Green suspicions could destabilise Coalition

ANALYSIS: The sense of events spinning out of control has fuelled inevitable speculation about how long the Government will survive

THE GREEN Party is feeling battered and bruised after the forced resignation of its totemic former leader Trevor Sargent. The key political question now is what impact the affair will have on the stability of the Coalition.

Party leader John Gormley was extremely upset and emotional in the immediate aftermath of Sargent’s resignation and that reflected a state of hurt and confusion within the Green parliamentary party and its prominent supporters.

Sargent’s loss to the Greens was far more significant for them than Willie O’Dea’s departure from ministerial office was for Fianna Fáil. While he was not the first Green elected to the Dáil (that honour went to Roger Garland), Sargent was the main standard bearer for the party for almost three decades and has held his North Dublin seat since 1992.

With the assistance of Gormley, he built the Green Party into a serious political force and led it into coalition with Fianna Fail in 2007. The bond between the two men explains how traumatic Sargent’s fall was for Gormley and why there is such suspicion about the source of the leak that led to the resignation.

Even before the Opposition rushed to claim that Fianna Fáil had a role in the leak, suspicions were already rife among the Greens themselves that they were the victims of some sort of retaliation for their role in forcing O’Dea’s resignation last week.

Leaks are usually impossible to trace and rarely come from the source taking most of the blame but that doesn’t stop people jumping to conclusions. The emphatic rejection of the Opposition claims by Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern calmed some nerves yesterday and Sargent himself was happy to proclaim his belief that Fianna Fáil had no role in the events that led to his resignation.

Other people in the Greens are not as convinced and the event has, at the very least, generated an unhealthy degree of suspicion about the attitude of some of their colleagues on the Fianna Fail side of the Coalition. Such suspicions will be difficult to eradicate and, true or false, will add another unstable ingredient to the political mix.

“Trust has broken down in certain quarters and not simply because of the events that led to Trevor’s resignation. The question is whether there is enough trust left in the rest of the system to keep the Coalition working properly,” said one Green insider.

By becoming the fourth high profile resignation in just three weeks, Sargent himself added significantly to the air of political instability now gripping Leinster House as nobody can predict what will happen next. That sense of events spinning out of control has inevitably generated speculation about how long the Coalition will last.

While nobody is sure what the next “unknown, unknown” will be there are two big “known unknowns” on the horizon which could have a decisive impact on the Coalition’s future. The first of them is the decisive phase of the banking crisis with the transfer of major loans to Nama and further recapitalisation of the banks.

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny has referred in the Dáil on a number of occasions in recent days to the prospect of Anglo Irish Bank requiring a whopping injection of €6 billion in taxpayers’ money to keep going. If that is what the Government does actually propose, it will inevitably generate a huge political controversy that will impose further stress on the Coalition.

Green Party Minister Eamon Ryan has taken a keen interest in the banking crisis and has worked closely with Brian Lenihan on the Government’s solution. His involvement has been crucial in keeping the Greens solid on the issue from a Government point of view but the next really difficult phase of the project will be a critical test for Ryan and his colleagues.

There has been some tension between Gormley and Ryan over the past year but Green Party sources say Sargent’s resignation has brought all the members of the parliamentary party together and that should help them in their dealings with their Coalition partners over the banking issue and the other challenges ahead.

The other big issue on the agenda is the Cabinet reshuffle. This poses a real challenge for the Taoiseach who has to make up his mind whether to simply fill the slot left vacant by Willie O’Dea or undertake a major reshuffle to put a new-look team in place in advance of the next general election.

When he took over as Taoiseach in May, 2008, Cowen acted boldly to restructure the Cabinet but since then the hallmark of his term of office has been caution. Cabinet reshuffles have proved dangerous for past taoisigh because of the instability they have engendered, but at this stage Cowen does not have a lot to lose by acting boldly.

A proper shake up of personnel and a restructuring of portfolios could change the tired image of such a long-serving Government but the lesson of recent weeks is that, whatever happens, it will be at the mercy of events.

Stephen Collins is Political Editor