Ireland's Green Party voted on Saturday in favour of staying in power, removing the risk of a snap election that would have scuppered a "bad bank" plan to revive the financial system and held up urgent fiscal surgery, Reuters reported. Members of the party voted 84 percent to 16 percent in favour of a new programme that will see them continue to support Prime Minister Brian Cowen's government as it seeks to revive the worst-performing economy in western Europe. "This programme for government is about ... getting this country back up on its feet again," Green Party Leader John Gormley told delegates, warning they would still have to stomach tough spending cuts as December's budget loomed. "Very, very hard decisions have to be made," Gormley said. "We are willing to make those decisions." Members dismissed by 69-31 percent a motion calling for the party to reject Cowen's plan to create a National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) to remove risky commercial property loans with a nominal value of 77 billion euros ($113 billion) off the books of its banks. The thumbs up from the Greens is a major relief for investors in Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks, who are relying on NAMA to draw a line under doubts about the lenders' future following the credit crunch and a devastating local property crash. The Greens, who wrung concessions including a windfall tax on property speculation from Cowen on the NAMA legislation, will now support the law in parliament and it could be passed next month. The Green vote is a reprieve for Cowen's Fianna Fail party, which would almost certainly have been banished to the opposition benches following a general election and for Cowen himself, who would have faced calls to resign as party leader if the Green votes had gone the other way. Only last week he scored a major victory in getting the European Union's reform treaty ratified in a referendum but Cowen faces his toughest challenge over the new couple of months in persuading backbenchers to agree to back his fiscal reforms. The 49-year-old has promised Brussels he will get the country's deficit, proportionately the worst in the euro zone, under control by 2013 and he needs to start cutting politically sensitive areas of spending to make that happen. Green Party officials warned earlier this year that the coalition could still collapse towards December as Cowen tries to push through 4 billion euros of savings in the 2010 budget. But Gormley said he was fully committed to the fiscal cuts. "You can't argue against the mathematics of it," Gormley told reporters after the vote. "We are borrowing 400 million (euros) a week, there is no getting away from it."
