When Eamon Ryan proposed to lead the Green Party into government in 2020 following protracted negotiations during the first Covid lockdown, he was backed by 76 per cent of party members.
Following a heated and sometimes fraught campaign, a far greater proportion of Green members endorsed the party joining Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in government than members of those parties supported going in with the Greens.
That number gives an insight into the party’s membership. It belies the reductive “realos versus fundis” analysis of Green parties across Europe – the notion that there is a constant and equal tension between the pragmatists and the idealists.
This isn’t an actual divide within the Irish Greens, but what is true is that members, more often than not, are closer to the centre of the left-right spectrum than is often portrayed to be the case.
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