John Gormley: The Phoenix Profile

THE Minister for the Environment, John Gormley, has well and truly arrived. In just a few weeks last summer, the Green Party activist became leader of his party, a member of government and a full cabinet member with the added bonus that his departmental portfolio is that of environment. But there is a view that the only way now for Gormley and the party is down; that the party has lost its soul for a few doubtful concessions and that the Greens are a modern representation of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Can Gormley and Co avoid being swallowed up by Fianna Fáil or will their performance in government persuade voters they are a credible, long-term political force?

Last Saturday week, the Minister for the Environment officiated at the opening of an organic food market during National Organic Week - the sort of occasion that ministers enjoy as they bask in the aura of their office without any unpleasant barracking or criticism from opposition politicians. However, while all those present listened respectfully until the conclusion of his speech, a member of Tara Watch then asked Gormley if he had anything to say about the M 3 motorway, a most sensitive issue for the Greens. Gormley was incensed at this impertinence and barked at the questioner that this was neither the time nor the place for such an issue, adding, "I know who you are and I will talk to you another time."

It usually takes the infinitely more experienced Fianna Fáil politicians five years or more to lose their sense of proportion and become above themselves and their constituents - and those at the organic function were most definitely Gormley's ‘people' - but Gormley has undergone a serious transformation in recent months. Time was when Gormley would have been the heckler at some sleek, political fat cat in a merc. Indeed, shortly before his reelection in Dublin South-East last summer, Gormley bearded Michael McDowell in Ranelagh in that celebrated street brawl which, in retrospect, marked the end of the former PD leader and the beginning of the new Green leader's emergence as an establishment politician.

Gormley is now part of the club he has for long barracked so effectively and his tetchiness under fire is typical of politicians from small, radical parties who have made it into government. But there is a more fundamental political reason for Gormley's paranoia, namely, the wholesale abandonment of the party's political programme in order to get into government and the fear that this could presage political Armageddon in five years time.

Gormley has always tried to have it both ways, combining a radical image with an orthodox career ambition as well as methods that owe as much to FF as the Greens. Nearly 20 years ago, Gormley threatened a freesheet publication, Executive News, with legal action unless they retracted a quote that the then fledgling journalist, Maeve Sheehan, claimed he had uttered when she interviewed him. According to Sheehan, Gormley was most uncomplimentary about the then European Green icon Petra Kelly, saying she had not done enough to assist the Greens in the 1989 European election and also casting further unflattering aspersions on Kelly. But Gormley later denied uttering the quote, threatening the freesheet with legal action unless they withdrew it. Gormley also arrived at Goldhawk's door with his Dail assistant demanding that Goldhawk desist from repeating the full quote as published by Executive News and he followed up with correspondence threatening legal action.

MODERNISER

Gormley was one of the first strong Green personalities in Irish life but he was also one of the first to effect the transformation of the Greens from their libertarian mode of party structures and democracy into something resembling a modern, centralised party with leaders - with himself being the current incumbent.

Throughout the nineties, Gormley was part of the modernising faction that demanded majority voting and a leader, not only because he wanted to be elected as leader (which he clearly did) but also because he viewed it as necessary to shed the whacky green image and become electable as a government party.

A blip on Gormley's political progress came after he captured the Dublin Lord Mayoralty (following an internal faction fight which Gormley only won against three other Green councillors with the help of Trevor Sargent) when he took possession of the Mansion House and the gas-guzzling mayoral car - a politically incorrect Volvo. Gormley had been making much mileage (political) out of his non-use of the car only for some snitch to inform Goldhawk that Mrs Penny Gormley had been using it to go to and from work. Outrage, recrimination and angry debate then ensued inside Dublin South-East Greens with allegations of treachery and leaking to The Phoenix followed by Penny's angry letter of resignation from the Green Party (see The Phoenix, 3/3/95).

However, Gormley and Sargent were at one in those days against the radical or fundie (fundamental) Greens who have always been suspicious of the modernisers, Gormley in particular. The duo eventually got their way in 2001 when members voted to elect a leader but, by then, Clever Trevor Sargent (who took a seat for the Greens in Dublin North in 1992, five years beforeGormley's 1997 Dáil breakthrough) was in pole position and he easily took the prize.

Gormley's leadership strategy in asserting his radical, Green credentials - he was by far the most effective spokesperson in the last number of EU treaty referendums - and then moving the party to a more conservative position, relied on unity with other senior Greens such as Sargent, Eamon Ryan and Dan Boyle. This meant that when the leadership question came up, Gormley was outflanked by Sargent and, later, Ryan. Gormley's tactics during the leadership debate - muttered in a most un-Green manner behind closed doors and to the ‘key' protagonists in the party - were that the party leader should not be someone who was certain to retain their Dáil seat (ie, Sargent) but someone who would have a hard battle to take one at the next election (ie, Gormley).

In the event, Gormley, wisely, decided to withdraw from the contest with Clever Trevor but a private, loose understanding arrived at was that while Sargent would be the leader, Gormley would be the environment Minister in any future coalition. This, at any rate, was the assumption Gormley worked on ever since, although he got a start when, shortly before he won the leadership in 2001, Sargent told the Irish Independent that he could take the job of environment minister in a future coalition.

ANTI WAR

A good example of Gormley's radical opportunism came when George Bush visited the North in 2003 and Gormley demanded that SF boycott a peace process meeting with the US President and Tony Blair as an anti-Iraq war gesture. Gormley's feigned innocence in face of the argument that such a gesture would have created a crisis in the peace process impressed few at the time and even less so now that the Greens, in government, have swallowed the FF line on the US Shannon stop-over without a murmur.

