Labour will vote anti-coalition unless...

The Labour Party conference is likely to exclude the possibility of another Coalition after the next election, unless a major effort is made to reverse the trend of delegates' support by the Labour Party establishment in the weeks leading up to the conference in Salthill on October 23 and 24.

On the basis of a detailed breakdown of delegate support conducted by Magill with the assistance of party members, we conclude that the vote on keeping options on Coalition open until after the next election will be defeated by more than 200 votes out of the 1,100 votes likely to be cast on the issue.

The trade union group will have a block vote of 140 delegates and these seem certain to go in their entirety to the anti-Coalition side. The Dublin area will send about 380 delegates, of whom a clear 300 will be anti Coalition. Of the 300 delegates likely to attend from the Cork region, half are likely to be anti-Coalition.

This alone gives a total anti-Coalition vote of 590 votes to the anti-Coalition faction, sufficient to give them a majority in a conference where only about 1,100 of the 1,400 delegates eligible to attend are expected to turn up.

The anti-Coalition faction is led by Brendan Halligan, once the most ardent advocate of Coalition (1973), and by other members of the Administrative Council, including Sam Nolan of Finglas, Billy Moroney of Wexford, Joe O'Callaghan of Cork, Pat Carroll, the Dublin councillor, and Mick Brennan, of the Plumbers Union.

They have held three meetings to co-ordinate their efforts throughout the country - the first in Hotel Keadeen, in Newbridge, Co. Kildare, tha second in Liberty Hall, Dublin, and the third in Dublin's Mansion House on Saturday, September 25.

In contrast the pro-Coalition side has held no meetings. Some work has been done however but, apparently, of a very desultory nature. Those involved primarily have been the leader, Michael O'Leary, along with Liam Kavanagh and Dick Spring. Their efforts have been confined primarily to telephoning branch delegates around the country and ensuring that they will turn up in Galway and, more importantly, that they will have paid their branch dues and therefore be eligible to vote.

The consequences of a defeat for the pro-Coalition lobby will be of considerable import outside the Labour party. It will deprive Fine Gael of a great deal of credibility in its attempt to offer an alternative Government to Fianna Fail and may well tempt Charles Haughey to avail of the confusion among the opposition parties to seek a mandate for a strong stable Government.

The anti-Coalitionists are relying on the persuasiveness of the argument that Labour has declined steadily since it abandoned its anti-Coalition posture following the 1969 general election. Then it won 16.7% of the first preference vote. This declined to 13.7% in 1973, to 11.6% in 1977, to 9.9% in 1981 and to 9.1% in 1982. The party is in danger of losing 6 seats in the next election and the spectre of total eclipse has come to haunt more than the congenital pessimists within the party.

O'Leary has not impressed thus far as leader of the Labour Party but the reasons for this are not entirely of his own making. He inherited a party from Frank Cluskey which had been run down organisationally, whose finances were in chaos and whose identity had been lost in the social democratic wave engendered by Garret FitzGerald of Fine Gael.

While O'Leary was obliged to make huge concessions to Fine Gael in the negotiation of the 1981 Coalition deal (primarily the abandonment of Labour's' strategy to reduce inflation by increasing food subsidies and lowering indirect taxation in favour of lowering food subsidies and increasing indirect taxation) he did manage impressively to carry his conference with him on June 30 of that year in the Gaiety Theatre.

His own performance in Government was erratic but nevertheless Labour did manage to curb Fine Gael's drive towards switching from direct to indirect taxation, and, as O'Leary reveals in the accompanying interview, there was almost a complete breakdown in the Coalition arrangement in the week prior to the budget when Labour refused to support the total abolition of food subsidies. Criticisms of him for having failed to re-build the party organisationally, as, for instance, Garret FitzGerald re-built Fine Gael from 1977 to 1981, entirely ignore the facts that (a) O'Leary had only 7 months, not 4 years and (b) he was in Government "holding down" two portfolios.

