Suspicion, paranoia and finger pointing - How the carbon deal was done

In the small hours of Wednesday morning – 3am to be precise – Green Party leader Eamon Ryan woke with a start. It had not been a good night.

Phone calls had been flying throughout the previous evening between himself and the other party leaders in an effort to find a landing ground on cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture. Still, there was no agreement. No one was budging. The Greens wanted it high, up towards 30 per cent, and the others wanted it low, down around 22 per cent. Just hours before the phones began lighting up, the three leaders had met in person where it became obvious that there would be no concrete proposal ready for Cabinet the next morning.

This is a fundamental issue for us. We can’t suck this one up

—  Green Party insider

The feeling in Fine Gael was that the whole thing could wait, a feeling not totally unreciprocated in Fianna Fáil, although sources said Taoiseach Micheál Martin was of the view it was time to get the deal done. This would be an easy time to make rushed and, therefore, potentially poor decisions, one Fine Gael figure mused. After all, it was at a late July Cabinet meeting last year where Fine Gael learned the hard way what happens when things are approved without full consideration: the move to appoint former minister Katherine Zappone as a special envoy created a controversy that dominated the headlines over the summer months.

The message from Ryan was clear, though, as one insider explains it. “We said: this is a fundamental issue for us. We can’t suck this one up. We will have a serious problem here because we cannot go to 22 per cent.”

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And so at 3am, knowing that the final Cabinet meeting of the summer would pass without agreement on what is basically Greens’ raison d’être in Government, Ryan woke up and sketched out a new proposal. The idea was that farmers would deliver further emissions in other sectors through offshore wind, solar energy and anaerobic digestion, which involves using slurry and grass from farms to reduce use of fossil fuel gas. The upshot was that there was room to manoeuvre.

Just six hours later, right before the Cabinet meeting on Wednesday morning, Ryan presented his make-or-break plan to Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar. Cabinet had been due to kick off at 9am but was delayed by an hour as all sides mulled over the details. Some on the other side of the table from Ryan were not impressed.

“Why have we got people coming in with these plans on scraps of paper?” one Coalition source grumbled.

Cabinet came and went on Wednesday. Ministers tore through the agenda of 50 items at lightening speed in order to get back to the negotiations. Another meeting was held after Cabinet and chinks of light began to appear.

That was until Green Party chairwoman Pauline O’Reilly went on RTÉ Radio. She was asked if this was an issue worth leaving Government over. She said it depended on the final figure but “every option is on the table at the moment”. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil were not happy. There were suspicions that this was Ryan’s way of upping the ante, a political ploy to put the pressure on at a critical moment. One Green figure says this was absolutely not the case. They say the party knew she would be on radio, but no one expected her to go that far.

The interview, albeit momentarily, derailed the tendrils of optimism that had been growing and came after weeks of similar difficulties. Every time there was a leak in the media throughout the month of July about the carbon ceilings and targets, there would be “finger pointing and paranoia” among the different parties, a source said. While the situation was tense, the high-wire talks continued. Ryan’s 3am blueprint was eventually tweaked, but it opened the door for a little budging on both sides, even if Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue did not want to go above 24 per cent and Ryan did not want to go below 26 per cent.

Sources said another element to the discussions involved Fine Gael demands “that the Greens had to sign up to no compulsion and that there’d have to be a financial package for farmers who make the leap”, referring to the fact that farmers would be asked to implement measures on a voluntary basis. A memo was drafted by advisers with whispers that the message from the top of Government was that it was time for compromise, and compromise looked like a 25 per cent cut in agricultural emissions.

We were under intense pressure. The Irish Farmers’ Association [IFA] mounted an intensive lobbying campaign. We were under pressure from environmental NGOs and our own membership

—  Green Party figure

Over in the Duke Pub not far from Leinster House, Green Party staff gathered for end-of-term drinks and to speculate about whether a deal was finally done, or whether the house of cards was about to fall. In the absence of any obvious further movement on Wednesday evening, McConalogue headed to the west coast for a constituency tour of Achill with party colleague Lisa Chambers. Word filtered through to McConalogue late that evening that, yes, a deal was more than likely in the offing, and McConalogue would have to hot-foot it up the road early the next day if a press conference was to be called.

In the end, all parties settled on 25 per cent just after 3pm on Thursday. An incorporeal meeting was held and a press conference was convened. Before Ryan walked out to speak to the media, he was visibly nervous, one Government source said. A Green Party figure says: “We were under intense pressure. The Irish Farmers’ Association [IFA] mounted an intensive lobbying campaign. We were under pressure from environmental NGOs and our own membership.” While some in the Green Party believe Ryan is damaged by the concessions (although not in a politically fatal way), others are keen to pull the lens back.

“Yes, there are people wondering should we not have held out for more. It was always going to be hard for us, going up against Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. But we are talking about getting these two parties, who have strong agriculture bases, to agree to cut agriculture emissions by 25 per cent here... Everyone is bloody exhausted but we have achieved something really good here.” It has not gone unnoticed, either, that both the Soc Dems and People Before Profit have tried to outflank the Greens on climate, adding another ingredient to the pressure cooker.

A Fianna Fáil source also identified the IFA’s mobilisation and recent campaign as a key moment which upped the stakes. “The IFA do have a sway and influence with this particular Government. A rural TD can’t go to Mass, the shop or the match without being lobbied. There are WhatsApp calls, emails. They can’t get out of bed without being lobbied,” the source said, although he added the environmental NGOs “also upped their game” since June.

Government figures believe the IFA, following a meeting this week, have privately accepted that they can live with the deal but will use it to lobby for massive resources in the budget.

“Charlie and Eamon are both quiet, and they get on bizarrely well despite being ideologically opposed,” the Fianna Fáil source continued. “They were really respectful of the challenges facing their cadres on either side of the debate. There was never desk thumping or anything like that.”

Another Fianna Fáil source says that what has happened over the past two weeks has been a “process” that all sides needed to go through, that it was inevitable where the figure would land but every side had to be seen to be fighting for that last 1 per cent for their own members and voters.

All sides acknowledge that some of the hard decisions have still been kicked down the road, such as the inclusion of a category of “unallocated savings” of a few million tonnes of carbon that have instead been put aside in the hope that new tech emerges later in the decade.

The final verdict on the agreement, from a senior Coalition source, was this: “It was a bad deal for everyone. No one is getting a good deal from this. Therefore, does that make it a good deal? Yeah, probably. But the Green Party built a hill for themselves that it had to be the upper range... and ultimately they had to climb more of the way down than anyone else.”