Tipperary’s Green Party general election candidate says he’s “quite disappointed” at the re-election of Éamonn Ryan.
Minister Ryan defeated Deputy Catherine Martin by a narrow margin in the battle for party leadership yesterday.
Rob O’Donnell, who stood for the party in Tipperary in the February election, says he thinks the party is going in the wrong direction.
Speaking on Tipp Today earlier, Rob said he feels Catherine Martin could have changed that:
“We have issues with our branding and reaching out to rural communities, and getting people to understand our policy and why it’s actually good.
“Éamonn hasn’t been able to deliver that over the last 10 years and Catherine, being from rural County Monaghan, she gets it and I think she would have been a much better spokesperson on those issues.
“Unfortunately, she wasn’t elected. I think there’s a question about how much better does a woman have to be to be elected to a position? Because I think she’s a lot more competent and she’s a lot more well-rounded as a leader.”
Over the last day or two a number of members of the Green Party have left, in protest at both the Programme for Government and the failure to elect Catherine Martin as their leader.
Rob O’Donnell has also joined a new group within the party called Just Transition, which is based on the idea of social justice and climate justice being firmly linked.
However, he says that he doesn’t think they should break from the party:
“People are entitled to leave and I understand why people are leaving but I don’t know, right now, do we need to all split up and set up another party.
“It could go either direction – it could be brilliant, like the Soc Dems managed to do, but it could also just fizzle out in a few years.
“… It is a vessel that’s connected to the Green Party… Now we have an official name and we’re going to keep pushing. It is mostly people who are against the Programme for Government.”
