INSIDE POLITICS:Before signing up to defend a tough budget, the Greens will need to extract significant concessions from Fianna Fáil, writes STEPHEN COLLINS
THE GOVERNMENT’S fragility in the face of the enormous pressures looming in the autumn has again been highlighted by the outbreak of anxiety in the Green Party at the Nama legislation, coming just a week after two Fianna Fáil TDs resigned the party whip.
The signals emanating from the Greens indicate that a revolt over Nama is highly unlikely, but the internal debate on the topic has focused attention on a much more dangerous hurdle for the Coalition, the imminent review of the programme for government.
Everybody in the Greens knows that before the end of the year they will be expected to endorse one of the toughest budgets in the history of the State. What makes it even more worrying for them is that there is no guarantee that the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party will hold steady in the face of fire at drastic measures, such as social welfare cuts.
The bottom line for the Green leadership is that before agreeing to sign on for the budget rollercoaster they need to extract significant and symbolic concessions from Fianna Fáil.
Even if they get what they regard as a satisfactory response from their partners, the Green Ministers will then have to convince a bruised party membership to endorse a new programme by a two-thirds majority.
The collapse of the Green vote in the local and European elections has led to some complacency in Fianna Fáil about the options facing their junior Coalition partners. The prevailing view is that the six Green TDs will cling to office like limpets, as they could all lose their seats in an early general election.
This assessment ignores the fact that internal party democracy is one of the core values of the Greens. The leadership has to bring two-thirds of the party members along with them, and unless the members are convinced that the best option for the party is to stay in Government, the Coalition is doomed. They also have to take into account the possibility that the Coalition may be doomed in any case.
That is why the Green leadership will have to convince Fianna Fáil to make the kind of concessions they can sell to their members and to the wider public as a justification for staying in Government. What they will be looking for are changes on a scale that will enable them to say they have transformed Irish political life for good, and that the mistakes that led to the property boom and banking collapse will not be repeated.
Items such as a complete ban on corporate donations to political parties and fundamental changes in the multi-seat PR electoral system are high on the Green agenda. Senior party figures take the view that the Irish electoral system has fostered the kind of clientelist politics that led to atrocious planning, political corruption and ultimately the banking crisis. They think that there is now an opportunity to reform it once and for all.
Getting Fianna Fáil to accept that a new kind of politics is necessary will not be easy. After all, Fianna Fáil has dominated Irish political life for the past 80 years because it mastered the art of using the levers of the current political system to its own advantage.
The Greens will also be seeking to protect key areas of public spending from the axe of the McCarthy report. Education is a fundamental concern for the party and it will try and minimise the impact of the cuts on the department in the budget.
The confidence among the TDs that the members will not block the Nama process stems from the fact that a two-thirds majority would have to go against the advice of the parliamentary party. That is regarded as highly unlikely. On the programme for government, though, the two-thirds rule cuts the other way, and the TDs have to persuade a big majority of their members to back them.
In the circumstances that will not be easy, whatever is in the deal. If Fianna Fáil is unwilling to make major concessions the leadership may even decide that there is no point in holding a conference. The only option then would be to leave Government.
Over the past two years the Greens have twice threatened to leave the Government but have not gone public about it. The first time was over an Opposition Dáil motion expressing confidence in the Mahon tribunal when Bertie Ahern was taoiseach. Fianna Fáil was reluctant to do so, but the Greens felt they had to insist on support, particularly given that John Gormley, at the Department of the Environment, was the line Minister responsible for the tribunal. The Greens got their way and Fianna Fáil agreed to express full confidence in Mahon.
The second issue arose over plans by Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern to abolish the Equality Authority and merge it with the Human Rights Commission. There was a tussle during which the Greens threatened to walk and Ahern eventually had to back down; a slimmed-down authority survived.
The review of the programme for government is shaping up as the most crucial battle in the lifetime of the Coalition. Formal negotiations between the two Government parties have not yet begun, and it was widely assumed that they would not get down to business until after the Nama Bill was passed by the Dáil in the middle of next month and the October 2nd referendum on the Lisbon Treaty was out of the way. However, the agitation within the Green organisation on Nama has concentrated minds in the party and there is a strong desire to get the review going immediately after the full Cabinet returns from holidays and normal political business resumes on August 26th. There have already been some exploratory talks between the two sides and an exchange of papers is expected by the end of this month.
The Greens are anxious to get moving quickly after that and have a deal wrapped up in time for a convention before the Dáil debate on Nama, in case the two issues have to be put to the membership.
Fianna Fáil Ministers were expecting a more leisurely set of negotiations which would not come to a conclusion until some time in October. If the Greens are serious about an early deadline, then politics will get very exciting in September.