This piece for the next issue of SR is by Joe in Belfast. He is something of an unreconstructed ortho-Trot. Though you’d probably have worked that out for yourself. It is a beginner’s guide to just how rubbish the Irish Green Party have been since entering Bertie Ahern’s government. As Lenin, probably, once remarked “they’ve been seriously shafted and look like a bunch of clueless, unprincipled amateurs.”

In June this year the Irish Green Party became the latest of such parties around the world to enter government, in a coalition with the Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrat (PD) parties, which had been in power for the previous 10 years.

The record of this government, especially from an environmental perspective, has been disastrous. Fianna Fail is notorious for being the party of developers and builders whose last consideration is the environmental impact of their work. Their actions, fuelled by the economic boom in the State, has led to the massive expansion of Dublin so that the M50 motorway, which was supposed to be a ring road round the city, now resembles a car park in the middle of it.

Dublin City now covers the same area as Los Angeles but with only one quarter of the population.

Estates have been built with little or no infrastructure such as shops and community facilities with long car journeys are required to get to work. This lack of public services has led to a situation where dozens of children were without a school place at the start of the new school year. This hit the headlines because all the children were black, the Catholic Church making sure that the primary schools they control – 98% of them – provided for their flock first.

The Progressive Democrats are a Thatcherite Party so viciously right wing that their role has been to break the neoliberal consensus – from the right! Their banner policy going into the election was the widely unpopular proposal to build private hospitals on the public land of existing hospitals.

The Greens campaigned against all this as well as the gross inequality of Irish society and the political corruption that again erupted as an issue at the start of the campaign. They were widely seen as a possible component of an alternative coalition, describing a deal with Fianna Fail as a ‘deal with the devil..’

All this was thrown into the air when the leader of Fianna Fail, Bertie Ahern, asked the Greens to enter discussions with a view to them joining him in government.

Publicly discussions between the parties were about these issues plus the use of Shannon airport by US troops going to Iraq and the building of a motorway through the most important archaeological site in the country. In fact it transpired that the real negotiations were about how many posts they would get in government.

The Greens surrendered on every single one of the issues claiming in return commitments to a carbon tax and greenhouse gas emission reductions described by the Green’s first ever TD as ‘waffle.’ Any illusions that the party as a whole was any more progressive than its leaders were scuppered when the membership voted by 86 per cent to support going into government.

Even for cynics the collapse of the Irish Green Party has been astonishing. Such a capitulation is not explained by the particularly rotten nature of the Irish party. It is the result of the nature of Green politics, which is opposed to the only project that can save humanity and the planet it inhabits – the one based on the working class taking political power.

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