Your correspondent offers a special edition of Profiles in Scourge: a group profile covering the Martin family, otherwise styled the Green Party.

I

As a function of the stipulation in Bunreacht na hÉireann that the number of Government Ministers must not exceed fifteen, the State presently finds itself with extraordinary ministerial titles that combine multiple discrete areas of responsibility, the worst of which—and therefore Macdara’s favourite—being the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, an tAire Turasóireachta, Cultúir, Ealaíon, Gaeltachta, Spóirt agus Meán. Macdara suggests that the word Culture alone would have sufficed to cover the other five fields, but never mind.

For the sake of his sanity, this will not actually be a letter on whatever has been happening at RTÉ, and however an tAire Martin has been handling it. Macdara has been busy and cannot bear to spend his leisure time engaging with something so infuriating and fatuous as RTÉ is even when functioning as normal. 

Let Macdara instead refer to the following facts about Minister Martin: the Minister represents Dublin-Rathdown; her husband, also a TD, represents Dublin South-West; one wonders whether they live in one of those intriguing properties right on the border of two constituencies, each of them setting out by opposite directions in the morning so as to be seen traversing their home constituency. Martin’s brother represents no one, being a Senator appointed by the Taoiseach (in fact he was elected as a County Councillor in Kildare, a role someone else has been co-opted into doing while he sits in the glorious Seanad). The basic salary of a TD is €107k; Ministers get more, Senators less, though still a nice salary at €75k. So to recap: the deputy leader of the Green Party has herself, her husband and her brother earning a combined figure in the hundreds of thousands of euro, of public money. And this is the woman said, by those in the right-wing media, to be the representative of the younger, more radical wing of the Green Party. The husband, Francis Noel Duffy, the Green spokesperson on housing, apparently, recently received recognition for his persuasive Argument against reinstating a previous ban on no-fault evictions: “Well then it turns into a communist state, that’s what you are talking about. So we purchase everybody’s property, is it?”.

Now Macdara has no information whatsoever on whether Martin influenced the choice of her husband for the constituency in which he ran, or her brother in the constituency in which he unsuccessfully ran before being hoisted into the Seanad. Nor does he have any idea who it was from the Green Party who put her brother’s name on the list for an Taoiseach to nominate, at the conclusion of the tough negotiations in which the Greens heroically got nothing whatsoever, other than cosy ministerial seats, gorgeous cars and massive salaries. Readers must bear in mind that the Greens signed a deal saying “We are committed to an average 7% per annum reduction in overall greenhouse gas emissions from 2021 to 2030”—meaning that the government, which sits for a maximum of five years, could increase its emissions and still say that it is compliant with the plan: wait until you see the next five years! That the Greens agreed to this document is evidence either of idiocy, in that they failed to understand words and numbers—the basic units of sense; the true characteristics of what makes humankind unusual in comparison with other species—or alternatively of the fact that they don’t fucking care about anything. “Strongly Green-influenced programme for government drawn up” the Irish Times slyly cooed.

Returning to the Martin issue—and do we know for certain that she isn’t related to Micheál Martin, with whom she so comfortably shares a Government?—the present writer would like to suggest that he has identified a problem: the Green Party is so small and so chronically self-regarding that evidently no one of any authority in the party thought to argue that it looks like some old-fashioned Corruption for the deputy leader’s husband and brother to be given lots of money for doing very little at all. 

Does the Green Party really have nobody to run in elections apart from members of the Martin family?

II

When another Green Party entity, Roderic O’Gorman, made an absolute hames of the Mother and Baby Homes Bill—unaccountably sticking afterwards around to fuck up the recent Family and Care referenda—which attempted to seal away records for 30 years, disgusted Macdara was moved to email his local TDs, excepting the Leftist TD who did not need to be asked to do the right thing. 

The present writer used the Uplift campaign so disdained by those TDs who resent multiple people being facilitated to get in touch with them at once, sending his message at 21.59 on Saturday 24 October 2020 (a normal Saturday night in so, for your antisocial correspondent). Of the Partionist Party TDs, the Fianna Fáil hack got a response to Macdara three minutes later, automated of course, but at least the man had sense enough to have someone set up an automatic response. The gaslighting started early on, followed by a very able act of backstabbing. 

Thank you for your email, I appreciate you taking the time to get in contact about the Mother and Baby Home Bill. The objective of this Bill is to safeguard a crucial database and make it available to survivors, not to seal records as has been reported.

I met with campaigners at the Dáil last week to discuss their concerns about the Bill. I raised these concerns with the Minister for Children, Roderic O’Gorman TD who was dealing with the legislation. He has acknowledged that the Bill was badly handled, and he has apologised for not consulting properly with survivors.

The Minister “has apologised for not conducting this consultation process prior to the introduction of the Mother and Baby Home Bill […] The handling of this Bill has been very regrettable, the Minister should have engaged with survivors earlier and stated from the outset that the Bill does not seal records”. Full marks to Deputy Devlin for doing what one might expect. Next, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, fatuous Fine Gael creature in a constituency crawling with them, who responded early on the Sunday evening: “There is no doubt there should have been much more meaningful engagement with survivors on this Bill”. 

Finally, on 12 November—nineteen days after Macdara’s email—Deputy Smyth responds. He gets his cringe in early: “I acknowledge that this Government and the Green Party did not manage this highly sensitive subject correctly and got certain aspects of it really wrong”. He continues: “it is abundantly clear from the debate and public discourse that emerged, that the legislation alone did not sufficiently address many issues that affect survivors and their families”. He ends: “I greatly regret the hurt and anxiety that this has caused. I am committed to working with Minister O’Gorman and our Party colleagues to ensure that the voices of survivors, their families, adoptees, academics and advocates are heard.”

Now it might be considered charming that this man is so keen to engage in self-condemnation, and that he attaches his Party so strongly to the mess made. But it is also naive in the extreme; evidence, combined with the extraordinary delay in responding—this writer imagines nineteen days of panicky redrafting of the text, frantic calls around the Party (not a hard task, admittedly, since half the Party membership live in the Martin household)—of the inability of this tiny group of people to meet the basic standards of competence that we might expect of political representatives. 

Macdara has just conducted another search in his inbox, sure that he responded to the Deputy to let him know that his government colleagues had been able to respond quicker. In fact it was not in response to Smyth that the present writer made this point: Macdara had in fact chased Deputy Smyth for a reply on 02 November, contrasting his behaviour with that of his nimble colleagues, after which it was a mere ten days until he received the nostra culpa quoted above.

It is galling that the Green Party will never believe that they are doing Politics, despite the huge sum the leadership has been paid to sit around the Cabinet table. They believe they are above Politics, their eyes instead on the Planet itself, but all they do is keep in charge the elites who are responsible for the degradation not only of the environment of the State, but also of the entire global ecosystem.

Let us end with some more Duffy, this time doing a bit of History:

Yeah. I think people in this country, as far as I know, have been evicted for generations. I know that’s a bit of a cliche. So are you saying if people don’t pay their rent, and all that kind of stuff, they should stay? [and speaking of evictions:] If I don’t get re-elected I’ll bow out gracefully and acknowledge the privilege I had, I won’t be sad about it.

No, no point in being sad. Go in search of greener pastures, Deputy; Macdara suggests you start looking sooner rather than later. It is hard to keep a family business going.