O'Leary's performance in the 1982 election was also underrated. He was forced by his administrative council into fighting an independent campaign and leaving open the option of a future Coalition arrangement. Nevertheless throughout the campaign he managed to keep the wraps on the divisions within his own party and present a somewhat united front with Fine Gael against Fianna Fail. Had he not managed to accomplish this, Fianna Fail's victory in the election would surely have been very much more decisive.

Nevertheless, not even his most ardent supporters would claim that he has given his party the leadership and direction which it has required since 1969. He appears for the most part to be bored by the role he is playing. He has little instinctive sympathy for the Labour movement. He has no burning socialist fervour within him.

He has allowed himself to drift further and further away from the left wing of his party, neither ameliorating them or confronting them. And in this present conflict over Coalition strategy, he has avoided the nitty gritty grass roots work required to take the conference with him in a decisive manner. Neither has he given much thought to a distinctive Labour policy position. He has the quickness of mind, unlike Cluskey, to disguise this in interviews and in tight situations internally in the party, but his intellectual instincts incline him more towards poetry than towards politics.

His position as leader seems secure, not because of any commanding loyalty among the rank and file or indeed. Parliamentarians, but rather because of the absence of an alternative. Frank Cluskey's performance as leader from 1977 to 1981 disqualifies him. Barry Desmond lacks any kind of broad appeal as does Ruairi Quinn and Michael D. Higgins. Liam Kavanagh, who would be a serious and weighty contender, is not interested.

What will happen to O'Leary if he is defeated at conference? He says now he will fight on and relies a lot on the initiative that rests with a party leader in an electoral situation. But more likely he will progressively lose interest and will eventually bow out. His political leanings incline him more towards the social democratic wing of Fine Gael than they do to a socialist antiCoalition Labour Party and it is in this former arena that he may well find himself in the not too distant future.

The likelihood is that there will be yet another general election within five months of the time of writing (i.e. by mid-February). Indeed the chances of there being an election by the end of November must also be considered favourable.

The basic reason for this is that there doesn't exist in the Dail a majority consensus on the issues on which the Government needs to make a decision over the next few months. The most immediate issue is that of public service pay.

While the Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, appears confident of being able to reach an agreement with the unions on the issue before the Dail re-assembles on October 20, time is running out and the basis of a deal has not yet emerged. In the absence of such an arrangement, the Government seems destined to be defeated on a crucial financial issue.

It is by no means certain however that such a defeat would compel Haughey to seek a dissolution of the Dail from the President, although he has privately told Tony Gregory that a defeat on the issue would cause an election. It could well be that Haughey would immediately call for a vote of confidence in the Dail and his chances of winning that would be very much better than on the public service pay issue (see interview with Tony Gregory).

But the accumulation of issues arising over the following weeks and months suggest that the Government could hardly survive. The next issue on the agenda is the cuts in public expenditure. These are anathema to both Gregory and The Workers' Party and on a specific vote related to these they would have no option but to oppose the Government. Again Haughey could call for a vote of confidence and again he might succeed but his chances of holding on would become thinner and thinner.

It is on the issue of the 1983 budget that the biggest and seemingly insurmountable problems arise. The prospects are that the opening deficit in the current budget for 1983 will be of the order of £ l600m. The Government will be forced to aim for a deficit of around £800m and even if the figures are cooked, very stringent cuts in public expenditure will have to be undertaken in reality to make even a gesture towards meeting that target.

It is asking too much entirely of the loyalty of Gregory and The Workers' Party to go along with such measures and therefore the passage of the budget would seem impossible.

Haughey is in as good a position to perceive this as anybody else and he will be keen to avoid going to the country on terms dictated by his opponents. Therefore, the chances are that he will opt to go at a time of his own choosing, which must be before the budget is introduced in late January.

If he waits until the new year to call an election he will be accused of running away from the tough budgetary decisions required. Therefore the likelihood is that he will call an election before Christmas, that is if an election is not forced on him before he gets a chance to do so.

