Prospects for the left in the Republic of Ireland:

The reformist parties:

The Irish Labour Party often seems like a pale imitation of its British counterpart. During the 1980s it came complete with its own Militant Tendency, soft left and right wing leadership. Having expelled the Militants and bought off the soft left, the right wing leader Dick Spring led the party to a historic victory in 1992 winning 33 seats in the Irish parliament. He promptly entered a coalition government with Fianna Fail, a party whose corruption he had denounced with passion. That government will mainly be remembered for the tax amnesties given to the super rich and the propensity of Labour Ministers to reward family and friends with jobs. In 1997 the voters dealt severely with the party, a drubbing it has yet to fully recover from. Even the absorption of Democratic Left failed to give it a boost. Ironically, the current leader and deputy leader of the party are former members of Democratic Left though they have pulled the party even further to the right by making it clear they are not opposed to the privatisation of services and openly courting business leaders. There is no left-wing in the party any longer, though some populist backbenchers occasionally dissent from the Blairite leadership.

This situation is reflected in the complete lack of involvement of Labour members in the anti-bin tax campaign. Anxious to win middle class votes, the party has consciously abandoned working class communities to Sinn Fein, a stance aptly summarised in the comment made to the writer by a leading Labour strategist: ‘Fuck Fatima Mansions’ (Fatima Mansions is a Dublin inner city flats complex traditionally wracked by unemployment, crime and drug addiction but also the site of powerful community resistance and regeneration). The strength of working class opposition to the tax has led to some modification of this stance. Labour now claims to be opposed to the bin tax despite the fact that its councillors have voted for it in the past.

Ireland’s environmental reformists, the Green Party, have played a shameful role during the campaign. They berated the anti-bin tax activists as enemies of the environment and lauded the tax as an example of the ‘polluter pays’ principle. The utter failure of the Greens to understand the real nature of the bin tax was a reflection of the party’s class base. The Irish Greens are a thoroughly middle class party with little or no working class support. Another factor has been the dominance of the ‘pragmatic’ wing of the party whose ambition is to join a coalition government and implement environmentally friendly policies from above. The more radical environmental activists, largely alienated from the now respectable Greens, were broadly sympathetic to the bin tax protesters, instinctively sympathetic to the anti-establishment nature of the campaign.

Sinn Fein has now emerged as a major political player in the Republic. In many working class areas Sinn Fein is the only game in town. A certain crude class consciousness allied to the lack of a genuine left alternative has fed working class support for the Republican movement. Yet party leaders openly acknowledge that their goal is to enter coalition government as soon as it suits them. The only difference seems to be over whether to join forces with the nationalistic Fianna Fail party or wait until it is feasible to form a centre left coalition with Labour and the Greens. Few senior activists now talk of the old goal of a socialist republic. What is remarkable about Sinn Fein is the conservatism of its leading cadres. For a party steeped in a history of armed struggle they are none too keen on radical activism. Outside a small number of areas they have confined their role in the bin tax campaign to issuing supportive statements through their elected representatives. Mass direct action left them decidedly uneasy!

Realignment of the left:

In Ireland as elsewhere, the prospect of establishing a broad party which will unite the far left and mobilise the mass of working people is a key point of discussion. The bin tax campaign has posed this question more sharply because for the first time in many years there is a campaign which has mobilised large numbers of ordinary people and united most of the left under a single banner. The two largest players on the left, the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party, have adopted fairly divergent strategies regarding left cooperation though this has not prevented them from cooperating. In fact, sometimes given their shared adherence to Leninism, they find themselves united in opposition to others on the radical left. This was particularly evident during the height of anti-war agitation in the spring of 2003 when they shared a common position opposed to direct action to prevent the use of Shannon Airport by the United States military.

The Socialist Workers Party has long argued for the formation of a socialist bloc, uniting the existing left primarily for electoral purposes without, it seems, the necessity of large scale involvement of broader working class forces. Perhaps the idea is that such a block will itself lead to the mobilisation of the class. They have combined this with working in (very) broad fronts such as the Irish Anti War Movement. It remains to be seen whether they abandon the socialist block strategy and replace it a demand for a much wider electoral front based on the bin tax campaign.

The Socialist Party has consistently argued that it would be premature to launch what would in effect be an alliance of the weak and isolated forces of the far left. The argument advanced is that a new party of the working class can only emerge from a real upsurge of working class mobilisation. In practise this boils down to two somewhat contradictory positions: refusing to contemplate a formal alliance of the left in the hope that some new elements will emerge from the working class in the form of community campaigns and independent political groupings to provide the basis for a new movement or party. The second element of thinking in the Socialist Party has been a view that in reality theirs is the new mass (revolutionary) party in waiting and that all that is necessary is to build their own organisation. While this is rarely verbalised it is evident in the lack of mention of the question of the broad party in public discourse by party members.

I have concentrated on the position of the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party because these are the largest of the far left organisations, though it should be emphasised that they have a tiny membership (roughly around a 100 active members in both cases) in comparison to Sinn Fein and Labour, whose membership numbers in the thousands though many are inactive paper members. The only other larger left group, the stalinist rump of the Worker’s Party has shown little interest in cooperation with those they view, through a prism of fossilised 1980s politics, as ultra-left ‘Trots’. I have neglected to concentrate a critical gaze on the positions of the smaller groups simply because these are too small at the moment to have anything other than a local impact. Suffice to say that there are a growing number of individuals and groups, including the Irish Socialist Network, who are advocating the creation of a broad mass party of the working class based on solid socialist principles and trying to learn from the successes and mistakes of the process of left unity unfolding in Scotland, England, France etc. without slavishly advocating the importation of any particular model.

The weakness of the Irish Left:

The weakness of the left in Ireland has been the result of both subjective and objective factors. The colonial history of the country, the underdeveloped, agricultural nature of the economy, the power of the Catholic Church and the dominance of the national question were among the major factors that caused this weakness in the 20th century. Even the rapid industrialisation, integration into pan-European structures and modernisation of the country over the last forty years failed to bring a major advance for the left, though it did have an effect on the political superstructure, seen primarily in the decline of the redundant Fine Gael and the rise of the left reformists of Sinn Fein and the Greens.

The leadership of the Labour Movement has remained firmly in the hands of the right since the execution of James Connolly in 1916. Never has a Labour leadership dared to assert an independent position and refuse the blandishments of coalition. Most left challenges to Labour have emerged from the Republican movement and these have repeatedly ended up mired in the bog of reformism. Until now the far left has failed to capitalise on this situation though the degree of cooperation that exists today in contrast to the naked sectarianism of the past gives one reason for cautious optimism. It may be some time yet before Ireland sees the emergence of an equivalent to the Scottish Socialist Party or Portuguese Left Block.

Colm Breathnach, 2003.