The Greens - Flawed Policies and Dodgy Deals
Outside of Official Ireland, there was little surprise at the Green Party’s electoral meltdown in the 2024 general election.
Going from 12 Dáil seats to one overnight was certainly up there with famous Irish electoral wipeouts.
In many ways, that collapse went beyond the normal cut and trust of the electoral cycle and reflected the white anger of voters who felt totally cheated not only by the Greens but the coalition deal which catapulted them to power.
The background to that Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael/Green 2020-2024 coalition is worth exploring. While Micheál Martin assured voters in the run up to the 2020 general election that his intention was to replace Fine Gael, that objective was quickly ditched after the election.
Unable to form a government, Martin’s objective now became ‘the national interest’ and the formation of a coalition government with the party he had vowed to replace just weeks earlier. That outcome had the look of being more in Micheál Martin’s and Leo Varadkar’s interest than the national interest.
This now made the Greens, with just 7% of the popular vote, the kingmakers in a questionable coalition deal between Fine Gael who had been in power for nine years and Fianna Fáil, the main opposition. This was effectively blindsiding the Irish electorate.
However, if this was a betrayal of voters’ wish for change, then the Greens had no problem going along with it knowing that they were going to be the main beneficiaries of such a deal.
That soon became clear in the Programme for Government for the coalition which strongly reflected many of the Greens core demands. Chief amongst these was the setting of a target of a 51% greenhouse gas reduction by 2030.
That target was subsequently passed into law as the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2021 making such a reduction binding in law. Even at this stage, there is widespread agreement that it is highly unlikely that such an ambitious target will be met.
The Greens have to take a lot of the blame for what looks like Ireland missing these climate targets. In plain language, it’s the Greens policies in a whole range of areas that make reaching these targets difficult if not impossible.
Increasing a country’s population is probably one of the fastest ways to increase its carbon emissions and that is precisely what the Greens supported in government. Between 2020 and 2026, the population of the Republic of Ireland increased by 786,000 or 16%. Most of this increase was made up by non EU migrants.
The Greens have been enthusiastic supporters of an open immigration policy and the non-enforcement of existing immigration laws.
Indeed, Green TD Roderic O Gorman in his role as Minister for Integration, gained notoriety in 2021 when he tweeted in eight different languages the promise of own door accommodation for asylum seekers. By cheerleading immigration (both legal and illegal), the Greens have made it more difficult for Ireland to reach the climate targets which they set for Ireland.
It’s been much the same story with renewable energy, in some respects the most publicly identifiable of Green policies. What we all now know is that renewables, as a variable energy source, only work in the generation of electricity when used in conjunction with a baseline energy source such as fossil fuels or nuclear power.
In 2025 about 40% of gross electricity generation in Ireland came from fossil fuels mainly gas. At present, gas from the Corrib field supplies about 20% of Ireland’s needs with the remaining 80% being imported from Scotland and Norway.
Ironically, one of the greatest obstacles to the viability of renewables now comes from the Greens opposition to fossil fuels.
Not alone are the Greens opposed to fossil fuels in general but they are even more opposed to Irish fossil fuels and in particular all exploration for same. This means that Ireland is now increasingly dependent on imported gas and oil with all the costs and security risks that go with that.
Opposition to the use of Irish fossil fuels isn’t some theoretical policy position for Ireland’s Greens. Minister for the Environment and Green leader Eamon Ryan refused drilling permits for the Barryroe oil and gas field in 2023.
The Barryroe field, located some 50km off the Cork coast, is estimated to be one of Europe’s largest offshore oil prospects. The effective ending of the development of Barryroe and the ban on oil and gas exploration in Ireland were in keeping with the Greens’ Climate Action Act of 2021. The net result of that is that Ireland will need to rely on imported fossil fuels in order to use renewables.
Today, the Greens’ ideological obsessions are also evident in everyday life in Ireland. The Deposit Return machine or Reverse Vending Machine (RVM) has now become a fixture of the Irish retail landscape mainly due to their insistence.
Contrary to the narrative often put forward by the Greens, Irish people have always been well disposed towards recycling. Indeed, before the introduction of RVMs in 2024, recycling rates for cans and PETs using domestic recycling bins had reached 49%.
What’s more, the use of the domestic recycling bin was both clean and convenient while also providing an additional source of income for refuse companies. What has now replaced this is a convoluted and messy system whereby shoppers pay a deposit and are then required to reclaim this deposit via the Reverse Vending machine.
Re-turn, the company who run the Deposit Return Scheme, now claim that recycling rates have jumped to 91%. However, drilling down into those numbers tells a different story.
While RVMs now account for 76% of recycled material, another 15% comes via the conventional domestic mixed dry recycling bin. In effect, the much vaunted RVM has increased recycling of cans and PETs by about 27%.
So what has been the cost of this relatively modest increase? No one mentions it but everyone now pays a huge cost in time spent queueing at machines which are frequently full, jammed or out of order.
In addition, Re-turn the company running the Deposit Return scheme get to keep about €60m a year in unreturned deposits. That’s other people’s money by the way.
People often criticise the Greens on the basis that climate change is not real. However, the scientific evidence on that is now incontrovertible and people who persist with it are basically fighting the wrong war.
The Greens should really be criticised because their climate policies are flawed and make the objective of carbon reduction less attainable.
Increasingly, this sees the Greens believing that the reasons why Ireland is unlikely to reach its climate targets is down to Irish farmers, people who won’t use cycle lanes or those who refuse to queue with bags of leaky cans at Deposit Return machines.
What happened in Ireland in 2020 was that a group with some seriously flawed policies was suddenly catapulted to power.
Today, we are all living with the consequences of that bad deal and those flawed policies.
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