Labour's Legacy
Mary Raftery examines the reasons why the Labour vote was so low in the Dublin Central by-election.
On the eve of the by-election in Dublin Central last week, voters S the Cabra area received a handd""':inen photocopied letter from Jimmy :;OiIleIS, the Labour Party candidate. :n it, he mentioned no fewer than four ~es that he was from Cabra. He ~de no reference to the Labour Parry, "Tomorrow, the people of Cacra will have the opportunity of :;::ruing me in Dail Eireann to repree5~:I: them there," said the letter. ]'i-;;-;my Somers had realised a little kTe in the day that even in his native Cabra people had no real knowledge 0: who he was, where he came from, 0:- what he had done that should enncourage them to vote for him. And on Xovemoer 23 last, the Labour Party received its lowest vote ever in the Dublin Central constituency.
The drop in the Labour vote cannot in any way be explained by shorttcomings in the organisation of the election campaign during the byyelection. It was one of the best cammpaigns ever mounted by the party in Dublin. Greg Sparks, an accountant· who managed Flor O'Mahony's Novemmber 1982 campaign in Dublin North Central, was brought in as Jimmy Somers's director of elections. The constituency was divided into six areas, and each of the Dublin constiituency organisations was allocated its own specific area for canvass. South Central and Frank Cluskey, for exammple, worked in the inner-city areas, Ruairi Quinn and South East in East Wall, South West and Mervyn Taylor in Cabra, and Barry Desmond and Dun Laoghaire in Stoney batter and Oxmantown. They worked alongside party members within the constituenncy itself, and there were up to 150 canvassers out on the streets every night. The reaction they received was hostile: people wanted to know why they were in the Coalition an was Jimmy Somers.
Jimmy Somers was a branch seccretary in the ITGWU until his recent promotion to Group Secretary. During the 1970s he was the thirddstring Labour candidate in several elections, both national and local, where he never exceeded 1,500 votes. In November 1982, after the defection of Michael O'Leary, who had held a seat for Labour in the connstituency since 1965, Somers was selected as the party's candidate to replace him. To the surprise of many, including the party leadership, Somers defeated Pat Carroll, a sitting City Councillor and Alderman, at the selection conference.
Pat Carroll had defeated Somers in the 1974 local elections, and had won a seat on the City Council. In 1977 he missed being elected to the Dail by under 100 votes. He topped the poll in the 1979 local elections. He had worked hard in the area, and had reached a certain national promiinence through his outspoken opposiition to coalition. He would undoubbtedly have been the best-placed canndidate to retain a Labour seat in the constituency.
Pat Carroll, however, was promiinent in the party's left-wing. He, together with Noel Browne, Matt Merrigan and David Neligan, had been involved in several bitter rows with the Labour leadership on several aspects of the party's policy and particularly on its participation in the 1973-1977 Coalition Government.
Shortly before the 1977 general election, left-wingers within the party held a meeting to reassess their entire strategy. They examined the new constituencies as drawn up under the Tully revision and perceived areas in which they were sufficiently strong to have a candidate nominated and even possibly elected. Pat Carroll decided to stand in Cabra, Noel Browne in Artane, Merrigan in Finglas and Neligan in Rathmines West.
The discovery of this new strategy by the Labour leadership unleashed what amounted. to civil war within the party. Brendan Halligan, then General Secretary and now the leader of the anti-coalition left-wing of the P~ organised the counter-strike. He himmself stood against Merrigan in. Finglas, causing the latter to resign from the party and stand as an Independent. A new rule was created by the Adminiistrative Council to p:-e,en: tile ratifiication of Noel Browne's candidature, and consequently he also stood as an Independent. :\1a.,,-:' Robinson, who
had been defeated by Neligan for the nomination, was imposed onto the Rathmines West constituency, and Neligan withdrew from the election.
In Cabra, in an attempt both to prevent the re-election of David Thornley and to stop Pat Carroll from taking a seat, the leadership ran Micky Mullen Junior as the third Labour candidate in the constituency. Carroll did not leave the party and was the only one of the original four to stand as a candidate for Labour. The party in Cabra received a vote well over the quota, but Carroll, although the front-runner, did not receive enough of Mullen's transfers to win a seat. He was less than 100 votes behind Fianna Fail's Tom Leonard, who took the last seat.
Shortly after that election, Browne, Merrigan and Neligan left the Labour Party to form the Socialist Labour Party. Carroll, however, did not join them. He remained with the party, thinking that he had a reasonnable chance of securing a seat in the next election.
In 1980, however, when the connstituency boundaries were revised by judicial commission, the Cabra area was amalgamated with Michael O'Leary's constituency of Dublin North Central, which comprised the Marino, Fairview, Summerhill and Ballybough areas. O'Leary's vote had been declining steadily since he topped the poll in 1969. During the 1981 general election, he refused to coooperate with Pat Carroll, who was his :unning mate in the new Dublin CennITa! five-seater. If they had reached an agreement for each to stay in his own area, there was a remote possiiaility that both could have been elected.
