In the round, last week’s general election produced little enough political change. FF and FG remain the parties of Government. Sinn Fein leads the opposition. Right leaning independents are fragmented, and the soft left remains a virtue signalling rump.
There was however one significant result: Voters, almost everywhere they had the choice, sacked their Green TDs.
This, according to our friends at the Irish Times, should make no difference whatsoever to the policies of the state. As the newspaper thundered yesterday in its editorial:
“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.”
The basic point here is straightforward: The Irish Times simply does not believe that voters should be free to reject “green” policies. Now that the voters have kicked out those most responsible for Green policies, the Times argues that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael should implement the Green Party’s policies anyway. The arrogance is breathtaking: Once the Irish Times decides it favours a particular set of policies, you’re simply not allowed to vote against them.
It’s a nice position to be in, isn’t it? Had the Greens won the election, the Irish Times would doubtless have argued that a mandate for green policy had been secured. Now that they’ve lost it, the Irish Times argues that no mandate is necessary.
But what did the public actually vote for? If anything, they voted for the return of the current Government minus the Green Party and its policies. The one decision we can say with certainty that voters took was to sack the bloody Greens.
The most likely Government, in fact, is a Government of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael with a selection of Independents most of whom have made their mark on the election at least in part by openly opposing the policies of the Green Party. That is the configuration of numbers that the voters sent to the Oireachtas.
The reason for this should be fairly obvious from the top issues in the exit poll: Housing and the cost of living. The Green Party and green policies are largely to blame for both issues being issues in the first place.
Talk to any builder or person in construction, and they will tell you that one reason for house price inflation and longer building times are the energy and insulation standards insisted upon by the Greens, which drive up costs, with homes regularly insulated to standards well beyond what the Irish climate actually requires.
Look at the cost of living, and you see the inflationary effects of Green policies everywhere, from the plastic bottle levy to the rising cost of fuel to the inflationary effects of making energy scarcer by the year. The Green agenda has always explicitly been about reducing consumption by increasing prices: That is why the party wished to constrict Dublin Airport, shutter the natural gas port at Foynes, and close down more power plants.
The new Government should be reversing these policies, if votes count for anything. For example, one of the very first acts of a new administration should be the lifting of the Dublin Airport passenger cap, and another should be re-approving the natural gas terminal at Foynes. Another policy should be to freeze – if not reverse – the carbon tax for five years. And another – which might help fuel poverty – should be to exempt home heating oil from duty.
The voters, in a democracy, are supposed to be sovereign. The Green Party does not get to lose an election and face no policy consequences for doing so. If the Irish electorate expressed one wish at the polls on November 29th, it was that the Greens should be removed from Government and the policies they support removed from the cabinet’s agenda.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael blamed the Green Party, happily, for the unpleasant effect of Green policies. Now, they have the chance to show whether that disapproval was real, or a feint.
We’ll soon find out.