Goodbye Mick, Hello Dick
Can Dick Spring pull Labour out of its nosedive after O'Malley has baled out?
Among the many who left the soporific Labour Party conference in Galway convinced that the party needed a good shake-up were Dick Spring, Liam Kavanagh and Eileen Desmond. On the Wednesday following the conference they went to party leader Michael O'Leary and told him it was time to get his act together. The shake-up which followed wasn't quite what they had in mind. Somewhat disturbed by the approach, O'Leary brooded for a day, then abruptly resigned from the leadership and the party.
The move was a probably inevitable consequence of O'Leary's drift away from the party over the past five years. Having lost by one vote in the leadership contest in 1977, O'Leary was excluded from the party's inner circle and developed an abiding loathing of Frank Cluskey, Brendan Halligan, Tony Browne and Flor O'Mahony.
Making himself busy with the 1979 Euro tussle with John O'Connell and subsequently with the business of a Euro MP, O'Leary hung around the fringes of the party, cracking jokes about the leadership and doing hilarious imitations of Cluskey and Halligan. (Probably his most memorable crack was the cruel and accurate jibe about Cluskey's love for foreign trips and junkets: "Every time he goes within a mile of an airport Frank goes rigid with excitement.")
Following Cluskey's defeat in 1981 the Parliamentary Labour Party found itself so devoid of talent that there was no choice but to turn to the man who disliked the party, who had grown alienated from it, who had belief neither in the party or in its socialist policies. (O'Leary witheld his resignation from the European Parliament until after his successful move at the Gaiety conference to win the party to Coalition. He believed that the prospect of succeeding O'Leary to the Euro job helped persuade Cluskey to back coalition at that conference.)
In the past year associates have been aware of his restless and inattentive attitude, his inability to concentrate on one issue for more than a few seconds. In addition, O'Leary had alienated himself from local activists. He surrounded himself with gofers brought in on salary and at election time gathered around him his own supporters for sporadic and unorganised forays into Dublin Central - increasingly coming into conflict with local party activists who were trying to systematically canvass the constituency and who resented his amateurish efforts. Such conflicts had a lot to do with the serious decline of O'Leary's own vote in Dublin Central.
Similarly as a national leader at election times he annoyed local activists by breezing through their constituencies without contacting them.
O' Leary's contempt for the Labour Party came into the open during last February's election campaign. Although the Administrative Council had decided that the party would fight the election on Labour Party policies and any decision on coalition would be made by it alone after the election, O'Leary went his own way. On the final day of the campaign he appeared at a press conference with Garret FitzGerald and gave a cast iron guarantee that Labour would go into coalition in the event that it and Fine Gael had a majority.
When asked if he didn't have to go back to the Administrative Council O'Leary replied that he had, but he repeated his coalition guarantee. Why then, he was asked, bother to consult the AC? With a straight face he replied, "Because we're a democratic party".
O'Leary went to the conference in Galway intending to get rid of any such handicaps this time around. His motion didn't mention coalition, but merely said that the post-election decision would be made by a joint body of the AC and the Parliamentary Labour Party, depriving the AC of its power. This would have fundamentally altered the balance of power in the party as the AC/PLP body would have a built-in pro-coalition majority.
In the event, O'Leary's preparations for conference were comic, lacking the kind of seriousness which the task demanded. A couple of days before the conference he lost the speech over which he and his advisors had laboured. The substitute speech was disjointed, repetitive and uninspiring. In the course of delivering the speech he dropped massive chunks of it for lack of time, dropped other bits (such as a commitment on legislation for the disabled) for no apparent reason. He annoyed delegates by being absent from the platform for long periods, seldom bothering to attend debates and not voting. (One explanation for his absence from the platform that is making the rounds is that he was suffering from "a stomach complaint" - a dose of the runs.)
After the conference much was made of O'Leary's "rebuff" and a supposed surge of enthusiasm for Cluskey. In fact, the 523 anti-eoalition voters, having been defeated, went solidly behind Cluskey's amendment in order to block O'Leary's attempt to rig the decision by setting up the AC/PLP body. O'Leary's motion attracted 498 votes, so it was clearly rejected by the conference even without the mere 148 votes which Cluskey's supporters (mainly the trade union leaders) contributed on top of the anti-coalition 523.
