IT MAY have been unofficial Green policy, but a record slump in political party conference coffee consumption was recorded on Saturday as delegates balked at the £1.50 charge over at the beverages and biscuits counter.
They were grumpy enough after the £10 conference registration fee, but settled down to contemplate the post election vision of glories to come.
"There is going to be massive surprise and a shock to the political system with the results the Greens are going to get," MEP Patricia McKenna promised.
Green was good and unspoiled by the grubby experience of actually being in government. Party members behaved as if to the manner born: they would occupy the high moral ground. They were "untainted by smears and scandals", said Ms McKenna, and it was the only party left in the Dail which had any credibility on issues of truth and honesty.
Ms Nuala Ahern MEP the other conference chairwoman, stressed that the Americas, the Third World and the Far East must not be forgotten. "We are going to become a great movement in the 21st century so that the planet can remain our home," she said.
Rumours that Garret FitzGerald - was attracted to all this goodness might have had some slight basis in terms of proximity - he was at the Junior Chamber Ireland conference in the same hotel.
"Clare Greens" sweatshirts were selling for £20, dispelling any myth that the party does not engage in the market economy. Later, however, Clare candidate Brian Meaney bemoaned the fact that limestone paving from the Burren was being collected by locals for £6 a pallet for shipment to DIY centres in Britain.
"Nearly 3,300 acres of the Burren's characteristic limestone pavement and scrub was converted to uniform grassland between 1981 and 1991 ... The bulldozing goes on unabated," he noted.
But Ms Mary White, candidate in Carlow-Kilkenny, in calling for a Green policy for rural renewal, made the most passionate speech. She described how her home village of Rathanna, Co Carlow - "under the mighty hump of Mount Leinster"- was slowly dying.
"First of all they closed the village school ....... Then they closed down the post office. Now, anyone who wants a stamp or their old age pension has to drive into Borris, our nearest town, five miles away.
"Those without cars beg lifts or get someone to get their pensions for them. We have lost social interaction, a sense of belonging, the friendly chat at the post office doors and the joyful noise of children, playing on their way to and from school." Soon afterwards, "the only grocer closed down".
Ireland was supposed to be the Celtic Tiger. But "the only roaring that we hear is the daytime noise of tractors and trailers hauling tons upon tons of fertilisers to help hold up stunted crops in impoverished, exhausted fields and the sound of JCBs and Hymacs ripping out hundreds upon hundreds of miles of hedgerows in the nearby river valleys," she said.