The Green Party
We’re now getting into the modern era with the Green Party, known as the Ecology Party from its founding in 1981 until it changed to the Green Alliance in 1983. The Irish-language version of the name still translates to Green Alliance, but the English-language name has been the Green Party since the fundis split off in 1987. The evolution of the nomenclature is by-the-by, though, because the Party's candidates stood as Independents until the 1984 Euros. Annoyingly, Wikipedia and other election result sites note some candidates as Ecology Party but not all, so I had to do some digging.
By the way, I really love the diversity of green party names in the era before Petra Kelly got big.
Like every Green Party in the world, there have been quite a few Interesting people involved over the years. Both the founder, Christopher Fettes, and one of their early councillors are both quite major in the Esperanto scene in Ireland. He now runs a 55-acre retreat for fellow Esperanto speakers and also Tolkien fans, and I bet he’s been banned from at least one forum in his life. The inaugural policies of the Ecology Party, by the way, included a call to end fractional-reserve banking. I'm not exactly sure when this was dropped (I suspect late 90s/early 2000s) but there is still a minority who take it to Conference every year.
After years of patient work, the Greens elected their first TD, Roger Garland, in Dublin South in 1989. He seems to have been quite keen on the environmental bits of the Green message but not otherwise super progressive. Like most Greens of the time, he wasn’t a supporter of European integration at the cost of localism, which led him to intervene in the European Parliament elections in 1994 on behalf of one of his allies, who was running as an Independent environmentalist and Eurosceptic, instead of the Green candidate Nuala Ahern. However, Ahern won one of two Green seats in an election which truly established the Greens as a relevant force.
As a side note, Nuala Ahern’s father had previously been a core member of Harry ‘Actual Name’ Diamond’s Socialist Republican Party, which won one seat in the Stormont Parliament in Northern Ireland one time. Just casually dropping that in there to fill the David Quota.
By this point, Garland was a has-been: in 1992, his first-preference vote had declined precipitously and he had therefore been defeated, probably largely because he didn't run surgeries or do casework. However, his election had broken the seal for others to be elected – namely, Trevor Sargent in Dublin North. A wingman for Sargent arrived in 1997 in the form of ex-Mayor of Dublin John Gormley. This was a breath of modernity: Gormley had been the first elected representative in Ireland to go in for one of these new-fangled ‘email addresses’, but had showed a slightly less farsighted view of the Internet in 1995 when he launched a ‘virtual Irish pub’ which appears to have been a sort of glorified chatroom designed to attract tourists to Ireland. He was lucky tourist numbers didn't crash down to zero in 1996.
Even while Dublin grasped Greens and modernity with both hands, there were still a number of old-fashioned misfits knocking about. Richard Greene, a Councillor who had been expelled from Fianna Fail, defected to the Greens in 1991. This, however, was most probably on account of nominative determinism, because his values were mainly those of Irish Republicanism and sex-based unpleasantness. He campaigned against abortion, the legalisation of divorce and various European treaties. He has also argued that a randomly selected pair of TDs (who just happened to be Jewish) had no understanding of ‘Christian marriage’. To be absolutely fair, I must admit that he was expelled from the Greens after a while and has mostly fought for his views as part of a series of micro-parties (Muintir na hÉireann, the Christian Centrist Party and the Christian Solidarity Party, mainly).
I will also note that Richard Greene lost his Council seat in 1999, for which he – amazingly – blamed an RTE documentary aired on the eve of poll which delved into the evils of dynastic politics in Ireland. He claimed that his opponents who had been featured in the documentary had thereby received some electoral advantage from being, er, exposed.
Some Eurosceptic Greens, of course, were not expelled for being weird. Chief among these was Patricia McKenna, the other Green MEP elected in 1994, whose beliefs are very much along the same lines as Jenny Jones and - indeed - the majority of the Irish Green membership until the mid-2000s. She stood for the leadership in 2008 and got about a third of the vote, despite losing her Brussels seat some time beforehand. This failure caused her to go off the rails a bit, and within months she was appearing in a hotel-themed reality show called ‘Fáilte Towers’. Along with other malcontents, she formed a new party, Fis Nua (meaning ‘New Vision’), in 2010 which has comprehensively failed to become a Thing. Even another party called New Vision beat them in the 2011 general election.
Let’s go back a bit: the duo of Trevor Sargent and John Gormley proved effective enough to expand their parliamentary party to 6 TDs in both 2002 and 2007. And locally, Greens on Dublin City Council achieved a ban on smokey fuel that ended the classic Dublin smog – although Mary Harney of the Progressive Democrats unjustly took credit for this change. The decisions the parliamentary Greens made in 2007, though, would set them back quite heavily. Sargent (who had been elected as the inaugural sole leader in 2001 as part of the moderation and centralisation process that accompanied the drive for power) promised not to go into coalition with Fianna Fail, but when the results came in, the only coalition that would really work was precisely that. Sargent resigned on principle, to be replaced by Gormley, and the Greens crossed the threshold of Government.
Spoiler: it didn’t go fantastically well for them. On the plus side, they made up some environmental ground with bans on incandescent lightbulbs and suchlike. As against that, they reneged on some of their oldest campaigns by approving a motorway through National Monuments in the Hill of Tara area and building oil and gas pipelines. And they also remained steadfastly loyal to the woeful fag-end of the Fianna Fail Government until a couple of days before the 2011 election was called. Tarnished with the legacy of that Government, they lost all of their seats.
The stress of the situation was perceptible in 2009, when the funniest incident of the late Noughties occurred. Backbench Green TD Paul Gogarty uttered the immortal phrase "With all due respect, in the most unparliamentary language, fuck you Deputy Stagg! Fuck you!" in the Dail after a very heated debate on the Social Welfare Bill. The absolute best thing was that, even though he quickly apologised for his unparliamentary language, a formal investigation revealed that he in fact had nothing to apologise for, as the word ‘fuck’ had not been officially declared to be unparliamentary by any previous Ceann Comhairle. Gogarty elected not to die on that particular hill, though.
After the defeat, the veterans of the Green Party went their separate ways and looked jealously over the border at their slightly-less-unsuccessful Northern Irish branch. Trevor Sargent started a gardening blog. Senator Dan Boyle (who happens to be a second cousin of Susan Boyle) released a terrible album called ‘Third Adolescence’ with the help of a former Progressive Democrat candidate and is now a staffer for the Wales Green Party. Paul ‘Fuck You’ Gogarty also had a go at breaking into the music business. However, he uses the stage name His Sweet Surprise and his first single was called ‘Wishing on a Photograph’, so there is no way in hell you're going to compel me to listen to that rubbish. Look, I have to draw a line somewhere.
Oh, also, this doesn’t fit anywhere, but one of their junior Ministers was a guy called Ciaran Cuffe, who is a nephew of Robert F. Kennedy and had to resign as Environment spokesperson when it was revealed that he owned shares in oil exploration companies.
In 2016, two Greens got back into the Dail, although it remains to be scene whether the Party can break out of the South Dublin ghetto again.