'Side salad' Greens wilt as reputations

Dáil Sketch:How right you were, Kermit. It's not easy being Green. Smokin' John Gormley and his sidekick, the smouldering Eamon Ryan, were not in the Dáil chamber yesterday for Leaders' Questions or the Order of Business. Never mind, Opposition leaders were more than happy to kick them around in their absence.

Smokin' and Smouldering were wise not to show their faces. That would have been looking for trouble, and they're in enough of that at the moment. As it was, their ears must have been burning, wherever they were.

Both men were in the spotlight due to Monday's decision by An Bord Pleanála to give permission for a massive waste incinerator in Dublin 4. The Greens campaigned energetically against the facility before they went into power with Fianna Fáil, and continued to stoke the flames of their ardour since then. But sadly for them, their senior government colleagues never really warmed to the cause.

This is very convenient for Fianna Fáil, who pull in a lot of Dáil seats around south Dublin and also have a Taoiseach who lives across the bay in Drumcondra - just a few wafts away from emissions on a breezy day. Indeed, FF was in power without them, whimper the Greens, when the deal for the facility was signed and sealed.

None of that matters. Smokin' John, Smouldering Eamon and the rest of their party colleagues seem destined to carry the ash-can for the controversial decision.

No wonder the handful of FF Ministers sitting beside the Taoiseach looked remarkably unconcerned by the fire building across the chamber. Even Séamus Brennan, who is billeted in Dublin South and might have expected to inhale some noxious political backlash from voters, didn't appear too bothered.

Instead, with not one Green deputy in sight, TDs sat back on the government benches and enjoyed the entertainment as Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore took it in turns to excoriate the Greens.

IndaKinny was first. "No sign of Minister Gormley" he remarked, "the helpless and hapless Minister Gormley." Then he noticed Minister Ryan's absence. "They're like Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show: commenting on everything but not able to do anything." He put the major statements John Gormley made about incinerators to Bertie, including one that it might be possible, through recycling and other methods, to render the Poolbeg incinerator "redundant". Did the Taoiseach agree with his Minister? Bertie mumbled and rumbled and spat out statistics like sparks from knotty wood.

Then he talked about "de MBTs". That's something called Mechanical Biological Treatment. Although given the Taoiseach's rather confusing answer, he may have been talking about the popular Masai Barefoot Technology footwear.

Enda tried again. "You see, Taoiseach, you're being paid almost 6,000 a week and you haven't answered the questions I asked you." Bertie shot him a withering look. So? Then treated him to more of the same.

Eamon Gilmore had a go.

Like his FG counterpart, the best way he had of attacking the Government on the incinerator issue was to attack the poor Greens. And in particular, John Gormley, who now has every incentive to keep the 30th Dáil in business for as long as possible so he can try to repair the damage done to his political prospects this week.

Deputy Gilmore is of the view that Mr Gormley was in a position to stop the project from going ahead when he got into the Department of the Environment. Bertie disagreed.

"Minister Gormley must be the first politician ever to have found, when first appointed to Government, that he has less power than he did when he was in Opposition," snorted Eamon.

Then he referred to the Green Party as "the side salad of the Government". All this, before they even got to John Gormley's suggestion that he might donate his ministerial pay-rise to his party. This, it transpired, is not legally possible.

Fine Gael's Charlie Flanagan had a thought: "he can put it into the incinerator."

Bertie was very quiet. Maybe he was thinking of a deserving cause, not too far from home, which John might like to support.

Like a poor 56-year-old orphan lad from Drumcondra, who has to pay for his own tea, cook his own rashers and doesn't have access to a yacht. Give a little, John. It would help a lot.