The duality of Irish politics was summed up by twin headlines this morning. On the one hand, Fine Gael were announcing a tender for charter flights on which newly-rounded-up illegal migrants will be seated, and flown back to their home countries. No doubt there will be cameras on hand for the occasion, and perhaps a stern-faced Taoiseach there in person to see them off.
On the other hand, Eamon Ryan was announcing his resignation as leader of the Green Party after more than a decade at the helm.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have a very different approach to politics than the Greens do. For the FF and FG stalwart, politics is more like a sport than anything else: The objective is to win the league and stay on top. You bring in occasional new signings like Nina Carberry and Cynthia Ni Mhurchu to freshen up the first eleven. If the game requires you to change your tactics, then that’s what you do – which is how you go from denouncing limits on immigration to embracing ceremonial deportation flights inside twelve months. Achieving lasting things for the country is entirely secondary to being in power, which is the first, last, and over-riding objective.
For the Greens, or at least for Eamon Ryan, the objective of politics has always been to change the laws of the country in order to achieve a desired change to the way Irish people live their lives. That is the point. You sense that if Eamon Ryan could have done more for the Green movement as a journalist, or a lawyer, then that is what he would have become. Politics for the greens is more a vocation, or perhaps a crusade.
For Eamon Ryan, his resignation this morning will bring to an end – or at least signal the beginning of the end – of one of the most successful Irish political careers in living memory, assuming we judge politics by the measure of “achieving changes that you want to see” as opposed to the more popular FF or FG measure of “staying in power for as long as you possibly can”.
Not only has his tenure seen a raft of green policy enacted – from the carbon tax to the bottle recycling whatever-it’s-called, from rural planning restrictions to insulation standards, from electric car subsidies to the cancellation of the Foynes gas terminal – but it has also seen Green Policy essentially adopted as national religion.
The Greens, under his tenure, have regulated the media to an extent that it is now expressly forbidden, in RTE’s editorial guidelines, for a guest to question the science of climate change on the taxpayer funded airwaves. The school curriculums, under the Greens, now teach the Green view of the world as fact. Across the state, a raft of Green leaning NGOs have been funded to the extent that they likely have to build extra greenhouses just to store the money. State boards have been loaded with Green activists. Across the country, roads are making way for specialised highways for the provisional wing of the Green movement: Middle class lycra-draped cycling dads.
Nobody, nobody at all, has been a more effective wielder of political power than Eamon Ryan. His departure will leave the Greens a much weakened political movement.
At a glance, his likely successors leave much to be desired: Neither Roderic O’Gorman nor Catherine Martin have shown themselves particularly adept at manipulating the levers of state power. Martin, the Deputy Leader, had by most accounts a very poor war during the matter of the RTE scandal. Nobody would think that Roderic O’Gorman has covered himself in glory either on the immigration issue, or on the stewardship of the two referendums that went down to near-record defeats.
More to the point, both of them lack something that Eamon Ryan has in abundance: The ability to make the radical sound centrist and reasonable.
Ryan’s pitch for Green votes over his career has always been very clever: Rather than make the express appeals to alarmism and urgency that tend to excite his own activists, he has always pitched Green policy as an inevitable part of the future. When you challenge him on the fact that much of what Ireland is doing is radically out of step with the rest of the world, he calmly tells you that the rest of the world will inevitably copy us and catch up because his policies are part of the inevitable arc of history, which bends us back towards the rainforests. Whether that was true or not – and I think not – it always sounded plausible, even reasonable.
There’s a lesson from Ryan’s career for those who want to be successful in shaping Irish politics: Talk moderately, act radically. Eamon Ryan has been the most radical left wing politician in power in Ireland for many, many years – and yet to listen to him one might have thought him on the moderate, pragmatic wing of his own party. He is a dealmaker, willing to take unpopular votes to support his Government colleagues, so long as they gave him a free hand on the Green stuff. He is also an ideologue: Perfectly content to lose the next election, so long as the prize for winning the last one was permanent change.
In a way, we need more politicians like Eamon Ryan. But we should pray to all the Gods that the next one is on the right side of the political spectrum, and not also a Green.