Members of the Irish Green Party voted overwhelmingly to enter a coalition with the two traditionally dominant centre-right parties on June 26.
Coming less than a decade after the Greens were decimated for their last stint as a junior partner in government ‒ propping up Fianna Fáil and implementing a vicious austerity program from 2007-2011 ‒ this move cements the Greens firmly and indisputably as a party of neoliberalism.
Observers had speculated that due to a surge in younger and more radical members entering the Greens in the past two years, the party would find it difficult to meet its constitutional threshold to enter government. This required at least two-thirds of the membership to vote in favour of the Programme of Government agreed with the leaders of Fianna Fáil (FF) and Fine Gael (FG). Several high-profile party members, including some of its elected representatives, called for a no vote. But in the end, 76% of the membership voted in favour, easily passing the threshold.
Members of the Dáil [Assembly] sat on Saturday to elect the Taoiseach [head of government], FF leader Micheál Martin. Part of the deal is for a rotating taoiseach, whereby the FF leader will take the position for the first half of the five-year term, followed by the FG leader. The Greens will get three ministries.
The Greens’ decision puts FF and FG back into government four months after a historic general election in February, in which the two mainstays of politics since the foundation of the Irish state a century ago failed to muster a combined 50% of the vote. FF and FG ‒ both parties of the centre-right that have alternately led every government for a century ‒ polled 22.2% and 20.9% respectively.
The election marked a major turning point in Irish politics as, for the first time in the state’s history, Sinn Féin (SF) topped the poll, winning 24.5% of the first-preference vote (under the single-transferable vote system). The Green Party took 7% of the popular vote, with smaller left parties Labour, Social Democrats and Solidarity/People Before Profit taking a combined share of the vote of around 10%.
To form government, a majority of at least 80 seats is required in the 160-seat lower house. After the February election, FF emerged with 38 seats; SF with 37; FG with 35 and the Greens with 12. A coalition of the left-of-centre parties was closer than ever before, but only amounted to 69 seats outright and would have needed support from at least half of the 22 Independents, many of whom ran on a right-wing platform.
The surge to SF surprised everyone, coming as it did on the heels of a disappointing performance in the local and European elections in 2019 in which the party lost seats. SF ran only 42 candidates in February but topped the poll in 30 constituencies, indicating it could have won many more seats, and with its distributed surpluses helping get other left candidates across the line. This was partially due to an effective “vote left, transfer left” campaign that benefited all parties to the left of FG and FF, including the Greens.
The leftward surge of the electorate was fuelled, in particular, by anger at the long-running housing and homelessness crisis; a shambolic, two-tier healthcare system; and a plan by the incumbent FG government to increase the retirement age from 66 to 67 years old.
About-face on basic principles
Following the February election, SF held talks with smaller left parties, though the Labour Party ruled itself out of entering a coalition government. FG and FF refused to entertain the idea of negotiating with SF despite its election victory, citing its historic links with the IRA ‒ a mantra that has, to say the least, worn thin with voters 22 years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed.
All parties and the media described the general election as a “vote for change”. The Greens colluding with the two right-wing parties to exclude the left party that won the election is an unedifying spectacle, and has prompted anger among many who supported the “vote left, transfer left” movement. SF will now lead the opposition.
The Greens held a special online convention on June 18 to discuss whether or not to endorse the Programme for Government, during which the party’s finance spokesperson urged members to vote against the program, describing it as a recipe for the “most fiscally conservative government in a generation”.
The Programme for Government was sold to the membership by a propaganda barrage by Green Party leaders and the mainstream media. The most commonly used argument was that the Greens had run on a platform of acting urgently in response to the climate emergency, and that to sit out the next five years was not an option. The Greens’ success in securing agreement for their “red line” of making year-on-year emission reductions of 7% each year until 2030 underpinned this argument.
The Greens’ endorsement of the Programme for Government means the party is doing an about-face on two crucial foreign policy issues with regard to which Ireland could punch well above its weight internationally in terms of defending human rights and the environment.
Firstly, there is no mention of the Occupied Territories Bill in the program, indicating that FG forced both of its coalition partners to drop this commitment to end trade with the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
The Greens had supported the Occupied Territories Bill, and FF had abstained, in previous votes that allowed the bill to pass the second stage in the Dáil last year, where it has since been blocked by FG through an undemocratic procedural mechanism.
Secondly, the program contains a commitment only to carry out an “assessment” of the impact of the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement despite the fact that the trade agreement was decisively rejected in a Dáil vote last year. The agreement, which must be ratified by all EU member state parliaments as well as the European Parliament, will fuel the burning and deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, possibly the most damaging anthropogenic contribution to global warming currently underway.
The Dáil vote on Mercosur last year was decisive, with TDs (MPs) from most parties, except FG, rejecting the agreement on the basis of both environmental concerns and worries over the impact of an influx of Brazilian beef into Ireland would have on the state’s farmers.
It appears that FG has used the Programme for Government to override the democratic votes on both of these issues, and has successfully forced the Greens and FF to back its own position against banning settlement goods and in favour of backing the Mercosur agreement.
Eco-austerity
The Programme for Government contains virtually nothing when it comes to the crises in housing costs, social housing and homelessness. In her speech to the Green Party convention, finance spokesperson Neasa Hourigan said: “I’m not voting against this because I don’t think it will solve the housing crisis. I’m voting against it because I think this document will make homelessness worse. There is no rent control. There’s no ban on evictions due to sale, but there is an overarching commitment to private home ownership without locking in how truly affordable housing could be achieved.”
