Outgoing FF Minister claims authorship of Environment Policy

On RTE's "Today" programme this morning (with Tom McGurk), Dick Roche said that he was proud that only THREE lines of the Environment section of the Programme for Govt had not been written by him! If true, you'd have to wonder what exactly took 10 days to negotiate???

The most interesting thing about the Green Party position is the 180 degree political turn they’ve managed to perform in the past week.

For 10 days of negotiations, the country was repeatedly assured that getting Green policy in a programme for government was the complete focus and priority. Nothing as tawdry as cabinet seats was even considered.

Once the deal was signed and the paucity of the policy concessions to the Greens was revealed, we were told that having Green Ministers at cabinet to influence Govt was the only thing that actually mattered. The negotiated programme for Govt is almost dismissed by Green TDs as being relatively unimportant.

Correction: I've listened again to the interview and Roche's claim regarding authorship of all but 3 lines related to the Local Government Reform section of the Programme for Government. His claim with regard to ownership of the Environment policy in the Programme for Govt was a more modest 85%.

I'll excuse myself this error on the basis that it was significantly less misleading than FF's 97% v. 3% tax benefit pre-election ads, which were a straightforward, bare-faced and deliberate lie.