Labour In Distress
Following the unexpected hammering which Labour received in the 1977 general election, the party got itself a new leader and continued as if nothing had happened. The few measures taken to inspire confidence for the future proved lacking and finance remains a big problem. The seats of two deputies of long standing, Dan Spring and Michael Pat Murphy, who are retiring, may not remain with Labour and there is a general lack of confidence in the party's election strategy. And, to cap it all, the party leader has been rolling in the electoral gutter with the party's leading vote winner, in a sordid territorial squabble. By Gene Kerrigan.
On the morning of 18 June 1977 the dust began to settle on the debris of the National Coalition. The Beechers Brook of general elections had proven especially disastrous for the Labour Party. Justin Keating's face, draped in unalloyed bitterness, glared out from newspapers that told of how once mighty Ministers had been toppled. Conor Cruise O'Brien, who had used his mandate as a platform from which to imperiously lecture the populace, found that platform whipped away. Both left the public stage, slowly, tentatively, as though waiting to be called back and told that it was all a joke.
Down the road in Meath, Jim Tully found himself struggling to retain his seat on the tenth and final count. It had been Tully who had cleverly revised the constituency boundaries in order to ensure an almost certain Coalition victory. The term "Tullymander" had been applied to his effort which, until the election, was thought to be the most effective fix of constituencies yet attempted. After the elec tion Tully became so disillusioned and lacking in confidence that he all but dropped out of activity for a couple of years.
Labour had lost three seats and over 2 per cent of its share of the vote. Within a few days its leader, Brendan Corish, resigned with bad grace. Of those in the parliamentary party most closely associated with the Coalition ideal, two were gone and two inactive.
From that day to this there has not been one formal, official discussion at any level within the Labour Party at which the Coalition experience and its consequences have been discussed. A strategy for the next election was arrived at and another Coalition may be entered into, without answers being attempted for the questions of what went wrong, what had been the aim, or why it failed.
In November 1979, Dr. John O'Connell wrote to the party leader, Frank Cluskey, suggesting that the Labour TDs should spend a weekend away at a hotel discussing the situation in which they found themselves and a strategy for the future. This was some time before a similar project was undertaken for the Fianna Fail Cabinet by Charlie Haughey. Even if O'Connell's idea had more than a touch of public relations about it, it was a genuine response to the malaise and lack of direction from which the party suffered. O'Connell received a formal acknowledgement and nothing was done. Other party members, and even TDs, have expressed astonishment at the failure to draw up a balance sheet and draw some lessons from the experience. None has done anything about it.
There was, however, an awareness among the party top brass that some adjustments would have to be made in order to patch up the leaking party. A newspaper was launched in .1979, and efforts were made to harness the energies of young people, by launching a youth group, and of the women's movement, by use of the Labour Women's National Council. While this last has had some success, almost all of which can be ascribed to the vigour within the women's movement and not to any inspiring stand by the party leadership, there has been less success in other quarters.
The party paper, Labour, is a monthly and even on the most generous estimate sells considerably less copies than the claimed paid-up membership of the party, which is 6,500. The idea behind the launch of the paper, that activity would be generated in the branches, with members selling the paper in pubs and outside factory gates and at their workplaces, and that TDs and councillors and members of the Administrative Council would show the way by participating in such sales, was a non -starter. In 1979 the paper lost £2027.88. Last year it lost £2282.30.
The appearance, at the Annual Conference in 1980, of a glossy party programme laying out the basics of policy did little to dispel the impression of a party ideologically and organisation ally confused. Left winger Pat Carroll described it as "incoherent and confusing", while even the ITGWU's John Carroll, who backed the new programme, described it as ''woolly in some respects".
And while there was some political content to the rows which raged in the Labour Party before, during and after the last election, when the left wing was stifled and walked out, today the rows are devoid of politics and result from the sordid efforts of politicians fighting like feudal barons to protect their own territory.
John O'Connell has always been a loner within the party. Independently wealthy because of his publishing
interests, he has been able to mount flash election campaigns that were the subject of much bitter comment by others. In ideology he has hardly distinguished himself as a rallying point for a crusade or even a stand on any important issue.