But with the certainty of a sharp ::ecline in O'Leary's vote in his old ~orth Central area, due mainly to =.eglect of constituency work, he zroved mercilessly into the Cabra zrea, As the leading Labour candidate, ::=;mty leader of the party with a strong national profile, he took the majority of Labour votes in the old Cabra constituency away from Carroll, and was re-elected. Carroll received a disappointing vote of just over 2,000, The Labour vote in O'Leary's old area to the east of the constituency totally collapsed, which was a major contriibutory factor in the election of Independent Socialist Tony Gregory a year later.
In the February 1982 general election, the Labour Party took a decision to run only one candidate per constituency, and Michael O'Leary was chosen for Dublin Central. Pat Carroll refused to support him, and O'Leary's supporters within the connstituency attempted unsuccessfully to have him expelled. They have never forgiven him his refusal to support the then party leader or the fact that he wrote an article, critical of O'Leary, which was published in In Dublin during the election campaign. Jimmy Somers was one of O'Leary's strongest supporters within the constituency.
Labour's Dublin Central organisaation is predominantly to the right of the party. Of its 15 branches, only 5 are controlled by the left, and the vast majority of mem bers are over 40 years of age. While Michael O'Leary may have ignored his constituency work, he paid considerable attention to ensuring that the left of the party did not gain any significant level of control over the branches in the area. He made certain that only those loyal to him were elected as officers of the constituency - Jimmy Somers, for example, held the position of connstituency secretary for several years during O'Leary's time as a Labour TD.
When O'Leary left both the party and the constituency in November 1982, his organisation withhin Dublin Central did not collapse. It remained substantially as it had always been, and merely shifted its support to Jimmy Somers. The rift between the left and right of the party in the constituency was so deep as to result in the jettisoning of any hope of electoral success in order to prevent the left-wing, and particularly Pat Carroll, from gaining power.
The power struggle within the constituency was repeated only weeks before the by-election took place. Pat Carroll resigned his seat on the City Council in October to go take a job in Tanzania, and the eight branches in his electoral area met to select a successor. There were two candidates:
Jimmy Somers and Barry Fottrell, a left-wing former member of the Administrative Council. Of the eight branches in the area, four voted for Somers and four for Fottrell. As all elections for positions within the Labour Party are carried out under the PR system, the normal procedure in the case of a tie is to put both names into a hat and whoever is chosen is eliminated, and the remaining canndidate elected.
This was not, however, done at the city councillor selection connference. Instead, there was an attempt o convince Fottrell to withdraw. Fottrell refused, and the matter was referred to the Administrative Council.
In an unprecedented move, the Council decided, on a proposal made by Ruairi Quinn, to give the seat to Somers, who at that stage had already been selected unopposed as the byyelection candidate. The four branches who had voted for Fottrell for the city council seat were furious. They felt that the Administrative Council, in deciding to simply give the seat to Sornerse-was in breach of the party's rules on PR elections. However, the decision was not reversed, and the four left-wing branches agreed to work for Somers in the by-election.
The by-election result was one of the most disastrous in Labour's history. To be surpassed by not only the Workers' Party but by Sinn Fein in an area where Labour had until recently held a seat is a humiliation from which it will be difficult to recover. The failure to pick up any of Tony Gregory's considerable vote in the area was obviously caused in part by the policies which Labour is pursuing in government. But it is also due in no small measure to the left-right battle within the party, from the attempts to destroy Pat Carroll in the 1977 and 1981 elections, to the insistence on nominating a candidate with no real chance of being elected in the Novemmber 1982 election. The result is that Labour, in November 1982, lost its only representative on the northside of Dublin, and has at present no prosspect of replacing him. •
Year Labour Party Labour Party Left Vote* Labour Party
% of National % of Dublin in Dublin % of Left
Vote Central Vote Central Vote* in
Dublin Central
1977 11.6% 24.0% ** 26.4% ** 91.1%**
1981 9.9% 17.5% 28.1% 62.2%
1982 (Feb) 9.1% 11.0% 28.1% 39.2%
1982 (Nov) 9.4% 7.5% 26.4% 28.4%
1983 - 6.0% 27.0% 22.2%
* By "Left Vote" is meant the percentage of the total vote which went to parties or indio viduals to the left of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. It includes the Labour Party, Workers' Party, Tony Gregory and Sinn Fein (whose transfers have gone to left-wing parties),
** Dublin Central did not exist as a constituency in 1977. The above figures are arrived at by taking the average over the two constituencies of Cabra and Dublin North Central, which were equivalent in geographical area to the present Dublin Central.