HistoryIn 1941 "Big" Jim Larkin, at a protest meeting about the government's controversial Trade Union Bill, dramatically struck a match on the seat of his pants and set the offending document alight.
What his wildly enthusiastic audience did not know, and what we might not have known without Andrée Sheehy Skeffington's memoir (quoted by Niamh Purséil), was that he had earlier taken the precaution of affixing a piece of sandpaper to his trousers, and of dousing his copy of the Bill in paraffin.
Would that the Irish Labour Party were always so well prepared! This anecdote is, however, of more than ordinary significance, because that protest meeting turned William Norton and other members of the PLP, whose earlier criticisms of the Bill had been less than wholehearted, into passionate opponents of the proposals. It brought Larkin back into active politics and, by doing so, accelerated the growing estrangement between Labour and the ITGWU's William O'Brien, who had been working behind the scenes with the government in an attempt to secure an acceptable compromise.
The scene was set for a new phase in the evolution of political Labour, a phase at least as disheartening - although for different reasons - as the three decades that had preceded it.
Those decades had seen Labour first of all behaving creditably as effectively the only opposition in the Dáil, and pioneering the "One Party Government - No Thanks" tactic in the early years of Fianna Fáil power. At one early election the party secured more votes (though fewer seats) than Cumann na nGael. In June 1936, its newspaper, Labour News, had a circulation of 65,000. So what went wrong? As this extraordinarily informative, well-written, and intensively researched study shows, almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong, so that Labour evolved all too rapidly into a party that, in one of Purséil's many pithy observations, "had the unfortunate ability of being able to please none of the people all of the time". It had been bedevilled by the loss of its leader's seat in 1932 ("from misfortune to carelessness", as Purséil puts it), and by Communist Party entryism. Fianna Fáil no longer needed to court its support. Its core ideal of "The Workers' Republic", adopted in 1936, was ditched three years later after a pincer movement by the INTO (who at one stage contributed more to the party's coffers than the ITGWU) and the Catholic Church.
THE FEBRILE LEFT-WING republicanism of the 1930s was hardly helpful: Labour could neither defeat it nor harness it. Peadar O'Donnell attempted to disrupt one Labour meeting accompanied by a crowd whose slogans were in part pro-Soviet, in part "Up Dev!". Most significantly of all, the trade union movement - whose links with the party acted to deter potential middle-class support, while at the same time manifestly failing to deliver trade unionists' votes - was moving after 1940 inexorably into a total civil war driven by the insensate mutual hostility between Larkin and O'Brien. Norton's leadership went from bad to worse, with only the occasional glimmer of vision, courage or tactical good sense: it was to last until 1960, by which time, unbelievably, he had been leader for 28 years.
Not all of these wounds were self-inflicted, and the deeply conservative nature of Irish society during these decades cannot be discounted. There is another factor, too, that may help to explain the endless battles for the soul of the party, then and since. It is simply a question of size. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have always been too big for any groupuscule seriously to alter their political trajectories: the fate of the Fianna Fáil rebels in the early 1970s, and of the attempts to rename Fine Gael as the "Social Democratic Party" (defeated by 8:1 at a party conference) are cases in point.
Labour's small size, and its ultra-democratic (at least compared with the other parties) organisational structure, have always encouraged takeover bids and fissiparous tendencies alike.
THE AUTHOR SUGGESTS that if Big Jim had become leader, the story might have been different. Indeed: it might have been even worse. In fact, the very evidence she cites leads this reviewer to the conclusion that the real lost leader was Young Jim Larkin, whose personality was equally magnetic but infinitely less disruptive, whose vision was intelligent and profound, and whose grasp of strategy and tactics, particularly in his middle and later years, was unrivalled. We are left to guess at the reasons why he detached himself from the political struggle, especially in the immediate post-war period, when Lemass (who admired him greatly) was privately prophesying that Fianna Fáil would be succeeded by a Labour government. Ostensibly, it was to give more time to the infant Workers' Union of Ireland, and this was undoubtedly true, as far as it went. But the looming presence of his father (who did not die until 1947), and the freshness of those Civil War scars, might well have been other powerful factors keeping him off the political stage.
The split in the union movement and in Labour lasted for the best part of two decades - decades that also saw horrendously lacklustre performances by Labour in two inter-party governments. When Corish became leader in 1960, it was little better than a basket case - a party that, in the author's view, "offering little and delivering less . . . received the support it deserved". These sections of the book, though profoundly depressing, provide evidence for the thesis that the scholarly study of failure can be at least as instructive and as interesting as any literary celebration of success.
The judgment just quoted, however, also includes the period from 1960 to 1973, which will be more familiar to most contemporary readers, and which Purséil covers in a lively and fascinating narrative, enlightened by much fresh research. As a judgment on 1960-1973 it is, in my view, too severe, certainly insofar as some of the individuals involved in the party during this period are concerned. They did what they could - and sometimes better than anyone might have expected - with the material to hand, which was often less than promising. And the same period, as her work demonstrates, also provided heartening evidence of a new emphasis within the party - however belated and occasionally unrealistic in the extreme - on the question of policy formation.
The centrifugal tendencies of some of Labour's public representatives in the latter period, the perennial shortage of money (Purséil all but ignores the role of this all-important determinant of political activity in the history of the party), and the inevitable battles over coalition helped to hold the party back. So did the northern issue, which, like the EU, was effectively extra-parliamentary. Social change, when it took place, was episodic and geographically limited. Each of the other major parties, too, had the support, explicit or implicit, of a national newspaper - hardly a negligible consideration.
I DOUBT THAT a verdict on the 34 years that have elapsed since 1973 would be as bleak, but Purséil's treatment of the earlier periods underlines the central importance of one fact, identified many years ago by Young Jim Larkin as he criticised, evidently with an increasing sense of despair, the shambles of the second inter-party government and the ineptness of Labour's performance within it. It is this: what matters is not whether Labour goes into coalition, but how it acts after any government in which it is a partner has taken power.
I would urge the leader of the Labour Party, regardless of the result of this election, to present every Labour TD with a copy of this book. And I would urge them to read it.
John Horgan is a former Labour senator, TD and MEP. He recently retired as Professor of Journalism at Dublin City University
The Irish Labour Party: 1922-73 By Niamh Purséil UCD Press, 400pp. €60