A look back at Green political posturing ever since the leadership contest shows that the party was willing to go into government, with all the political compromises that would have entailed, as far back as 2000, well before the second-last election. At the Greens conference that year, Boyle moved a motion urging that the party work out a pre-election coalition position but the unbridled hostility of the members - with Patricia McKenna stirring things up against the leadership - forced the leadership to withdraw the proposal. This meant, of course, that the leadership did not suffer an obvious rebuff (Gormley and Sargent had backed Boyle) but also that their room for future manoeuvre was not restricted by a vote that would have shackled them in future behind-the-scene moves.

Since then, of course, the Greens have overcome - or at least bludgeoned into the ground - the members' resistance to coalition with the devil and have lost their soul as a result in signing the Faustian pact with Bertie. The list of political pledges and positions dumped by the Greens to get into power is long and detailed but most of the biggest ones are well known: the Shannon stop over and the M3 Motorway through Tara are two, while the party is clearly preparing the ground to jettison its neutral, Euro-critical view on moves towards a federal Europe.

However, it is the decidedly less dramatic but quintessentially Green position on fluoridation of water that shows just how cavalier Gormley can be in the pursuit of power. Tasked with writing a report for the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children on fluoridation, Gormley presented his report to several meetings of the committee beginning last December. Gormley's well-researched report was scathing, arguing that worldwide research showed, among other things, that water fluoridation was damaging to babies in bottle-feed and recommending that water fluoridation cease immediately - for all age groups.

The report has never been published as Gormley could not get it through committee or past the objections of such as FF's Dr Jimmy Devins and further reports are pending before the committee comes down one way or the other. However, Gormley's report is fully in line with Green Party policy on water fluoridation and, as far back as 1997, Sargent described the practice as a "crazy experiment with our health. It cannot be lawful for a state to poison its own people."

Nevertheless, when the Greens drew up their general election manifesto, Gormley and the party's policy of demanding an immediate end to fluoridation had mysteriously disappeared, replaced with an anodyne commitment to "an independent study" into fluoridation to be followed by a halt to the practice if "excessive levels" are shown to be present in the water supply. Many members of the Oireachtas health committee were deeply sceptical of the Greens' fluoridation policy, regarding it as a good example of that party's whacky political outlook and a reason to be wary of it. Gormley picked up on this dangerous perception and so the fluoridation policy was dumped - before the election. The subsequent agreed programme for government, of course, includes neither the original Green position on fluoridation nor even the commitment to an independent study.

Another indication that Gormley and colleagues had planned to dump principled policy positions that go the heart of what the Greens are about is that, as far back as three and a half years ago, Gormley and Sargent tried to push the Greens into a more pro-EU position with various devices, including ‘educational' sessions for Green Party members led by enlightened Euro-federalists like Garret Fitzgerald and Professor Ben Tonra.

EU REFORM TREATY

The party has since decided to stay neutral on one of the burning policy issues of the last few years and one that helped to define the Green Party's political identity - the revamped attempt by Brussels and the Eurocrats to implement the revised EU Reform Treaty.

Gormley and Boyle, the negotiators with FF for the programme for government, did not even attempt to save the Lismullen henge site along the M3 motorway, and Shannon is simply not an issue for the Greens anymore. The perhaps simplistic impression purveyed by the Opposition parties and media is that the Greens have lost their soul and sold out most of their policies to scramble into government for vague aspirations on climate change and a few domestic environmental issues; that this will lead to an erosion of their voter base and that they will end up like the PDs - only in double quick time at the next election.

But surely Gormley, Ryan, Sargent, Boyle et al have thought things through in a more coherent way than this and will emerge as a party of achievement, politically and in terms of their own policy issues at the next election? Gormley and company apparently believe that the entire political landscape has changed and that the national question, left-right politics and so on are out-dated concepts that afford an opportunity for their party. The new population and electorate will move inexorably towards Green (and ‘responsible') politics over the next few years and the party will emerge unscathedand even stronger at the next election.

The public has been hearing for many decades that the national question is dead and that the working class is no more. And the proposed electoral revision already threatens to remove the electoral base of one of its six TDs, Ciaran Cuffe in Dun Laoghaire. And the party's prospects at the European and local elections in just 18 months time do not look good - the party had a disastrous dual election in 2004, losing its two European seats and suffering a fall in its local vote and there is no reason to believe that a demoralised membership will fare better next time.

Gormley needs to watch out especially for the discontent amongst the party's own ranks, as even a change in the electorate cannot compensate for a decline in membership - or a revolt. Support for McKenna in the leadership contest, Gormley argued, would mean a split in the party and while this was deliberate scaremongering, there is a grain of truth in this argument. More to the point, it did not prevent the members from giving McKenna three times the vote that opposed going into coalition, a simple message indicating that the members were already retreating from coalition after just a few weeks in government.

An even greater irony is that FF ministers believe that Green cabinet members Gormley and Ryan are enjoying a honeymoon that will shortly be followed by hard graft back in the house. Bertie and Biffo Cowen seem to believe that while the two Greens are having a great time announcing energy efficient home improvement schemes and architectural and archeological initiatives, that the political cheque they signed has yet to be honoured.

The first tranche of political payback due to be delivered comes with the forthcoming European referendum. Gormley's finest and most articulate moments came in debate with the Eurocrat smoothies whom he handled better than anybody else on the NO side in various referendums in the past. Gormley earned considerable respect and loyalty from some of the more serious, middle-tier Green activists as a result. One wonders how these people, many of whom grudgingly traipsed after Gormley into government, will feel when Gormley begins to sound more like Alan Dukes than the late Petra Kelly.

© Phoenix 2.11.07

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