They had none of the ball and chain traditions/advantages of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. They weren’t seen as “business friendly” the way the Progressive Democrats were. They were new and unaffected and innocent. 

They were difficult to dislike, especially because, although we talked, at the time, of “Global Warming”, it hadn’t mutated into “Climate Change” and “Climate Chaos.” The Greens weren’t seen as wanting to stop us doing things. No harm in them. Nice lads and lassies.

They got over that phase over the next few years, most of the ones who stayed put, and proved they could be as territorial and mutually hostile as members of any other party. With one exception: Eamon Ryan. 

This was a man you couldn’t get to be waspish about a colleague, even if you were setting out to entrap him. He would talk about the colleague’s strengths and direction of thought, never about their mutual relationship, even if it was known to be poisonous. Same when it came to opposition figures. Or — eventually — other parties in a coalition government.

Too sweet to be wholesome? The odd answer is No. Ryan is riotous fun over lunch. He’s a reader. A thinker. A questioner. He lives modestly and is embedded in family. He’s genuinely interested in other people, including people who will have danced up and down when they heard he was resigning as leader of the Greens after disastrous European and local elections. 

One of his great strengths — which, classically, would also be one of his great weaknesses — is a conviction that if you provide someone with supportable evidence, they will come to agree with you. It’s that courteous determination to argue every single point on the agenda that causes broadcasters to get snappy with him. (He doesn’t notice or react to snappy.) 

Quite apart from broadcasters, however, the reality of influencing in mainstream media is that reliance on data as the ultimate persuader has had a hole blown in it in recent years.

At the same time, the Greens, like everybody else in politics, have ended up being caricatured and stereotyped. In their case, they are seen as the killjoys who don’t want us to fly to our summer holidays or do traditional farming. Not to mention the eejits who wished those supermarket edifices that look like outside toilets on the public, into which you are invited to shove your plastic bottles.

All of which led to canvassers of all parties in rural areas during the election campaign reporting the same thing to their varied HQs: Outside the cities, the very name Eamon Ryan was rejectable at first syllable. The reasonable, evidence-based arguments he was presenting, along with members of his party, were going down like lead balloons, out on the stump. 

He was viewed as personifying “all that biodiversity and sustainability stuff” many voters no longer believed in. Now, you can attribute that to the human capacity to live in denial of the facts, as Jared Diamond suggests led to the abandonment of Easter Island after much despairing vandalism. But, whatever the key causes, the tide went out for the Greens even more decidedly than it did for Sinn Féin, although the latter got more immediately negative coverage.

For Eamon Ryan, the only honourable thing would have been to resign as leader, and that’s what he did. He will assist the replacement process, because he believes in the Greens and in democracy. He’ll be off to one of the Aran Islands for their usual simple family summer holiday without a worry for the run-up to the general election.

The day he gets on his bike to head home as a former political leader, he will go without rancour or regret. Which is unusual for a man so long at the top in politics.