FORMER Limerick Green Party TD Brian Leddin has resigned from the party, citing its decision to back Catherine Connolly’s presidential election campaign, along with the current direction of the party.
An engineer by training, Mr Leddin was elected to Dáil Éireann in February 2020 and became the first Green Party TD to represent Limerick City.
He chaired the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Environment and Climate Action during his term in office. Prior to his election to the Dáil, he was a Green Party councillor representing Limerick North City.
In an opinion piece in the Irish Times this week, Leddin announced his resignation from the Green Party.
He deemed the party’s support for Catherine Connolly’s presidential campaign as the latest effort by the leadership to chart a different course for the Greens.
The Limerick politician maintains the Greens’ core purpose is to tackle the destruction of our natural environment, climate change, and its catastrophic impacts, and suggested the Greens should concentrate on these.
“The Green Party of today appears less concerned with the environment and more focused on broader social issues. All of these are laudable, but, in my view, the move is bringing the party to a place that is occupied by other parties and, in turn, making the Green Party less relevant,” Leddin said in his Irish Times piece.
“I know that many members, including former colleagues of mine who were proud to serve as TDs, senators, and councillors, have been dismayed at the recent direction of the party. That it would back a candidate of the far left in the presidential run was unthinkable only a few months.”
He said he made his mind up that Connolly was not a suitable candidate as soon as she was proposed because he doesn’t believe that she will park her political positions at the gates of Áras an Uachtaráin.
“Whether it’s her criticisms of the European Union, her repeated equivocation on the causes of the Ukraine war, the preservation of the triple lock, or any other cause she has passionately represented, she will have to be silent on them for the most part if she is elected president,” Leddin hit out.
The Green Party’s decision to support the Connolly campaign, he continued, only deepened his concerns about the party’s current direction.
“It had other options. It could have put forward its own candidate. Although the prospects of getting a nomination were slim, given the current numbers of councillors and Oireachtas members, the effort to do so could have inserted the environment into the debate,” he wrote.
“As things stand, the Green Party is not one that I would join, and so it no longer makes sense to remain a member.”
The Green Party locally thanked Brian for his contributions to Limerick on the Council and in Dáil Eireann.
“The Green Party took the decision on which candidate to endorse in the presidential race after considerable consultation with our membership, party spokespersons, and councillors, and endorsed Catherine as the only candidate in the race that was addressing and raising issues related to climate action and the environment. The party is proud to continue to be represented in Limerick City by Cllr Seán Hartigan,” the party told the Limerick Post.
Cllr Hartigan said he was shocked to read of Leddin’s resignation in the Irish Times, adding that support for Catherine Connolly on the campaign trail is very strong and that she is “uniting opposition parties and has Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael running scared”.
