GREEN PARTY leader John Gormley has said it became obvious to him during the summer of 2010 that the IMF would be coming into Ireland, some three months before the Government publicly acknowledged it.
Mr Gormley, minister for the environment in the Fianna Fáil-Green coalition, said that talking to his own officials and advisers during the summer, he began to take the view that the State was on the brink of insolvency.
The government denied that there would be outside intervention in the economy until November 18th.
This was when the governor of the Central Bank Patrick Honohan said in an interview that he expected the IMF and the EU to offer a loan facility to Ireland worth tens of billions of euro that the government would have to accept.
Mr Gormley was responding to recent comments by former Green Party TD Paul Gogarty and Senator Dan Boyle that he had argued to leave government at an earlier juncture, but that colleagues had decided collectively to stay.
He said the impending arrival of the IMF had compelled him to form a view that the party should leave coalition after three years.
"It became obvious over the summer that the IMF was coming into the country. If the IMF came in and went through the budget, my view was it was politically better to go before that happened," he told The Irish Times.
“I could see the writing on the wall. Whether it would have helped substantially or not is another question.” He said others in the party took a different view.
“We are a very democratic party. My view was not the prevalent one. We stuck with it. The fact of the matter is that our decision was not to leave government and go through the budget.”
He said that once the IMF did intervene, it became a huge factor, although he had been hoping that that would not have happened until the new year.
Mr Gormley said he had formed the view firmly that summer.
“I remember saying to people ‘we are in a bad place.’ I said at cabinet a few times ‘when are the IMF coming in and how close are we to the IMF?’ I was reassured that the State had enough funding.
“That was in the summer and early autumn. The problem was that any negative talk was seen as defeatist and precipitating things. It was a peculiar thing. That’s why banks cannot tell you the truth. They said that they needed to get confidence back.
“Any negative sentiment is viewed as heretical, but I believed it was very necessary from a personal point of view to be clear about all this,” he said.
Mr Gormley was speaking ahead of a special meeting of the Green Party membership in Dublin tomorrow to discuss the fall-out from its disastrous general election performance, when it lost all six seats and polled so badly that it is no longer eligible for State funding.
He has also announced he will be stepping down as party leader.
Some 300 of the party’s estimated 1,600 members are expected to attend tomorrow’s meeting.
Some delegates are expected to argue for the party to step back from the political arena to return to its campaigning roots.
The leadership issue is not expected to be dealt with until the party’s national conference in May.
