All political careers end in failure. Like all the best political clichés, this one is pithy, overworked – and wrong. Take Eamon Ryan.
At the most superficial level, the leader of the Green Party will step down with his party at a low ebb, having just seen its two MEPs fail to win reelection and losing almost half of its council seats. But even that tells only part of the story. When Ryan became leader in 2011, the Green Party, emerging from a crisis-era government with Fianna Fáil, had just suffered a disastrous general election in which it failed to retain a single seat in the Dáil.
It had three councillors. Its obituary was written. From that inauspicious base, Ryan presided over a revival in the party’s fortunes.
Within 10 years of that calamitous 2011 campaign, the Greens had 12 TDs, two MEPs and 49 councillors. It became a real force in Irish politics. The strongest evidence of its influence is the way in which the party, once derided by its opponents as hopelessly out of touch, forced our ecological crises to the top of the political agenda.
Rivals who once mocked the party began to mimic it, adopting its rhetoric and sometimes – if not often enough – its policies. The Greens are not alone in making the case that a chronically short-termist system must take the longer view, but they are one of the most consistent advocates for that view. Unlike others on the left, the Greens realised that to achieve real change, they had to be in power.
Their record in go.
