*Senator Roisin Garvey (GP). Photograph: John Mangan
FROM THE high of the Green wave in 2019, Senator Roisin Garvey (GP) is confident the junior coalition partner will ride out any storms heading their direction.
Inagh native Roisin is in contention for the fourth seat in Clare where she would become the first ever Green TD elected in the county. She was previously the first woman and Green councillor elected in North Clare for Clare County Council back in 2019.
Fresh from winning a €15 voucher for the Tulla butchers in a raffle from the Feakle Women’s Shed, Roisin is hoping for much bigger success and what would be a major political win.
Pitching herself as “a strong voice for Clare,” she said her five years in the Seanad have been fruitful. “I don’t know any Senator who’s achieved as much as me in the last four and a half years, I do pre-budget submissions every year. I got millions for local enterprise offices, for small businesses, for Local Links, for, awnings and furniture for small businesses. I got money for Digi Hubs. Like, I do the work, I do the maths. I do the research. I use the CSO, and I make a pitch with different ministers. I got money off Heather Humphreys, off Leo Varadkar, off Simon Coveney. Nothing off Peter Burke this year, of course, he was the first Minister for Enterprise that would not meet me, I’ve always been focusing on rural development and small medium businesses because I’m an enterprise trade and employment spokesperson and there’s plenty in the big parties taking care of the multinationals, and nobody’s taking care of the small businesses”.
She continued, “You are only getting warmed up after your first term, it took me two years, there’s no training, it is a big difference between a councillor and a national politician, it took me two years to get my head around it, the first year I chanced my arm putting in a pitch to Heather Humphreys and I got €5m for Digi Hubs so I was like ok here we go but most TD’s and Senators don’t need ministers looking for money for budgets, whereas I thought our whole job was to try and make everything better for people”.
Garvey is not short of confidence when predicting what she could do if elected a TD. “If I can achieve x amount as a senator, if I had a constituency office we’re not allowed have a constituency office, it’s illegal for us to have one, which was really difficult because everybody kind of sees you as a public representative, the same as a TD so they all want to meet you and stuff, and that is tricky and if you become a TD, you’re allowed to constituency office, and you’re allowed to have a staff member that will run it for you which is amazing, I mean, if I can achieve as much as I did without any of that, I think I would achieve a lot more for Clare and a lot more for climate and nature in our county as well”.
As the smallest party in the coalition, the Greens are expected to lose seats, some pundits such as Ivan Yates have predicted a wipeout which was news to Roisin. “Nobody is predicting a wipeout, they are just saying we won’t get them all back in, we’re still on five percent, we’re not down to one or two like the PDs and Labour were in previous governments, you’re actually the first person that has mentioned a wipeout, RTÉ, Newstalk and all the journalists in the last few days that I’ve met nobody else has used that word, I’d push back on that word, we will definitely get some people returned,” she told The Clare Echo.
When asked how many seats the Greens will win, she responded, “I’m not a psychic but we’ll win one in Clare anyway”. The deputy leader of the party said they are hopeful of winning seven or eight seats which will be down from their current tally of twelve.
In 2020, she polled 5,624 first preferences which was more than then Junior Minister Pat Breen (FG) but not enough to cause an upset, she was the second last candidate to be eliminated. “The Greens weren’t in government the last time, and I had only been a councillor a year so 5,000 was very good for somebody who’s only been a councillor a year but, I mean, I have had a more of a platform now as a national politician, as a Senator, you know, you’re involved more. You’re going to more events around the county for the last four and a half years, I’ve travelled the length and breadth of Clare anyway in my previous job as a green schools, coordinator, and a lot of the schools had me back over the last four and a half years to raise flags and to do workshops with kids, I’ve raised green flags for them, I’ve been to Tulla and, you know, lots of places. I think when people see Local Links they will think of me, if they see a pedestrian crossing or an improved footpath in their town or village”.
Her national profile has increased since her nomination to the Seanad in June 2020. “I’m surprised the amount of people who actually know me, I’m actually very surprised by that, I wasn’t expecting that but I don’t have time to be thinking that I’m on the news, apparently a thing between Michael Healy-Rae and me went viral on Twitter, I don’t look at Twitter at all, Twitter is goodbye. I hate it. I haven’t I haven’t used it at all. I think I’ve got a friend now who want to do a bit for me for this election, but Twitter is, like, it’s journalists so they’re not going to vote for me and it’s people who are really unhappy that just want to attack you”.