Now that the tensions arising from the incongruity of his leadership of a party with which he had no sympathy have departed, O'Leary can possibly make a more vigorous and worthwhile contribution to Fine Gael, so long as it remains vaguely social democratic. His lack of self-importance, which led him to lightly accept and then throw off the leadership of a party for which he had contempt, is otherwise admirable and lacking in Irish politics.
The significance of O'Leary's short and weary tenure as Labour leader lies not in his own qualities, good or bad, but in the fact that the party should choose such an ill-suited individual as leader. The Galway conference narrowly defeated a motion which 'would have allowed the leader be elected by conference rather than by the TDs. The main argument by the TDs against this extension of democracy was the fine people who had been chosen as leader under the present system - Brendan Corish, Frank Cluskey, Michael O'Leary.
It is appropriate (or not, depending on your point of view) that both O'Leary's conference speech and his resignation were written in an office in Baggot Street - owned by a dry rot company.
Liam Kavanagh, who could have had the leadership for the asking, wasn't interested. Barry Desmond, who was very much interested in the leadership, wasn't wanted. Kavanagh felt he· should not replace O'Leary as he had been too closely identified with O'Leary's coalition motion. He pushed Dick Spring from the outset. Barry Desmond got little support - only from Cluskey and Birmingham, and possibly Seamus Pattison.
Although the conference had split on a left-right basis close enough to fifty-fifty, only Michael D. Higgins and Mervyn Taylor of the TDs voted a left line, so Higgins was never in the running. Ruairi Quinn appeared to have assembled majority support for a bid at being deputy leader but he backed down when Barry Desmond refused to resign.
Spring was the least unacceptable to the greatest number.
Dick Spring entered politics through a process indicative of the worst kind of cynicism - his father resigned from Kerry County Council to leave the way open for his co-option. His exposure to socialism and left-wing politics in general is minimal and there is nothing in his background to suggest that he will be innovative. However, he has the openness of mind and intellectual capacity to learn. He will not be taken up with the kind of personal antagonisms that absorbed O'Leary. Although firmly of the pro-coalition camp and plainly enamoured of Garret FitzGerald he is also respectful of Michael D. Higgins. Prior to the conference the right had plans for an all-out attack on the left, with Spring challenging Higgins for the position of chairperson - however, the plans collapsed.)
Although it is difficult to imagine Dick Spring as a fiery leader of the proletariat he has the ability needed to stabilise the storm-tossed party, and could ensure that Labour develops rather as it did in the 1960s under Brendan Corish.
Accepting the Labour leadership these days is no short cut to greatness. There are indications of a terminal decline in the party's vote, with only nine of their fourteen seats that can be considered safe. Since 1969 Labour's total first preference vote has fallen from 223,282 to 151,875, seats that were formerly considered safe have been lost. Constituencies where Labour formerly held seats or at least drew a respectable vote with some prospect of a seat are now left uncontested or produce derisory votes. These include: Cavan-Monaghan, Clare, the Cork region, the Dublin North region, Dublin West, Laois-Offaly, Limerick, Longford-Westmeath, Louth, Mayo, Meath and Wexford.
In five constituencies Labour faces possible losses: Carlow-Kilkenny, Dublin South Central, Dublin South East, Kerry South and Tipperary North. They have already lost Dublin Central with the defection of O'Leary and are unlikely to get it back.
Under O'Leary Labour had a flippant image - though this was not wholly of his own making. The playboy tag was largely exaggerated sometimes to the point of libel - and partly arose from O'Leary's lack of the qualities of dissimulation and pretence and his refusal to make a big thing publicly of his convictions giving an impression that he couldn't care less. Spring is unlikely to attract this kind of petty viciousness.
One danger which is already obvious is the ambition of the Halligan element to reassert its dominance in the party. Should Spring be unable to resist this he is likely to find the party sinking deeper into the morass of personal intrigue and self-serving which has crippled it over the past few years.
The departure of O'Leary was right for him and for Labour - it will clear the air and allow a fuller development of the left-right debate which was evident at the Galway conference. Much of Labour's controversies have arisen from the fact that - whatever the internal plotting and maneuvering - it is by far the most democratic of the parties in the Dail. In an era when (to quote Michael D. Higgins) all the old moulds in Irish politics are cracking, that virtue may be its saviour in allowing it to respond more readily and accurately to the current subterranian shifts in Irish political consciousness.