Interesting to note in this article from The Sunday Independent, that “Former Green MEP Nessa Childers (Dublin), former Councillor Bronwen Maher (Dublin) and former local candidate Patricia Gardiner (Dublin & Sligo/Leitrim) have also made the switch from the Greens to Labour.”

Nessa Childers was actually a Labour party member who joined the Greens, and then rejoined Labour when Eamon Gilmore told her she could have a job in the European Parliament. I sat beside her at a Green Party event in late 2008, in which we talked at length about our collective disappointment with Labour Party re. their stance on environment issues. An easy mistake to make I suppose.

The more comical bit concerns Patricia Gardner, however.

Patricia was a Green Party candidate in the Local Elections in Dublin in 2004 (6 years ago) where she polled reasonably well. Thereafter, she moved to Sligo, where she expressed an interest in running for the Green Party in the 2007 General Election. This was approved by the local members, but Patricia then refused to go through a more detailed ratification process with the Electoral Task Force, who wanted to interview her about some comments she had made in the media that were critical of the Party.

When she refused to do this, her ratification couldn’t proceed, and 6 weeks before the election, we were left without a candidate. Brian Scanlon agreed that he would be the candidate, but Patricia’s sister then decided that they would scupper this process by herself forward, which meant we would have to have another selection convention.

Ultimately, this didn’t happen, as Patricia’s sister hadn’t paid her membership dues, which meant she was ineligible.

Both Gardiners left the party a few weeks later. This was done with some ceremony, where Patricia wrote to all of the members of the local group announcing her resignation.

Anyway, the point of all this is that these events happened before the party went into Government, so they have no relevance to ‘message’ in the article. Patricia Gardiner was not a Green Party candidate in either 2007 or 2009.

More generally, I was also in the Labour Party once, up to 2007 (I even officiated at the Labour Party Selection Convention for Sligo-North Leitrim for the 2007 General Election).

I left for various reasons, most particularly because the local Labour Party had no interest whatsoever in environmental protection, and even went as far as lending public support to a number of white elephant and extremely damaging developments in the Roscommon Leitrim area.

This attitude was recently highlighted again in the Labour Party’s recent refusal to support a ban on the Ward Union Stag Hunt and new legislation to regulate dog breeding establishments, and prior to this, their refusal to support new building regulations and a ban on inefficient light bulbs.

When I was in the Labour Party there were about 35 members in Leitrim. 25 of these left en masse in 2007, when Labour HQ refused to allow Gabriel McSharry run as a Labour Party candidate in North Leitrim, claiming that it would upset the chances of Jimmy McGarry, who went on to poll about 1,300 votes, only about 200 more than the the Green Party candidate who didn’t even have any personalised posters.

Gabriel and I attended a meeting with Pat Magner and other members of the Labour Executive in Leinster House in late 2006, where we put the case for Gabriel’s candidacy. Gabriel was promised that he’d have a decision within weeks, but Gabriel never heard from anyone in Labour HQ again. Hence, his departure, along with his supporters.

Today, the Green Party group in Sligo-Roscommon-Leitrim has about 40 members, which is about the same as we had prior to the 2007 General Election.