Irish Examiner view: Greens suffer the curse of Cassandra

Mon, 02 Dec, 2024 - 00:20

Now that the numbers are in, time has to be spent reading the entrails, consulting the augurs, and drawing conclusions about what it all means for Ireland. Working arrangements must be put in place and alliances tested. There’s a heavy workload ahead.

While there is more debate, justifiably driven by Sinn Féin who are markedly more cheerful than 10 days ago, about a “realignment” of the left including the Social Democrats and Labour, much of this is speculative.

What is beyond doubt is that the election has been catastrophic for the Greens. While this is represented as a traditional ballot-booth punishment for a junior partner squeezed between two big beasts in a coalition, it will be a strange country indeed where an alliance of the centre-left does not include some representatives from the party with the most robust environmental credentials.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Greens, who held 12 positions in the previous Government, have been penalised for reminding voters — who are clearly seeking stability — of the inconvenient truth of climate change and the consequential demands on all citizens.

To this extent, the party has come to resemble Cassandra, the Trojan princess who was bestowed with the gift of accurate prophecy by the sun god, but cursed by him to ensure that no one believed her soothsaying.

Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman, who was given something of a hospital pass when Eamon Ryan, the most recognisable face of the environmental movement, decided to stand down in July, put his finger on it on Saturday night.

“I suppose enough people weren’t feeling in their pocket that the Greens were as focused at insulating people from the cost-of-living spikes that the other two parties were,” he said.

The difficulties of creating and implementing policy from a subordinate position can never be underestimated and, even where progress is made — in childcare costs and parental leave, for example — the credit is just as likely to accrue to coalition partners as to the champions in the Cabinet.

For now, the Greens are forced to walk down a road they have travelled before. They may take some comfort from their own version of a well-worn Irish phrase — their day will come. Unbundling the generational statistics of voters in this election may give us a better idea of when that will be.

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Putin revives an era of espionage

In the 1,013 days since Russia invaded Ukraine — more than five times as long as Napoleon spent advancing and retreating from Moscow — there have been hundreds of occasions when actions brutal, bloody, and brave have captured the headlines. But very little progress to alter the balance of power and probabilities.

Until now, when, for the first time, Kyiv has intimated that it might be prepared to cede land in exchange for a Nato “protective” umbrella. This signal may have been sent ahead of the Trump presidency and his promise of a ceasefire within 24 hours of January 20, 2025, when he takes office.

It is high-risk for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as any concession could be viewed as weakness by Vladimir Putin and an encouragement to push for more after a week in which Western intelligence forces have been briefing heavily about various incidents across Europe and citing them as examples of the Kremlin’s covert hybrid war.

Drones over US bases in England, fires at warehouses, mysterious crashes of freight planes in Lithuania, the cutting of communications cables in the Baltic Sea, the attempted assassination of the chief executive of a German arms manufacturer, all are being linked as part of a strategy which would not be out of place in one of the 1970s thrillers of Frederick Forsyth. No wonder his most famous creation is so popular on TV in The Day of the Jackal.

Bruno Kahl, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, said this week that Russia’s “measures” only increase “the risk that Nato will eventually consider invoking its mutual defence clause [Article 5]”.

As we end the year, there is some sign of movement in the mincing machine that Israel has created in Gaza, with Hezbollah, the main prop and stay of the Hamas terrorist group, weakened by conflict and the need to maintain a ceasefire.

Behind them, Iran is mulling the consequences of the terms of settlement of its proxy, while another of its allies, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, once so heavily backed by Russia, faces insurgency and the loss of Aleppo to Islamist rebels.

This dangerous volatility may initiate a change of priorities in both Tehran and Moscow. Should Kyiv make a formal offer as opposed to casting bread on the water, the world can see whether Putin has any interest at all in talks. If he doesn’t then the prospects for 2025 will be dire and can be marked by grim news that the US has been pressing Ukraine to revamp its laws to allow conscription of troops as young as 18.

While the White House has authorised more than $56bn of security aid to Kyiv, Washington is also said to hold the view that Ukraine has the weaponry it needs and must dramatically increase its manpower to stay in the fight.

The world is grim indeed when one country’s hawks can demand that allies send more teenagers to the front line as the price for continuing support.

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Desert dates

It’s reasonable to assume Gianni Infantino, president of world football’s governing body Fifa, didn’t spend any time telling Saudi Arabia how gay he felt when his organisation greenlighted that country’s application to host the 2034 World Cup.

The bid evaluation, released this weekend, will be rubber-stamped at an online congress on December 11, when approval is also expected to be given for the 2030 World Cup to be hosted jointly by Portugal, Spain, and Morocco.

So we can look forward to another winter World Cup, with its centrepiece in the desert megalopolis of ‘The Line’, with its mirrored walls, much of which is yet to be built. And, no doubt, much anguish over the rights of migrant workers and women, the status of LGBT+ communities, and construction safety standards. And then some football.

Irish Examiner view: Enjoy a small moment of calm after election day