Ryan sowed green shoots of change across Ireland’s political landscape

Minister surpassed all expectations to place his party’s policies at heart of conversation

As Ireland teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in early 2009, Eamon Ryan made a decision some colleagues would find unsettling: he started writing everything down.

Acutely conscious that the Greens had been sidelined in the early stages of the banking crisis, Ryan had determined to get closer to things. He had a family background in banking and a long-standing interest in economics, and he began conferring directly with finance minister Brian Lenihan.

He and Lenihan quickly came to trust each other and Ryan, surprisingly, became one of a small circle of politicians and officials around Lenihan who were at the heart of the Irish crisis response.

So his resignation will be not just a loss for the Greens, but a loss to Irish politics more generally of valuable institutional memory — the experience of being in the white heat of a global financial crisis.

Ryan was at the lunch meeting in early 2009 when economist Peter Bacon, who had been investigating the banks’ loan books, told the country’s leading mandarins the banks were bust and threatening to take the country with them (Bacon proposed a national asset management agency). Ryan left that meeting “scared shitless”, he later told me. He went back to the Green parliamentary party and told them: “We’re in deep trouble.” That was the point when he started writing everything down — phone conversations, meetings, even cabinet discussions.

If they were unsettled by this at first, his cabinet colleagues got used to it. For Ryan, it was his way of processing the immense and often chaotic events that were taking place.

Later that year, the Green Party negotiated a revised programme for government and then put it to their members at a special convention. The Greens were ridiculed for this at the time, their participatory democratic culture seen as being at odds with the “senior hurling” of government.

But Ryan and then party leader John Gormley won an impressive mandate at that convention; the Greens took shared ownership of the rescue plan and would prove surprisingly resilient.

Ryan’s connection to Lenihan also meant the Greens were sometimes better informed than their Fianna Fáil colleagues. In November 2010, with Ireland in the crosshairs of the international markets, Ryan received a call from a reporter: was Ireland going into a bailout programme?

Ryan talked to Lenihan and senior officials; the official line was that there were merely “discussions, not negotiations”, but he learned enough to tell his Green colleagues to keep the head down over the weekend. Dermot Ahern and Noel Dempsey were not so lucky. The picture of them on the news vehemently shaking their heads as they denied the negotiations became one of the iconic moments of the crisis.

As John Downing, former press adviser to the Greens, told Morning Ireland last week, Ryan was a “very unusual politician”. One of his quirks was that he didn’t like to deliver scripted speeches, preferring the greater authenticity of extemporising. But when you extemporise, you sometimes fluff — as when, during

Covid, he suggested that salad seeds in south-facing window-boxes could save us.

That those comments became a leitmotif for the assault on the Greens — it was one of the first things cited by Independent Ireland TD Michael Collins when asked to assess Ryan’s legacy, on Morning Ireland last week — shows how threadbare much of that attack is.

To the extent that there is substance to that attack, though, it is paradoxical: the Greens have been attacked for being successful. According to the anti-Green narrative, a small cabal of loony environmentalists have co-opted the deep state and managed to ensure their agenda (cycling, bus lanes, cattle culls, lettuce leaves) prevails over the interests of their far larger coalition partners.

That looks perilously like a conspiracy theory, but there is some truth to it. Early in the life of this Government, while the 2021 Climate Action Plan was being circulated, a (non-Green) political adviser overheard a conversation between senior officials in a department not involved in climate policy. “We’re going to have to remember in future, in everything we do, to see it through a green lens,” one advised the other. That is influence.

The evidence of that influence is writ large all over government policy: carbon tax, carbon budgets, a climate action plan, a climate advisory council, public transport. Ryan himself said his Green colleagues in Europe acclaimed the Irish programme for government as the greenest in Europe. Green voters should be rewarding them for that. But the Greens’ voters are not all particularly green.

The narrative around the Greens’ election losses and around this leadership contest is that the party has a rural problem. This is true, but it’s not new. As much as it suited rural politicians to attack the Green Party for its policies, it should have suited the Greens to be so attacked — and thereby have policy wins highlighted.

Fine Gael MEP Regina Doherty denounced the Greens for turning Dublin “into a spaghetti junction of cycle lanes that have divided the city like East and West Berlin”. Sixty-one thousand people cycle to work or education in Dublin — roughly the same number as voted for Ciarán Cuffe in 2019.

A quarter of Dubliners cycle at least once a week. If the cyclists had voted for the Greens, they wouldn’t have a problem. Clearly, in some places, such as Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, they did.

For a long time the Greens were outsiders. As such, they attracted an anti-establishment vote. But that vote is next-to-impossible to sustain when in government — particularly when in a government that has been resolutely attacked for four years by the opposition for its conservatism.

It is difficult to remember how unlikely this scenario once seemed. When I was working as a researcher in RTÉ 20 years ago, Ryan, then in his first term in the Dáil, came in to the studio and performed particularly well. “If only he wasn’t in the Greens,” the producer said ruefully, “he could be a minister some day.”

Ryan and his party surpassed expectations. To do so, they became insiders — albeit unusual ones. In doing so, they lost a significant portion of their support. That is a riddle that any new leader is going to struggle with.

We have to remember, in everything we do, to see it through a green lens