He has remained slightly removed from the party, not fraternising socially too often and occasionally clashing with the party hierarchy on issues of repressive legislation and health. Despite these differences O'Connell was always as alienated from the left within the party as from the hierarchy. When the Coalition Ministries were being handed around it was at least. arguable that O'Connell was passed over for people of lesser talent. An agreement between Labour and Fine Gael to control the Dublin Lord Mayoralty and to take turn about was the occasion for another slighting of O'Connell.
On being told that the nomination that he was expecting, for Lord Mayor, was to be reneged, O'Connell announced that he would not support any other Coalition candidates. The Coalition parties did not have an overall majority on Dublin Corporation without O'Connell's participation, so he received a phone call telling him that he would get the
nomination if he came along and voted. He went along, participated, and they again reneged.
Although he entered the Dail as a Labour TD in 1965 it was not until 1978, when he announced his intention of standing for the European parliament and asked if he could go have a look at the Parliament, that O'Connell got one of the free trips, apparently much prized within the party. After he had lifted General Secretary Brendan Halligan into the Dail in 1976 there was a suggestion that since there was a free trip coming up O'Connell might get it - but after a vote of 18 to 5 the trip was given to Senator Michael Ferris.
O'Connell's own branch of the party is the Bluebell/ Inchicore branch. Following the redrawing of the constituency boundaries the branch straddled the division between Dublin West and South Central. It was in the latter that the most solid part of O'Connell's support remained, where he had practised as a doctor and which he had represented as TD since 1969.
It was clear that there was going to be a clash here. Both O'Connell and the party leader, Frank Cluskey, whose own
record of vote-getting has been weak, wanted to stand in South Central. So obvious was the impending clash and so potentially destructive that the failure to head it off by quiet consultation points to negligence amounting to a political death wish.
The party hierarchy, instead of trying to arrange a compromise or inspecting O'Connell's claim that there was room in South Central for two Labour seats, backed Cluskey's surgical removal of O'Connell. O'Connell's branch was shifted into Dublin West, without consultation with the members or with O'Connell. This meant that without his own branch's votes O'Connell was unlikely to get a nomination in South Central. In the event he got only 8 votes. Cluskey got 16, Michael Collins 12, Joe Connolly 8 and Peter Mooney 4. C1uskey, Collins and Connolly got the nominations. O'Connell received no transfer votes on Mooney's elimination.
When O'Connell expressed the hope that he would be added to the ticket on the decision of Connolly not to stand he was told by Cluskey that he would not get the nomination.
It was the view of the Administrative Council that O'Connell should defect to Cluskey by departing for Dublin West where he could not only win a seat, they claimed, but possibly help another strong candidate (probably Mary Robinson) take a second seat. They believed that it was "in the objective interests of the party" that O'Connell make.
this move, and not simply a manoeuvre on Cluskey's behalf.
However, given O'Connell's unique history, his superior vote-getting ability, his feeling of isolation, his belief that he was disliked and plotted against in the past, and the resulting mixture of pride and truculence, it would take a massive ignoramus to believe that the man could simply be switched from one place to another whatever "the objective interests of the party".
The manoeuvring which saw the nobbling of Noel Browne and Matt Merrigan before the 1977 election at least had the virtue of being a political battle between left and right, albeit in the shape of factional infighting. It is perhaps a reflection of the political sterility which followed the defeat and departure of the left at that time that not once has it been suggested that Cluskey and O'Connell have any substantial political disagreement.
In the introduction to its 1980 Party Programme, the party lays down its Aims and Objects. "As its primary
objective Labour seeks to eradicate the exploitation of one class by another, to banish poverty, to promote industry, to stimulate agriculture, to foster commerce, to develop our natural resources, to end violence, to promote the voluntary unity of all the people on the island of Ireland and to establish the Workers' Republic".
No doubt is left that the party is also strongly opposed to cancer, killer sharks and bad weather. Long on intentions, short on ability to fulfil them.
The programme is studded with ringing declarations; "In a socialist economy there will be no doctrinaire restrictions to the State's range of activities." If such sentiments were simply addressed to the populace as an effort to convince people of the correctness of turning socialist there could be no quibble. They are, however, intended as suggestions of the eventual outcome if one votes Labour. Yet, if Labour enters a Coalition it is inevitable that the majority of the policies offered to the electorate as reasons for voting Labour will have to be shed before the TDs stride through the gates of Leinster House.