The pandemic seems to have barely registered in the healthcare section of the Programme for Government, with heath reforms (Sláintecare) aimed at improving access, affordability and quality being postponed until 2022. There is nothing in the program either for workers’ rights, with no commitment to enshrine statutory collective bargaining rights for all workers, nor enforceable access to workplaces for unions.
The existing carbon tax will rise from €26 per tonne of carbon dioxide to €100 per tonne by 2030 ‒ but the Greens’ proposed fee-and-dividend model that would ensure redistribution of the revenue to benefit lower-income households has been scrapped in favour of a regressive model.
The one area of the Programme for Government that outlines a progressive policy that actually includes firm commitments and defined funding is on the expansion of walking and cycling lanes in the government’s transport budget and program. This is a necessary step forward in policy but, as the only concrete win in the agreement, will reinforce the ‘FG on bikes’ description of the Greens among the rest of the left.
A group of young and rural Green candidates wrote an open letter to the party, urging a no vote, saying: “We know that the climate crisis requires urgent action. However, the need for urgency makes it all the more important to consider inequality. To be fast, climate action must be fair. Policies that hit the most vulnerable in society the hardest and exacerbate inequality are neither just nor effective.”
Even when it comes to the headline Green achievement ‒ the 7% year-on-year emissions reductions by 2030 ‒ the incoming government is highly unlikely to succeed. The program commits to an average of 7% by 2030 and notes the cuts will take place in the second half of the decade, after the end of this government term.
More importantly, it fails to outline exactly where these cuts will come from. It leaves the most polluting sections of the Irish economy entirely intact, with minimal reforms, if any ‒ the cattle and dairy farming, aviation and road haulage sectors are practically untouched. Despite the media spin, the agreement does not include a firm commitment to ban the importation of fracked gas.
The most important aspect of the agreement is its fiscal policy. The program commits to deepening Ireland’s tax haven economic model, refuses to impose higher taxes on the wealthy, and commits to making year-on-year deficit reductions. The only new revenue will come from regressive consumption taxes including the carbon tax, and taxes on plastic and sugar.
Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 recession, this blanket commitment to reducing the deficit each year reflects the failed FG and EU austerity ideology that has caused so much pain in Ireland since the 2008 crash. This will indeed be “the most fiscally conservative government in a generation”.
Lessons from recent history
The February poll cemented the long-running decline of FF and FG. From the time the first FF government was formed in 1932 until it was crushed in 2011, the party was in government for 61 of those 79 years. FG-led governments, usually with Labour as a junior partner, came to power when voters tired of FF.
This system of sharing power by two centre-right parties that emerged out of the Civil War in 1922-23 has distorted the development of Irish politics ever since, preventing a left-right ideological divide from becoming the basic faultline of the political system as it was in most Western industrial countries throughout the 20th century. The weakness of the Irish labour movement (in what was until relatively recently a largely agrarian economy), partition and its effects, and the preferential voting system have also contributed to this phenomenon.
After years of corrupt mismanagement of the Celtic Tiger property boom, FF formed a coalition government with Greens following the 2007 general election, which was propped up by a handful of others including two representatives of the right-wing Progressive Democrats. It was the first time the Greens were in government since the party was created in the 1980s. The Greens had six seats and two ministries, environment and communications. The government oversaw a €64 billion bailout of the Irish banks by the EU, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund in 2010, and enthusiastically implemented the vicious austerity program demanded by the Troika.
In the general election that followed in 2011, both FF and the Greens were crushed. FF went from 77 seats to 20, while the Greens lost all their seats and polled just 1.8% of the vote. The winners were FG and Labour, who formed a coalition government with Labour as a junior partner.
This government maintained most of the cuts to social protection that the previous government had implemented but deepened the state’s strategy of courting US multinational corporations from the technology and pharmaceutical sectors to avail of the tax avoidance techniques facilitated by the Irish state, allowing it to claim a quick economic “recovery” ‒ a recovery that never seemed to make it down to the household level.
Yet, while both FF and the Greens suffered dramatic losses after their government term, in the 2016 general election, Labour was wiped out while the FG vote held up a little better. FG dropped from 76 seats to 49, while Labour dropped from 37 seats to seven. From 2016 until the February election, FG led a minority government with FF supporting it through a confidence and supply agreement.
FG has clearly become the party of choice for international capital and the EU ‒ as reliable managers of the Irish economy as an offshore financial centre, without the same baggage of incompetence, corruption and social conservatism that FF carried.
This rough outline of electoral politics in the Irish state in the 21st century reveals several simple lessons. The first is that people are steadily turning away from FF and FG. Both parties are in a steady and consistent decline.
The second is that when left-of-centre parties enter a coalition government with either of these right-wing parties, they bear the brunt of voters’ anger at the ensuing policies implemented by the coalition governments. They hold ownership of all of the policies implemented by that government, not only those implemented by their ministers.
The third is that Irish parliamentary politics is gradually but definitely moving towards a “normal” left-right divide, with the left vote increasing and the two old parties ‒ with no practical ideological or policy differences ‒ are finally being forced together, with one unable to rule without the other.
In this sense, the new coalition government may be clarifying and healthy for the development of this right-left politics in Ireland. But it is bad for the people forced to live under another neoliberal government for the next five years. And it is bad for the climate movement in Ireland, which, through the Green participation in this government, will undoubtedly be associated with painful austerity.
[Reprinted from Irish Broad Left. Emma Clancy is the editor of IBL. Follow her on Twitter @emmaclancy123.]