FROM THE ARCHIVES: MARCH 1ST, 1971The Labour Party's annual conference in 1971 was dominated by two issues: its decision to oppose Irish membership of the EU and not to expel Stevie Coughlan, its Limerick East TD, for anti-Semitic remarks in which he supported the priest blamed for causing the Limerick pogrom in the early 1900s and described the then Jews in the city as "extortionists". Nell McCafferty was less than impressed by Labour's deliberations in this report. – JOE JOYCE
‘THIS YEAR’S Labour Party conference is one of reconciliation and recuperation after the Stevie Coughlan debacle,” a delegate told me on Saturday morning, at the Seapoint Ballroom, in Salthill, Galway. Yesterday afternoon the same delegate attempted unsuccessfully to introduce a motion of censure on Brendan Corish, leader of the parliamentary party, for his intervention in the debate, held in private session that morning, on a motion to expel Coughlan from the party.
The motion had been defeated and some delegates had left the conference in tears at what they considered to be an opportunist endorsement of power politics at any price. Corish’s unwillingness to expel Coughlan on the grounds that he would also have to expel Noel Browne, was summarised by one man as “a cynical bargain – a washing of the hands in favour of remaining governor”.
A continuing dissension in the Labour Party was brought into the open yesterday afternoon by a delegate from the James Connolly, Dublin, branch, who announced from the rostrum: “We can see today how members of a platform party threatened to suspend the socialist, while a fascist went from the platform with the support of his leader.”
The socialist Ireland advocated by Labour over the weekend was a confused one. Attempts to point out the dichotomy of a party which endorsed outright rejection of the EEC while remaining adamantly in favour of coalition with Fine Gael who favour entry, were firmly quashed.
There was no extension of cultural limits – Connolly was familiar, Marx an incomprehensible alien. Nationalisation, one got the impression, was an Irish reaction to foreign domination rather than an expression of anti-capitalism. A member of the Ictu summarised the position of lower-paid Irish workers as a disgrace to society based on Christian concepts, a comment which one could hear from any Fianna Fáil believer.
The conservatism was most marked in the debate on the issue of contraception. “Politics are not black and white. They are complicated,” deputy Michael O’Leary explained to me, before voting on the contraceptive motion, on the uncomplicated ground that he was a bachelor. Birth control was equated with venereal disease and free love; the planning of people, one delegate said, should be left to God.
Sex itself was understood well enough, as delegates laughed uproariously at Conor Cruise O’Brien’s plea that the matter be discussed without heat. It was left to Noel Browne to point out that this is a man’s world and the rights of mothers and respect to motherhood were man-made laws. His remarks were vociferously endorsed by the female delegates.
Contributions to the subject were, on the whole, uninformed and emotional and one felt that though the motion was passed, the delegates were more excited at the idea of having encroached on territory hitherto the property of the Catholic Church – daring indeed – than of having defended the rights of one-half of the human species.
http://url.ie/55k7