The Green Party’s loss of 11 of its 12 seats in the Dáil is a blow to two interlinked issues of critical national interest: avoiding climate catastrophe and restoring critically degraded biodiversity and landscapes.
Of course, no one party should bear responsibility for defending policies that benefit the whole population. But the fact sadly remains that only the Green Party, despite its shortcomings, gives strong and consistent support to these issues, which are intimately linked to current EU policy, especially the EU Green Deal. It is a telling reflection on the priorities of voters that they should have been wiped almost entirely off our political map at this moment – and that other parties fail to share their sense of urgency.
It is also true that the Greens’ coalition partners in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil scapegoated their junior colleagues for the undoubtedly unpopular nature of many of the measures required to cope with the climate and biodiversity emergencies.
They would have been better giving leadership by engaging their constituencies with the depth of the environmental crisis. Serious thinking is needed on how to do this in the light of opposition to much of the climate agenda.
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The election outcome gives little grounds for optimism on this score. While possible coalition partners for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, like the Social Democrats and the Labour Party, have strong environmental programmes, they are unlikely to highlight the very issues that annihilated the Greens in negotiating a programme for government, if this were to happen. Meanwhile, Sinn Féin remains reticent on all matters relating to the environment for fear of losing rural support.
Besides, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are more likely to win support from Independents than from the centre-left. And many Independents are explicitly opposed to much of the EU’s climate and biodiversity agenda.
The Irish situation is mirrored across much of the EU, where centre-right and far right groupings appear hellbent on destroying the Green Deal, taking demagogic short-term perspectives. Nor is this unique to Europe. After successive years in which increasingly frequent extreme weather events – fires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, crop failures – have made manifest the accelerating urgency of the environmental crises, opposition has emerged worldwide – often from self-interested sources – to obstruct measures that have any chance of alleviating them.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are not bereft of leaders who are very well-informed about the severity of the climate and biodiversity emergencies. It is not too late for them to set out a bold, publicly-engaging environmental agenda as a condition for supporting a new government. The security of future generations demands that they do so.