Greens in Government - its not whether or not you sup with the devil, but simply how long is your spoon

After another conversation with someone this morning about, amongst other things

As Green Party TD and Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources noted in the Dáil in a debate in early July 2008:

We bought bigger cars for the status that it gave. We built bigger houses with X number of bedrooms and bathrooms, regardless of how we were going to heat these massive properties. We flew to New York in a way that turned Madison Avenue into our latest Grafton Street…Let us be honest with ourselves that is the phenomenon that occurred… In the last decade China and India started to produce our goods for us at a fraction of the cost. That brought down inflation in the developed world and allowed the central banks to lower interests internationally, which led to easy lending, bad lending. (Irish Times, July 11th, 2008)