For the Labour Party to be 'radical, not redundant', its new leader will have to articulate an alternative vision of Irish society in which economics and social justice go hand in hand, writes Fintan O'Toole
Imagine a developed country where the following stories are in the news. One of its major cities has just had its tap water declared safe to drink again after six months in which it posed a serious health hazard. Cancer survival rates are below the EU average and there is still no national cervical cancer screening programme. More than 60 per cent of primary school pupils are in classes larger than 25 and a quarter are in classes larger than 30. Even though suicide is a national crisis, over a quarter of those who try to kill themselves do not receive any form of psychiatric assessment.
People with learning disabilities are being paid as little as €5 a week for full-time work at sheltered workshops. The Department of Health is worried that it may be open to a slew of court cases because young people are waiting months or even years for psychiatric assessments, orthodontic care, speech and language therapy and disability services. The country is warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world. And business and community leaders in part of the country are up in arms because of the consequences of a decision to privatise the national airline.
Anyone looking at such a country and told that it was wealthy, highly developed and part of the western European mainstream would surely conclude that it must have a strong social democratic movement that was either the natural party of government or at least the main opposition. And they would think that the time when all of this was happening would be a favourable one for that party. The case for a coherent, progressive left-of-centre programme, centred on the provision of good public services, a commitment to equality and decency, and environmental responsibility, would surely be guaranteed a sympathetic hearing.
THAT COUNTRY IS, of course, Ireland and these were the headlines in the days immediately before and after Pat Rabbitte's announcement of his resignation as leader of the Labour Party. He was leaving because he had given the job his "best shot" and the only target he had hit in the general election was 10 per cent of the vote and 20 of the Dáil's 166 seats. Add in the fact that Rabbitte is arguably the most articulate and the brightest leader the party has ever had, and the scale of the disconnection is even more obvious.
In some respects, the picture is even bleaker than it looks. Historically, 10 per cent of the vote is pretty much par for the course for Labour. But the current Labour Party incorporates its old Workers Party-Democratic Left (DL) rival. Fifteen years ago, the two parties took 22 per cent of the vote - just 2 per cent behind Fine Gael. Their candidate, Mary Robinson, had won the presidency in 1990: the first left-wing victory in the history of the State. It was not at all unreasonable to suggest that Labour was set to become at least the main opposition party over the course of the 1990s. Instead, Labour now has much less than half of the vote it and DL had in 1992 and the gap with Fine Gael has widened to 17 per cent. The Spring tide has long since ebbed away, leaving Labour becalmed in the same political backwater it has occupied for most of the State's history.
Moreover, in terms of the large shifts in Irish society, Labour's failure to make or sustain a breakthrough is monumental. All of the things that were supposed to make voters more left-wing - urbanisation, the end of the mass emigration that siphoned off discontent, the breaking of the authority of the Catholic Church, a rise in standards of education, a huge growth in industrial and service employment - have happened. None of them has done the party much good.
To make matters worse, Labour can't be accused of not trying out different electoral strategies. It has contested each of the last three general elections with a different leader and from a different position. In 1997, under Dick Spring, it was part of an outgoing governmental alliance with Fine Gael and DL. In 2002, under Ruairi Quinn, it adopted an independent stance and refused to rule out any viable coalition option. In 2007, it was tied to Fine Gael as a result of a long-term policy pact which had made it, for two years before polling day, Fine Gael's junior partner. The changes achieved nothing except slow decline, from 13 per cent to 11 per cent to 10 per cent.
At least this recent electoral history provides one beam of light for whoever the new leader may be. It suggests that electoral strategy is, in the overall scheme of things, neither here nor there. Changing partners is not going to solve Labour's problems. The sterile debates on coalition options that have often bedevilled the party's internal politics are clearly pointless in the immediate future. Electoral strategy has to be a consequence of much bigger changes. The party has to think instead about what it is and how it relates to 21st-century Ireland.
This is not to say that organising for elections will be a less than urgent job. On the contrary, Labour activists are all too aware that the party has, over the last decade, thrown away seats it could ill afford to lose. Traditional seats still count for something in Irish politics and Labour has been extraordinarily bad at keeping them. All across the middle-sized towns and cities with a strong industrial base, Labour has been losing seats, held in many cases from the early years of the State.
Its seat in Carlow-Kilkenny, won by James Pattison in 1933 and then held by his son Seamus from 1961 onwards, was lost this year because there had been no adequate plan for the succession when Pattison predictably retired. John Ryan's seat in Dublin North went the same way. The two Tipperary constituencies, which each had a Labour seat for decades, have become a desert for the party since John Ryan and Michael Ferris left the stage in the 1990s. The old Labour seat in Louth was given up to Sinn Féin in 2002 and the party now has less than 5 per cent of the vote. The Spring family seat, held from 1947 until 2002, is also in Sinn Féin hands and the high hopes of taking it back in 2007 proved illusory. Meath, where Labour once had a solid seat and Brian Fitzgerald outpolled John Bruton in 1992, is now fallow ground. And does anyone even remember that Labour held a seat in Cork South-West for nearly 60 years and in Cork North-West for 35 years, even winning by-elections in both constituencies?
There is an obvious organisational job to be done, not just in getting those seats back, but in making sure that the same thing doesn't happen in constituencies like Waterford, Wexford and Galway West where Labour's seats seem dangerously dependent on loyalty to individual TDs. The new leader will also have to learn lessons from the situations in constituencies such as Kildare North and Galway West, where talented and ambitious Labour activists such as Catherine Murphy and Catherine Connolly despaired of ever being able to challenge long- established TDs (Emmet Stagg and Michael D Higgins) and left the party, taking some of its future with them.
