An open letter to John Gormley

Dear Mr Gormley,

It is with bitter satisfaction that I read of your decision to step down as nominal leader of the Green Party. That decision comes as little surprise but yet you still seem to be in denial as to the cause of the party's demise.

The simple answer is that the Green Party made a Faustian pact with little regard for the long-term implications. For a party which claims to have the environmental health of the planet as its raison d'être it's hard to fathom just why you all drank the Fianna Fail-flavoured Flavor-Aid so readily and consequences be damned. At the time it was glaringly obvious to even the most casual observer that Fianna Fail were in the process of crash-landing this country into the ground but you in your hubris decided that you could change all that.

It's hard to tell whether you were misguided, over-ambitious or just plain stupid but the fact of the matter is that you shouldn't have done it. Instead you went ahead and propped up a corrupt, selfish and incompetent government at the very time that the opportunity should have been taken to consign them to the bin. For that I will never forgive you and am delighted that the Green Party has been shown where to stick its so-called principles.

The Green Party could have been so much more if it had just stuck to basic principles, but you decided instead to play politics with one of the dirtiest players in Irish political history. All I can say is good riddance to you and to them.

For the record, our household recycles nearly all our waste. Leftovers (when they happen) are composted and the green bin is well-filled every two weeks. I literally can't remember when I last put the black bin out for emptying, and it's still only a third full. Nearly all the lights in our house are CFL or LED and we use an electronic power logging system to monitor usage and identify heavy usage. Car trips are kept to a minimum as is our central heating usage.

Why is it that so many of us make a real effort to do it right and yet you, who claimed to represent us couldn't even have the good sense to think about the future that we all have to live in?