The situation the Green Party finds itself in now is analogous to 2011 in some ways.
It’s just not quite as bad.
Back then the party was humiliated. Its six TDs lost their seats. Its number of councillors went down from 16 to just three. To make matters worse, the party did not reach 2 per cent of the national vote, the minimum threshold for State funding.
Sure, the 2025 version of the Green Party is a shadow of the 2020 one having endured a brutal election last November. Five years ago the party had 15 TDs and 49 councillors and was in government. Now that total has been sheared to one TD (Roderic O’Gorman) and 23 councillors and is the smallest of the parties in Opposition.
RM Block
Former Green Party leader Eamon Ryan was fond of quoting Samuel Beckett’s famous dictum: “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”
The party did indeed fail better and is in a slightly better position when it comes to recovery.
O’Gorman, the party leader, the party’s sole senator Malcolm Noonan, and many of its 23 councillors gathered in Dublin city centre on Thursday for a meeting in advance of the return of the Dáil next week.
The party was sanguine about its future. It has just published its strategic plan and its chair, Cllr Janet Horner, spoke about the party putting climate at the centre of its agenda, of building up its strength at local level.
“We have a clear agenda ahead about what we want to deliver as a party, and we know we have incredible representatives and members who are deeply committed to doing just that – to bringing climate action into the heart of our communities, and to making the policies that we stand for relevant.”
[ Green Party’s meltdown largely due to ‘smaller party in government syndrome’Opens in new window ]
O’Gorman and his colleagues are returning the party to core values with a big emphasis on nature, sustainability and climate and also on childcare, social equality and other progressive policies. In the media conference, he specifically identified communications as a weakness for the party, saying it had not sufficiently conveyed its achievements in government, or countered the negative narratives used by its rivals against the Greens.
Durability was another theme of the strategic plan. The party aims to address that electoral phenomenon whereby it is either a feast or a famine and nothing in between.
Membership of the party has been shored up at 3,200, which compares well with other parties.
But that electoral problem was well summarised by Noonan. “Smaller central parties have to try to crack that nut of surviving being in government,” he said.
“You saw after the last general election, Labour and the Social Democrats sat back and did not go into government because of what happened to us.
“So it has to be about resilience, getting into government, getting your policies implemented, and surviving afterwards ... It’s really important we try to build in that resilience piece.”
The fact that neither Labour nor the SocDems – and they all fish for votes out of the same pool – went into government could possibly limit the Greens’ recovery. They are both stronger and expect to strengthen in Opposition. The Greens could be effectively squeezed out because of it.
Against that, unlike other smaller parties, the Green Party has managed to survive and bounce back because it has a coherent set of values that are relatively easy for voters to identify.
It will certainly take two or more electoral cycles for the party to regain the 15 seats it had in 2020. However, it may do comparatively better in the second-tier European and local elections in 2029. These are polls in which the party has done well in the past.