Another narrative that manages to press Garvey’s buttons is that the Greens haven’t helped rural Ireland. “I’m so sick of that question. If I go out my door and I go right, my neighbour has gone into organic farming, who swore he never would, and he’s an organic farmer now, he’s sixty two, if I go left I have two people in their eighties that have solar panels and an electric car that are powering off it for free. If I go down the road a bit further, I have another couple that have land in Doolin, they’ve gone organic. If I go up the road, I have a woman whose husband passed away, and she can get the Local Link now from her door because of the new increased services that I got funding for. If I go down to Inagh, I have all the parents, like, their teenagers could get the bus eight times a day now to Ennis or Ennistymon without them having to bring them and because of the night-time economy bus they got on the weekends, they can go to the cinema without their parents, or the kids can stay at home, the teenagers can stay home, and the parents can go out on a Friday night to Ennis or Ennistymon, have a bite to eat, have a few drinks, and come back to Inagh so tell me how that is bad for rural Ireland and the rural broadband has increased tenfold which means people with all kinds of jobs, there’s as many people working from home as there is outside of home”.
Her former Council colleagues in North Clare have been vocal in criticising the change in focus of the Active Travel grant in 2024 which now seems to prioritise urban areas with only Ennis and Shannon receiving funds this year. “There was no funding for Active Travel in Clare until the Greens got into Government, let’s be very clear, the first few years there was money for every project. I got a letter from Eamon Ryan telling the county councillors how untrue that was, that is a problem with the NTA but Eamon Ryan put it in writing for me because it came up before and if you look at look at funding from Mullagh, look at funding for Bodyke, look at funding for Kilmurry McMahon, look at funding for the Cross of Spancill Hill, I mean, is that urban centric. So four and a half years ago there was no money for Active Travel anywhere in the county, let’s make that very clear”.
Garvey was adamant the fault instead lay at the door of Clare County Council. “Eamon Ryan fought tooth and nail with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to get proper investment for Active Travel for everybody in Ireland, not just Dublin or cities, he also five full time staff in Clare County Council, so for the last four and a half years, Clare County Council had 5 full time staff funded and millions of euros to do active travel initiatives, the first three years, all that went anywhere they wanted in the whole county, they scattered it out everywhere, all over the county, as rural and urban as you name, they got they got funding for things. No issue at all. In the last couple of years, because a lot of money has been wasted by our local authorities by putting it into consultants’ pockets instead of actually doing the work themselves and getting the Active Travel team to do the work. And as a result, the NTA have gone, wait now, lads what are you doing with all that money? We just want to pull you back a small bit there, and maybe for now, to see proper model shift and to see the money getting its value, we better just focus on that and that didn’t happen in lots of that didn’t happen in lots of other counties. So instead of blaming the greens, we might look at the active travel team in county council. We might look at Pat Dowling and his priorities. We might look at why they put in road engineers and quantity surveyors instead of people who could have had the expertise to do the active travel infrastructure themselves instead of paying lots of companies like ACOM and places lots of money that they drew down from the NTA on consultants instead of doing the work. And we could have finished Doolin by now, we could have Mullagh finished by now, and all those rural areas could have been taken care of that money instead of spending on consultants so let’s be very clear about that. This is not a Green Party issue. This is a local authority issue”.
According to Garvey “it’s usually only journalists that bring it up, you’re the one saying we’re anti-rural, you haven’t cited any case except one that has nothing to do with the Green Party. I’m not getting it on the doors at all, let’s not forget North Clare elected me to the Council and everybody said, you’re mad, you’ll never get elected because the people of rural Ireland hate Greens”.
She said no farmers in Clare have criticised her on Green Party policies. “I had a good chat with a neighbour the other day, we were talking about low low cost, flooding measures that we should be doing instead of all this hard engineering, he was like, just throw throw down the trees, throw them in throw them into the stream, and I we’re talking about the beaver imitations, people laugh at this sort of stuff but that is how you stop flooding and farmers’ lands are saturated, farmers aren’t eejits, they can see that everything has changed, and they know they need help to see to cope with the changes, that’s a fact. The only visceral I get is when a journalist says you’re anti-rural or when somebody says something on social media”.
Liam Grant’s (GP) narrow loss in the Council elections in June have left the Greens without an elected voice on the local authority. It has made Garvey more determined to win a seat in the Dáil. “We need green voices everywhere now. We have the we have the wherewithal to deal with flooding and all these things that we’ve been saying, like, the way we’re doing it at the moment is we’re we’re pretending Midleton is not going to happen somewhere else, like, are we waiting for it to happen in Ennis or Ennistymon because that’s what’s coming down the tracks and we need people who actually take it seriously, and we want to have serious investment in flood prevention, not this ‘oh, the rail line is flooded again’ and the OPW go ‘oh my goodness. Is the railway flooded’, I mean, it’s been flooding for years and the OPW just laugh at us, this this is serious, and it’s going to happen more frequently and it’s going to happen for longer”.
