ABSTRACT
Green politics in the ecological rather than the nationalist sense came late to the Irish Republic. It was only in December 1981 that Christopher Fettes, a Dublin schoolteacher, established the Ecology Party of Ireland on familiar grounds. The Ecology Party changed its name and reformed into the Green Alliance in 1983, in order to better reflect its pure green and decentralist preferences. The pattern of politics in Ireland is, of course, far from static. There has been a discernible shift over recent elections, which might indicate a better prospect for those parties which stand outside the post-civil war animus that has continued to cast a long shadow over the country's politics. If the pattern of electoral flux continues to unfold in future elections, the Irish Green Party is as likely to figure in the same post electoral calculus as its sister parties have recently done in France, Italy, Finland and Germany.
