This article is from page 25 of the 2011-02-22 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 25 JPG
CLARE General Election candidate Brian Meaney (GP) says his primary focus will remain local issues, even if he is asked to take up a senior position within the Green Party following the elections.
Cllr Meaney will be the most senior party member in the country should the Greens, as predicted, lose all of their Dáil seats in the upcoming election. Cllr Meaney has already been touted in some quarter as a possible party leader following next week’s vote.
“I will probably be the most senior elected Green in the country [after the election] and that is not something that I would relish. What will happen will happen but the party will not go away. The party will need to be rebuilt, and they’re not going to be rebuilt from the ashes because the possibility is there that there won’t be any ashes,” he told The Clare People . “But that said, on a good day we could get four seats; we could even get eight seats. There is no way of predicting this.”
Should the Green Party lose all of their Dáil seats, they will need to retain at least two per cent of the overall national vote to retain funding for national party office in Dublin. Even if they don’t achieve this, Cllr Meaney is confident that the party will survive.
“In many ways we are still a campaigning party and no matter what happens we will remain a campaigning party and many of the issues that we are campaigning on have become main stream issues. The issues have not gone away and the need for a Green Party has not gone away,” he said.
“It wouldn’t bother me [if he started to get responsibility within the party] but I would concentrate on my main job which is a councillor representing the people of Ennis West. The electorate of Ennis West, the electorate of Ennis Town Council and the various other positions that I have as a result of these, they are my primary function and responsibility.”