This article is from page 17 of the 2007-04-03 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 17 JPG
CLARE’S Green Party election can- didate Brian Meaney has slammed Fianna Fail this week claiming the ruling party is dipping into green policy in a bid to secure easy votes ahead of the upcoming election.
He branded what he termed Fianna Fail’s “new found interest in envi- ronmental issues” as a “cynical at- tempt to court the electorate at the A CoAYoraln el ele) en uae
Councillor Meaney then reiterated his party’s stance at national level saying, “Fianna Fail can try to steal our clothes, but they’ll never fit”, and pointed out that exactly a year ago Taoiseach Bertie Ahern addressed the Dail and said, “I am not respon- sible for the state of the planet”.
“It’ll take more than Dick Roche offering to change the light bulbs to convert Fianna Fail to the green agenda. Members of Fianna Fail must realise that their Party requires
root and branch reform 1f it 1s to seri- ously address environmental issues. For ten years they have ignored the need for change, and now with ten weeks to an election, Bertie Ahern is attempting to hoodwink the elec- Keyes Koni
He highlighted a number of local issues that he says show the current Government have not got green pol- icy at heart.
“Under Fianna Fail’s watch the En- nis CIE freight yard was allowed to
close and this further clogs up our roads. Not only that, Ennis Town Council is still pumping raw sew- erage into the Fergus which is no longer considered worth fishing in by serious anglers. The water in En- nis is unreliable and we have regular boil notices. There is not a metre of cycle path in Ennis and we’re the tenth largest town in Ireland. How can the two Finna Fail TD’s in Clare allow this to happen?”
He said that while the Green Party
welcomes a move towards green policy at all levels, he feels recent declarations by Fianna Fail are merely symptoms of “chameleon- like behaviour rather than conver- sion to the cause. In the space of a year we have watched Bertie Ahern mutate from republican to social- ist, and now he’s going through his environmental phase. One can only be deeply cynical about his attempt to wrap the green flag around his
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