political analysts have been straining themselves to stress the massive gamble that the Green Party has taken in entering government alongside Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats. The decision to take up the position of the junior partners in coalition is a massive gamble but one that had to be taken at this juncture.
It is true that the Green's imprint on the programme for government may not be immediately evident but anyone with a cursory understanding of Ireland's record on climate change and the impending energy crisis the country faces in the forthcoming years, will understand why they had to take the risk of entering the coalition. Despite their protestations to the contrary, the previous government's record on these two key areas of public policy was awful.  There are unquestionably less noble reasons for the Greens taking hold of the levers of power but essentially these two issues were rightly viewed as of too much immediate importance to be ignored.

Within environmental politics as a whole there is no consensus about the best way to practice green politics within more conventional party systems, never mind the political framework in Ireland with its predominance of centrist parties. What is understood within the discourses of green politics is, however, that real success is measured not only in electoral success. If the programme for government is achieved over the next five years, a true indictor of the Greens success may in fact be the cannibalisation of their policies by the parties of the centre. Were an all-party consensus to be reached on ambitious energy and climate change targets, the Greens may well have to be happy to see their policies implemented while they themselves become politically sidelined.

In the forthcoming weeks and months, I hope the controversial questions of the M3 and Shannon will be re-directed to the party that implemented these policies and that the two Green ministers take up what might be their only opportunity to implement long-term environmental and economically sustainable policies. It is, therefore, likely that the Greens may have engaged in an act of political suicide in joining with FF in government but in the long term it may in hindsight be seen by those with environmental concerns as sacrifice worth taking.