A chara, - As your coverage of the Democratic Left/Labour merger correctly highlights, the merger agreement and document concentrate exclusively on mechanisms for the gradual absorption of the DL structure into the larger Labour structures and on strategies to protect the electoral futures of certain of the leading personalities within DL.
However, I believe that you have not devoted sufficient critical scrutiny to the public proclamations by the merging leaderships that this new "formation" will vitalise and enlarge leftwing representation within the Irish political system.
Historically there are many precedents for the Labour Party absorbing smaller parties, but no evidence that those mergers led to any expansion of the Left representation within this country. I refer in particular to the absorption of National Labour (with four TDs), the Democratic Socialist Party (Jim Kemmy) and the Sligo Workers group (Declan Bree). All of those were hailed by Labour at the time as vital breakthroughs and yet that party languished in a political-cul-de-sac.
The Labour-DL merger is being sold as something qualitatively different. Admittedly, the DL TDs are very photogenic and media-friendly. But organisationally they are a shambles. In a party built to their own specifications they have not survived seven years. In that time they have managed to lose one MEP, four TDs and two senators. Their entire membership, and their families, could be seated in one room in the Shelbourne Hotel. In the interests of their TDs' political futures they have jettisoned whatever few members they had in Northern Ireland.
Likewise Labour, despite the bearded wonders whom they had as spin-doctors, had not the membership or organisational base to consolidate their 1992 success, much less expand from that platform.
Individually Labour and DL have ignored the poor, the marginalised, the dispossessed. Possessing 38 TDs within the Rainbow coalition, they dropped corporation tax for the banking sector and insulted old-age pensioners with a rise of less than £2 a week. They made Maria O'Donoghue, mother of the severely handicapped Paul, go to the Supreme Court to get a primary education for her son, while university fees were abolished for parents earning over £18,000 a year. By what miracle of osmosis are we now to assume that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, and particularly by what process is it argued that the whole will now seek to represent a working-class constituency which the parts, individually, have purposely and increasingly ignored?
The new merger is, unfortunately, a merger deriving from failure. That failure has many facets but the pervading failure has been the failure to put the interests of the Irish working class above the interests of personal political advancement. On every possible occasion over the last 50 years the Labour Party has entered into a right-wing coalition rather than force the issue of class politics, destroy the legacy of the Civil War parties and advance the Left as a serious political force. The only difference now is that the seemingly permanent reduction in FF electoral support, allied to the sheer pragnatism of their leadership in search of power, means that Labour has a choice of partner for whom to desert its core support.
This long-promised merger clears the political landscape. It ends the pretence that Democratic Left retained the radicalism which the Workers' Party personified in the 1970s and 1980s and on which the DL TDs founded their parliamentary careers - and on which in large measure they have relied since 1992 for street credibility.
The Workers' Party, however, did not vanish in 1992. We have continued with the solid work of representing the interests of the Irish working class in every possible forum from the council chambers, the Trade Union movement, on the streets, or wherever else is appropriate. This is not the sort of work that gets us mentioned in Quotes of the Week, but it is the work which Labour and its partners in DL have refused to do. We look to the future now with greater confidence for our own organisation, and for survival and growth of real Left politics, than at any time previously in this decade. - Is mise. Padraig Mannion,
Research Officer,
The Workers' Party,
Hill Street,
Dublin 1.