It is relevant therefore to examine the preparedness of the three major parties for an election.

Fianna Fail:

The party's finances are in disarray but, if necessary, enough money would be begged or borrowed to fight another campaign. A new finance committee is to be set up soon to replace that led by Senator Des Hanafin but a new financial controller has already been appointed to head office. Organisationally, the party failed to come to terms with the problems which the 1981 election exhibited notably in the Cork region and in Dublin North - and there is little reason to believe that much has been done since the last electoral outing,

However, some things have been done. Haughey appointed Ned O'Keeffe of Cork East to the Senate last March in an attempt to wrest the last seat there from Joe Sherlock of The Workers' Party - a swing of a mere 0.3% is required to do so. O'Keeffe may be the man to do the job for his pedigree is impressive. He is a farmer in the area, a director of Michelstown Co-Op, he is an exVice President of the IF A and is well known locally.

In the most marginal constituency in the country, Waterford, Fianna Fail hopes rely on either Sean Ormond, who fought the seat the last time and failed to take the last seat from Paddy Gallagher of The Workers' Party by just 558 votes, or ex-Lord Mayor of the city, Tom Browne. The latter is a son of Fad Browne, former TD for the constituency for many years. destined

Then there is a strategy being discussed by Haughey and his mentor, Senator P.J. Mara (this strategy was actually thought up by a group of journalists having lunch with Mara in the Unicorn restaurant on the eve of the All-Ireland hurling final), whereby three prominent Fianna Failers would switch from safe constituencies into marginal ones. This involves Haughey himself moving from Dublin North Central, where Fianna Fail have a certain two seats out of four, into Dublin North, where he lives and where the party needs a swing of 1.8% to gain an extra seat.

Secondly, Gene FitzGerald would move from Cork South Central to Cork North West, where a swing of 1.2% is required to give Fianna Fail an extra seat. Finally, either George Colley or ,Michael O'Kennedy moving into Dublin South East, where a swing of 3.9% is required.

Fianna Fail needs to pull rabbits this out of the hat for it seems destined to lose seats in Sligo-Leitrim and in Louth but were it to be successful in all the above constituencies and lose in the latter two it would end up with 84 seats - a clear majority.

At a meeting of directors of elections on Saturday, September 25, Haughey gave little indication of a general election being imminent. The meeting discussed the last election and made outline plans for re-organisation for the next election but the meeting evinced little sense of urgency.

Fine Gael:

It came out of both the 1981 and 1982 elections with small financial surpluses but its financial problems are no less acute than those of Fianna Fail for it has lost out heavily on current revenue since the election, with constituencies failing to make the returns demanded of them. The party's finance committee has hardly met at all since the election for there is a fear of "milking the cow dry" if any approach is made prematurely to financiers.

Other committees have been meeting regularly however. The communications committee has been reactivated in recent months. The strategy

committee has hardly been out of session since the last election and there have been conferences of directors of elections held also and more due shortly.

Problems in the Sligo-Leitrim and Louth constituencies are being resolved to ensure that candidates are based properly from a geographic standpoint in the next election and this should ensure the party two additional seats. But chances of being able to form a Government on its own are entirely remote. This would require a swing of 9.5% to Fine Gael (see the Magill Guide to Election '82), involving the taking of four out of five seats in Dublin South.

It's finances are chaotic. It owes in excess of £100,000 and it's chances of being able to raise funds quickly are remote.

The party got into financial difficulty in the European elections in 1979, in spite of getting £100,000 from the Socialist group in Europe to fight the contest - they ended up with a deficit of £50,000 and there has been no adequate explanation of how the money was spent.

Organisationally, the party is absorbed with internal squabbles, primarily related to the Coalition issue. Several of it's seats are in danger the next time out, including that of the Labour leader, Michael O'Leary.

It's chances of being able to recover seats lost in Meath and Wexford have receded by the news that Frank McLaughlin, who did so well in 1981, will definitely not be a candidate and that Brendan Corish has declined requests