Green Party obliterated by great Nama denial

The nice gestures in the programme for government are trifling compared with the absurdities it supports

ONE OF the nice things about writing a column in Ireland is that you don’t have to work very hard for your metaphors. If you wanted to encapsulate the death of the Green Party in a little moral tale, you’d be hard put to come up with a better one than John Gormley’s ostentatiously eco-friendly trip to the UK on the ferry, after which he was picked up by a limo that drove from London to Holyhead at a cost of €2,200. If you think of the ferry as Green principles and the limo as Fianna Fáil culture, you have a perfect image for the charade that was played out at the weekend.

The renewed programme for government has lots of ferry moments: lovely stuff about education, political reform, public transport and the green economy. It can sail happily over a sea of doubt until it reaches the far shore of political reality, where it will be picked up by the Fianna Fáil limo called Nama. When all the aspirations and all the gestures have been left behind, it is Nama that will shape the real world in which power will be exercised. And it is driven by Fianna Fáil and everything it represents: the attempt to shore up a failed system using sacks of public money as sandbags.

To understand the extent to which the Greens have been reduced to gesture politics, let’s consider one thing that is in the programme and two that are not.

The thing that’s there, the fig leaf to cover the Greens’ nakedness, is the inclusion of a levy on the banks in the event that Nama makes a loss. It is a triple sham.

Firstly, the levy was already part of the Government’s proposal. Secondly, it contains an obvious escape hatch: it will be “carefully judged so as not to disrupt the stability and sustainability of the banking system”. In other words, it will not be imposed if it does any real harm to the banks’ profits and share prices.

Thirdly, it is entirely meaningless in relation to the very worst aspects of Nama, the pouring of public funds into the zombie institutions Anglo Irish and Nationwide.

These dead banks, which account for half of the liabilities that Nama will assume, will never be able to pay a levy because they will never function as commercial banks. And Anglo is, in any case, in public ownership – we would be paying a levy to ourselves.

Now let’s look at the two things that are not in the programme. Both are completely central to any idea of sustainable development. The first is the implementation of the Kenny report on the control of building land by allowing local authorities to buy it at the agricultural price plus 25 per cent. It has been an absolute mainstay of Green policy since the party was formed. There’s not a word about it in the programme. What we get instead is a wind-powered exhalation about “a long-term strategy of land acquisition in order to meet at a reasonable price the needs of both market and non-market providers”.

The second non-appearance is the urgent issue of upward-only rent reviews for commercial property. This has to be tackled right now: ludicrously high rents are closing Irish businesses every day and throwing workers on the dole queues. The Greens have been going on about this for ages. All we’ve got on the table is a very weak proposal to outlaw the practice for new leases. What have the Greens, and the Irish retail sector, got to show for all the posturing? Nothing.

And why is nothing happening on these two crucial issues? Because change would not suit the Nama strategy. Implementing Kenny would bring down long-term property values, while Nama needs them to grow. Banning upwards-only rent reviews would expose one of the big flaws in the Nama strategy. Brian Lenihan has repeatedly pointed to the “health” of commercial rents as a sign that the property market will bounce back.

The reality that all of this is based on an absurd insistence that rents cannot be negotiated downwards has to be denied.

The Greens are now entirely complicit in this denial. In a week when the value of the Irish Glass Bottle site in Dublin was officially downgraded from the €413 million that was paid for it to just €60 million – a fall of 85 per cent – the party is telling us, as the programme puts it, that “the Government’s approach to asset valuation within the Nama initiative is carefully balanced and reasonable”.

Putting what remains of Green ideas and idealism into a zombie government is a waste of political capital in the same sense that putting €30 billion of public resources into a zombie bank (Anglo) is a waste of financial capital.

For all the nice gestures, it will be just as productive. The Greens are now in that publicly funded luxury limo, sitting comfortably on the road to perdition.