The Green party in Ireland has been virtually wiped out in the general election, and its leader admitted it was entering a period of “rebuild” after the electorate removed any prospect of the party re-entering government.
The Greens lost all but one of their 12 seats, with its leader, Roderic O’Gorman, scraping through on the 13th count.
It means the party is unlikely to team up again with the two centre-right parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, which are on track to come within a few seats of the 88-seat majority needed to form the new government.
Counting from Friday’s election could continue into Monday. The proportional representation system involves multiple counts and too-close-to-call scraps for the final seats in many constituencies.
The party’s losses are the worst since 2011 when it was left with no seats in the election, triggered by the financial crash and IMF bailout.
Eamon Ryan, the recently retired leader succeeded by O’Gorman, said even one seat would make “a huge difference” because it would not repeat his experience post-2011 when the Greens had no voice at all in parliament and no funding.
Among several high-profile losers in the Irish election was the gangland figure Gerry Hutch, who lost out to Labour in the Dublin Central constituency, where the four seats were filled by others including the Sinn Féin leader, Mary Lou McDonald.
Hutch caused pandemonium when he arrived at the Dublin count centre, posing gnomically for a media scrum for 15 minutes. He clashed with RTÉ’s reporter but took a question from the BBC, who asked if he would run again. “I’ve been running all my life,” he said.
Named in a court case last year as the head of a well-known crime family in Ireland, Hutch, known as “the Monk”, was released on bail in Lanzarote to run for parliament after his arrest in Spain last month as part of an international investigation into money laundering.
Hutch said in a recent podcast interview that he had had several convictions for robbery as a young man. He has not been convicted of any other crime more recently and, in a rare 2008 interview with RTÉ, he denied being the leader of a crime gang.
As the results appeared to point to the return of some form of coalition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the centre-right parties hailed Ireland’s reversal of global trends and pointed in particular to the voters’ broad spurning of far-right candidates.
Jack Chambers, the Fianna Fáil deputy leader, said: “I think, in the main, centrist politics in Ireland has strengthened here. We haven’t seen the level of fragmentation in other countries, the level of polarisation in politics. In fact, if you look at the far-right candidates which presented themselves for election, there’s clear rejection of their politics in Ireland.”
Chambers said that although the election was cataclysmic for the Greens, it had strengthened two other parties on the left, with the Social Democrats expected to get more than 10 seats and Labour on course for eight or more.
Sinn Féin, which got 19% of first-preference votes, behind Fianna Fáil’s 21.9% and Fine Gael’s 20.8%, is expected to get more than 30 seats but not enough to lead government formation talks.
Among the issues that created problems for the Greens was a carbon tax on petrol, aimed at discouraging people from consuming carbon-emitting fuel, which was introduced by the previous government but blamed on the Greens. There were also rows about Ireland’s derogation from an EU directive on nitrates, commonly used in fertiliser seeping into rivers: Fianna Fáil committed to retaining it while the Greens wanted to phase it out and prioritise river quality.
Ciarán Cuffe, a member of the party for 40 years and a former MEP, said the Greens had been “the fall guys” and had paid the price for being incumbents.
“I think small-party incumbency is at the heart of this. In the Irish political context, it is always tough for the junior partner in government to argue about what it has achieved in government, and it seems to be held responsible for every other department, including the ones it doesn’t control. That’s what happened to Labour in 2016, it happened to us in 2011 and it seems to have happened to us again now,” he said.
“We were seen as the fall guys. We were being attacked from two sides, from some of our core supporters who felt we weren’t doing enough, and then quite a few loud voices within Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael who were saying that the Greens were destroying the country, so we were stuck between a rock and a hard place,” he said.
He added: “It is a lonely place when you’ve been wiped or almost wiped out in national elections. But I think the green issues are much bigger than one election, and having been in the Greens since the get-go for 40 years, I believe the Greens will certainly rise again, and the issues are more important than ever.”