HARD GRAFT, FORWARD planning and discipline can go a long way towards solving some of these problems and giving Labour a better base on which to build. But it would be difficult for the party to gain more than half a dozen seats by organisational means alone. The much larger task is ideological, the definition and articulation of an alternative vision of Irish society. Labour needs to arrive at a clear understanding of where it is and where it wants to be before it can persuade the electorate to share its goals.
In doing this, it needs to avoid the temptation to follow the line most often articulated by media commentators who are queuing up to present Labour's problem as a failure to connect with the values of the Celtic Tiger. For a start, it is simply not true that Labour's biggest problem is that it is out of synch with a young, vibrant prosperous Ireland. The RTÉ/Lansdowne exit poll for last May's general election tells quite a different story. Labour values are not meaningless to the young: Labour did better - at 14 per cent support - with 18- to 29-year-olds than with any other age group. The party has in fact been steadily increasing its appeal to first-time voters over the last decade: 10 per cent of them voted Labour in 1997, 13 per cent in 2002 and 16 per cent in 2007.
Labour also does best among those who have benefited most from economic prosperity. It has 12 per cent support among the ABC1 social groupings (the higher and middling professionals, administrators and managers and the lower middle class), but just 9 per cent among the C2DE groups (skilled and unskilled manual workers, pensioners, welfare recipients and casual employees). Its strongest geographic area is Dublin. So Labour is actually doing relatively well with the young, the well-to-do and the urbanised.
What really marks it out from other mainstream social democratic parties in Europe is that it doesn't get the support of the old working class. Fianna Fáil and, to a lesser extent, Sinn Féin, occupy too much of Labour's natural territory. One of the things the party has to do if it is ever to become even the largest party in a coalition government is, oddly enough, to connect with the working class.
This is one reason the new Labour leader won't have the option of doing a Blair. The party's problem is exactly the opposite of the one Blairism was meant to address. In Britain, Labour was too dependent on voters who lived in council estates, belonged to trade unions or were on welfare, and needed to appeal more to middle-class professionals. In Ireland, it would be a triumph for Labour if it could get the votes of the people Blair could take for granted.
The other reason Blairism is not an option is that the centre ground in Irish politics is already occupied by two extraordinarily resilient catch-all parties. Under Dick Spring, Labour set out essentially to destroy one of them, Fine Gael, and replace it as the State's second party. It came close enough to doing so, and, even after the 2002 election, Fine Gael looked moribund. But Pat Rabbitte (with, it should be remembered, the support of the overwhelming majority of his party) gave it the kiss of life in order to provide an alternative to the Fianna Fáil-PD alliance. Now, with the PDs virtually gone and the party well entrenched again in the Dáil and local government, Fine Gael is set to be around for the foreseeable future. With Fianna Fáil having lost its most obvious right-wing flavour when Charlie McCreevy was packed off to Brussels, there is simply no room on the centre ground.
Conversely, however, the one real piece of good news for Labour from the 2007 election is that there is space on the left. Pat Rabbitte did succeed in seeing off the twin challenges of the Greens and Sinn Féin, and, with the Socialist Party out of the Dáil and the Independent contingent greatly reduced, Labour's position as the leading party on the left hasn't been so secure since the emergence of the Workers Party in the early 1980s. With the Greens in Government and Sinn Féin still in shock after its terrible showing in the election, Labour has a real chance to become the vehicle for most of those who want substantial political and social change.
That means remembering the slogan coined by the man who became its greatest victim: Michael McDowell's "radical or redundant". The economic progress of the last 15 years has, paradoxically, given voters more to lose. With large mortgages, expensive lifestyles to sustain and high levels of personal debt, Irish people have reasons to be risk-averse. As the last election showed, the electorate, faced with two slightly different versions of the same model of society, is always likely to go for the one it knows, warts and all. If it is to take a risk, it needs something worth taking a risk for. There has to be a credible prospect of a reward. Something exciting has to be on offer.
Above all, Labour's alternative has to do what the Labour-Fine Gael alliance persistently failed to do in the election: engage with the economy. If Labour takes the economy as read and simply talks about how its fruits should be spent, it will continue to cede the ground on which elections are won and lost. Ironically, however, economic policy should be Labour's trump card because the debate is shifting on to its ground.
It is not just that the era of ultra-rapid growth, with its dizzying rise in property prices, is almost certainly over. The slowing down of the economy and the consequent tightening of the public finances will certainly limit Fianna Fáil's ability to throw money at everything and put the identification of priorities (and therefore of values) back on the table. But it will also highlight the larger question of what Ireland's next trick in the global economy will be.
THE CONSENSUS THAT has emerged from the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) is that it has to be a rapid move up the value chain to a highly skilled and innovative society. That, as the NESC has made clear, means scrapping the old model of wealth creation on one side of the equation and welfare on the other. In the new model, economics and welfare go hand in hand because, without a decent society (one with good health and education and the ability to tap the potential of all its people), you don't get the wealth.
That agenda is there for Labour to tap into, and it provides a way for the party to square the circles of radicalism and relevance, of economics and social justice. If it's bold enough to take it on, it will make real progress. It can catch up, if not to where it dreamed of being in 21st century Ireland, then at least with where it actually was 15 years ago.