.The electoral strategy - of "going it alone" ideologically, before the election, with an independent socialist programme - and then, after the election, making a deal with Fine Gael on which policies are to be dumped and which to be implemented in government - not only smacks of deviousness but is bound to lead to further rows and accusations of betrayals within the party when socialist policies are abandoned.
Yet, the failure to discuss and account for the Coalition period, openly and with the frankness with which it is dis. cussed and explained in private, necessitated the construction of a "yes and no" strategy which can please both pro. and anti-coalitionists, for a time.
Recent polls showing Labour's support declining mean that the party could be in a poor bargaining position after an election. After the 1957 election, in which Labour lost 3 percentage points in its share of the vote, the party set its face against another coalition. The share rose in 1961 (from 9.1 to 11.6 per cent) and 1965 (15.4 per cent). A good local election result and the general air of militancy at the end of the 1960s gave the party the boost in morale which allowed such statements as "The Seventies Will Be Socialist" to be made with a straight face.
The 1969 election result showed that Labour support was continuing to rise 17 per cent, (the highest ever Labour shares of the vote), but due to the idiosyncrasies of Proportional Representation the party actually lost three seats. Which is what caused Labour to lose its nerve.
In 1973 Labour support slumped to 13.7 per cent, but I because of the Coalition pact on transfers the party won more seats. In 1977 the decline continued, down to 11.6 per cent.
The one bright sign, electorally, was the European elections in 1979. The party claimed to have commissioned
"scientifically conducted polls" before deciding on its campaign slogan - "Be with the Biggest in Europe", a slogan not noted for its trumpeting of any socialist principles. In the event, the party had very little to do with the victory.
Most of Labour's energy went into the local elections, held on the same day, in which the party barely held its own. .
The campaigns of the Euro candidates were largely personal ones and the election was held at a time when the electorate were in the mood for a warning gesture towards the government and this time Labour benefited from the idiosyncrasies of PR - getting 4 candidates elected 'on 14.5 per cent of the vote (Fine Gael had 4 elected on 33.1 percent).
At parliamentary party level there is little overt opposition to the policy of merely labouring on. TDs are only too well aware of Frank Cluskey's own commitment to Coalition and even more aware of who will be handing out the goodies if and when Labour gets to share the Mercedes pool with Fine Gael. The social upheavals of recent years have received scant attention from the party which declares its reason for existence to be social change.
Any support given to the massive tax marches was on an individual basis and the Labour leadership tagged along several yards behind the conservative Congress leaders. Barry Desmond made a point of condemning the tax strikes
in terms which not even government Ministers dared use. If the tax marches are a confused expression of some deep discontent within Irish society it is a rebellion with which the Labour party is not only out of touch, but seems less than anxious to be identified with.
The absence of the Labour left, the nucleus around Noel Browne, Matt Merrigan et al, means that the focus of what. ever debate remains within the party has moved to the right, with individual left wingers such as Michael D. Higgins and Pat Carroll as much concerned with their own political futures as with the future of the party. The only other potential source of ideological spurring, the Militant Tendency, has A Theory and remains tame and deferential while it patiently awaits the working out of the Theory.
The only sources of change likely to be come active, therefore, are discontented sections of the party establishment - this, again, will revolve around personalities and territorial rights rather than any political difference. The gulf between Frank Cluskey and Michael O'Leary, the winner and loser of the leadership battle in 1977, is wider than ever.
O'Leary is not in any position to make a move until Cluskey has dug an even deeper hole for himself. This could follow an election in which Labour's vote continues to decline or remains static - in which case the party will be in a weak position approaching Coalition and will take on even more the appearance of a paperback version of Fine Gael. The party might subsequently be ripe for a "Go it alone" surge which would dislodge Cluskey.
It is unlikely, however, that such a direction would be followed for long. Those in a position to lead the move have little stomach for the dozen or so years in opposition which it would entail, and the risky intervention in the more noisy and relevant battles likely to take place outside Leinster House over that period.