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Bills add up for Greens
11 July 2010 By Niamh Connolly, Political Correspondent
In the final days of the Dáil session last week, Fianna Fáil members were heard complaining bitterly of being ‘‘bullied’’ by the Green Party.
It was a flattering description for a party which was being attacked last summer for caving into Fianna Fáil’s policies of public sector cutbacks and the state’s bank rescue agency, the National Asset Management Agency (Nama)
But the Greens’ status has miraculously changed from government whipping-boy to the tail wagging the dog, a turn of events that has nettled many of the Fianna Fáil backbenchers.
The Greens celebrated their tally of four bills in the final ten days of the Dáil - including the Civil Partnership Bill which they pushed to the top of the agenda - on the plinth of Leinster House last Thursday, as protesters crowded around them to object to the bill extending legal rights to same-sex couples.
In their postmortem about the impact of coalition on the Greens’ near wipe-out in last June’s council elections, Green TD Ciaran Cuffe took Fianna Fáil to task for stalling on the Greens’ social agenda, noting delays in publishing the Civil Partnership Bill.
‘‘We need clear timeframes on policy issues. We need to ramp up the policy delivery," Cuffe told The Sunday Business Post last June.
He pointed to delays in the publication of the partnership bill, which he said should have been finalised before the local elections. ‘‘This is symptomatic of the concerns we have to push through," he said.
The Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern, moved to publish the bill in early July last year and in return the Green leadership lobbied its membership intensely to support the Lisbon Treaty.
But the Greens’ legislation in the final days of the Dáil, including a contentious ban on stag hunting, puppy-farm regulations, and a Planning (Amendment) Bill, have to be balanced against more than two years of major compromises to Fianna Fáil.
Last summer’s local elections saw the party virtually wiped out at local level in Dublin, and this was followed by internal revolts over the bank’s rescue plan, a convention to renegotiate the Programme for Government and a string of high-profile defections from the party.
But lately it has been Fianna Fáil’s turn for defections.
The Civil Partnership Bill claimed three Fianna Fáil scalps last week, with John Hanafin, Labhrás O’Murchú and Jim Walsh resigning the party whip in protest at its passage, while the Greens’ stag-hunting and dog-breeding bills cost the party Mattie McGrath and Senator Denis O’Donovan.
Tense debates
The last fortnight saw a ramp up in tensions between the Greens and the Labour Party, with Labour voting against the ban on stag hunting.
Labour’s Ciaran Lynch accused Green leader John Gormley of not listening or understanding the problems in the dog breeding bill that was later amended for safe passage through the House.
A last-minute meeting between Taoiseach Brian Cowen and members of the Hunting Association of Ireland held last Wednesday appeased hunt clubs’ concerns, while Gormley amended the bill in its final stages to satisfy the greyhound sector. It agreed that the welfare issues of the bill could be dealt with by amending the Greyhound Industry Act 1958.
‘‘It was a question of discerning between common sense and taking an adversarial position - he did not take on board when people were simply talking common sense," said Lynch.
Labour ultimately voted in favour of the dog breeding bill rendering Mattie McGrath’s opposing vote inconsequential to its passage.
But the Green Party said that from now on ‘‘the gloves are off’’ in targeting Labour in the next Dáil session.
The two parties share a common middle-class liberal electoral base in many Dublin constituencies.
Labour leader Eamon Gilmore, who in the past supported a ban on stag hunting, refused to debate the bill with Gormley on RTE.
Labour sent out a stinging message that Gilmore does not debate on the airwaves with the leader of a party which is only at 2 per cent in the polls.
Slipping down the polls
A slump to 2 per cent by the smaller coalition party in the latest Red C/Sunday Business Post poll has spooked many inside the party.
With doubts that the government will last its full term, some party insiders believe that from January next year the Greens will be approaching ‘end game territory’.
But this is disputed by some senior Green figures who insist that, provided the party continues to implement its policies, as it did last week, it should not seek an early exit but stay in for as long as possible.
‘‘If we can continue to achieve in government, we won’t be looking for a symbolic issue to jump on," said one senior source.
The Greens still have specific priorities for the autumn. Topping that list are a ban on corporate donations, a directly elected mayor of Dublin, electoral reform and the establishment of an electoral commission.
The alternative position inside the party is that from January onwards, the Green TDs must robustly start to differentiate the party from Fianna Fáil if any of its TDs are to make a return to the Dáil.
Obliquely referred to as ‘‘cultural differences’’ by the party’s chairman, Dan Boyle, these differences were elevated to a new level in recent debates on rural Ireland.
The ‘differences’ should be far more visible from now on, sources believe.
‘‘They should be there all along - you couldn’t get two parties more dissimilar than the Greens and Fianna Fáil," said one Green source.
‘‘There was definitely a sense of ‘let’s make the Greens fight very hard’ for the stag hunting and the dog-breeding bills.
‘‘The fact is that these people are not our friends and never will be our friends. The big challenge will be the budget in December and then it is crucial to get the ban on corporate donations. After this we will be at the end game."
But Fianna Fáil TDs may now retaliate in the autumn by dragging their feet on corporate donations. Several months ago, Fianna Fáil TD Bobby Aylward laid down a marker on the Greens’ insistence on banning corporate donations to all political parties.
‘‘On corporate donations, the Green Party’s Paul Gogarty said it was a core value to them, but I’m saying ‘we’ll see’ when this matter comes up for discussion because we have core values as well," Aylward told The Sunday Business Post shortly after the party’s annual convention last March.
When asked this weekend if Fianna Fáil would agree to ban corporate donations, one Fianna Fáil TD joked: ‘‘It won’t be an issue - because there are no corporate donations these days’’.
Gormley’s plan for a directly elected mayor of Dublin in October is not now likely to bear fruit until next year. Even if the Government’s bill for mayoral elections is published in the next couple of weeks as promised, it must go through Dáil debate in the autumn.
Budget pains
In the meantime, the coalition is facing another painful budget in December. Fianna Fáil TDs are hostile to a property tax on a primary residence and voiced objection to the idea at last week’s parliamentary party meeting.
It now appears to be off the agenda for this year’s Budget. Yet the Greens would equally find a flat rate water charge unacceptable on the basis that it would be a licence to waste rather than conserve water, sources said.
Gormley has plans for the installation of water meters in all homes in 2012 on the principle of a free allocation of water, and subsequent charges based on consumption.
The Greens believe they would be decimated by the Labour Party on water charges if they introduced a flat rate charge.
But the Department of Finance is proposing water charges based on a temporary flat charge for next year to help secure the exchequer savings for metering in 2012.
Gormley is firmly against such a move, and the Greens are now preparing for a fight, although the real political debate has not yet got under way.
Some senior Green figures acknowledge that the exchequer cannot find up to €1 billion for the country’s two million households, and may have to look to other measures.
One option is a possible public-private partnership to offset the immediate costs of metering against the charges imposed for water use over a longer period.
Boyle said this weekend that the party acknowledges that installing meters involved an upfront capital cost at a time when there was no money in the exchequer coffers.
But the party opposed a flat rate water charge as it believed it would not encourage conservation.
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