A multibillion euro investment in public transport will be one of the Green Party's most important policy requirements if coalition negotiations take place after the general election, party leader Trevor Sargent said yesterday. Mark Hennessy, Political Correspondent, reports.
The expenditure will be a consequence of substantial reductions in the State's road building programme.
Though ruling out any pre-election pact with Fine Gael, Mr Sargent was not unwelcoming of Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny's declaration yesterday that he would approach the Greens for support after an election.
Earlier, Green Party TD Paul Gogarty was scathing of Mr Kenny's statement. He accused the Fine Gael leader of being "more than a little patronising" by "painting us as the desperate junior coalition partner lucky to be in government".
By midmorning, Mr Sargent insisted that the Greens would not do a pre-election deal with Fine Gael - which was something that was not proposed by Mr Kenny in his Irish Times interview.
However, by yesterday afternoon, a conciliatory approach was on offer from Mr Sargent, who acknowledged that he would prefer an alliance with Fine Gael rather than one with Fianna Fáil.
"From all that I can see at the moment, Fine Gael and Enda Kenny can contemplate the issues that are being promoted by the Green Party and given that they have not been in government we can only act on their intentions, not actions.
"Whereas, in government, the actions, not the rhetoric of Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats have been to worsen the way Ireland is preparing to deal with high energy prices," Mr Sargent said.
However, he went on to say he accepted that road improvements are fully necessary.
"There need to be improvements, but not the gold and platinum version that has taken place in some places," he said.
Any political party seeking to negotiate with the Greens after the election would need to have read, and understood the recently published Stern Report.
It outlined the bleak economic and not just environmental consequences of global warming, he said.
However, his Green colleague, Mr Gogarty, who has been a long-standing critic of Fine Gael, said it was as "plain as day" that Mr Kenny could never become taoiseach without the Greens.
"I have no doubt that if the Green Party are needed to form a coalition, Enda Kenny will approach us with whatever amount of seats his alliance can muster. And we will be willing to talk business," he said.
Meanwhile, Progressive Democrats Minister of State Tom Parlon has challenged Fine Gael's repeated assertion that it is standing at 20-year high levels in the polls.
The claim, he said, is "bizarre", since Fine Gael stood at 23 per cent in the most recent Sunday Business Post poll last November, while The Irish Times/TNSmrbi poll in December had it on a 27 per cent rating.
"The party's actual support in general elections had been higher on at least the following occasions over the last 20 years: 1987 general election [under Garret FitzGerald] - 27.1 per cent; 1989 general election [under Alan Dukes] - 29.3 per cent; 1997 general election [under John Bruton] - 28 per cent."
There were also "many occasions in the last two decades" when Fine Gael's opinion poll support exceeded those levels. In July 1989, for instance, it was above 30 per cent.
"Fine Gael support is not at a 20-year high. It is evidence that Fine Gael prefers wishful thinking to rational analysis for the party to pretend the contrary," he concluded.