Dick Spring is a serious and thoughtful politician, with a clear social democratic commitment, a deep concern for integrity in public life, and great sensitivity to the complexities of the Northern Ireland problem. He is also very committed to his family, and he has a delightful sense of humour. It is not surprising that I enjoyed working with him in government.
That does not mean that our relationship was free of problems.
He was then the leader of a deeply divided and fractious party, many of whom were at that time opposed to participation in government and all of whom, understandably, found it difficult to accept the tough measures that were required to bring our country back from the brink of national bankruptcy.
Elected to the leadership of his party at the age of 32, with a mere 18 months' parliamentary experience behind him, Dick Spring thus found himself walking a perpetual political tight-rope. From his own and his party's point of view, opposition would have been preferable, but it was simply not an option. Three factors ruled it out.
First, after the 1982 GUBU period it would have been morally irresponsible to have thus cleared the way for a return to government by Charles Haughey.
Second, it would have been economically irresponsible to have done so. For, despite the appalling budget deficit and borrowing level left behind by Charles Haughey's 1979-81 and 1982 governments, throughout the following four years in opposition he persisted in advocating a suicidal policy of yet higher spending.
And, third, the post-hunger-strike situation in Northern Ireland required a new approach through the New Ireland Forum and the negotiation of an Anglo-Irish Agreement, with the objective of pulling support back from Sinn F ein and thus forcing them to reconsider their "Armalite and ballot box" tactic. Because of the manner in which Charles Haughey had alienated British opinion at the time of the Falklands, this was a task that could be accomplished only by another government.
A minority Fine Gael government supported by Labour from outside would not have provided the stability required to accomplish these tasks. But it was not comfortable for Labour to find itself effectively required by the national interest to join a coalition and keep it in being for four years in the face of severe internal party stresses. As Dick Spring himself suggested in his Prime Time interview last Wednesday the situation was made more difficult by feeling within his party that his predecessor, Michael O'Leary, had been on terms of personal friendship with me, and by the fact that on resigning as Labour leader he had literally come to my door that same evening to apply for the Fine Gael whip, which I could not reasonably refuse him.
This made it necessary for Dick Spring to preserve in public a certain distance from me, which belied the reality of what became in fact a warm relationship of mutual trust that survived many vicissitudes. By any standards Dick Spring was remarkably successful in managing this difficult period in government.
The only downside was the tensions that occasionally arose between him and two Fine Gael ministers not much older than himself, Alan Dukes and John Bruton., Happily, by the time they came to serve again in government together these had eased to the point where the 1994-97 tripartite coalition seems to have been one of the most harmonious in the history of the State.
Subsequently in opposition Dick Spring was remarkably successful in uniting his party and making it an effective political instrument. His own parliamentary performance helped to give him the necessary authority to accomplish this task and thus to achieve an extraordinary success in 1992. But this success brought with it two quite distinct problems.
First, and most obvious, there was the problem of the role this new powerful Labour Party should play in the formation of a government. Dick Spring's reluctance to enter a coalition involving the Progressive Democrats made sense: given the deep ideological divergence between these two parties, such a government would probably have been unstable.
But the political arithmetic of that moment ran against a tripartite Fine GaelLabour-Democratic Left government, which would have commanded only 82 seats out of 166, a situation later modified by two Democratic Left by-election gains.
That left only one possible coalition alternative, a Fianna Fail-Labour government. But Labour could, of course, have abstained to allow Fianna F ail to form a minority government. Two considerations may have worked against such a stance by Labour.
The first may have been a fear that if Labour facilitated the formation of a minority Fianna Fail government and subsequently brought it down, which at some point it was likely to have come under pressure to do, the electorate might then have penalised it by depriving it of some of the 33 seats it had so unexpectedly won.
A second factor may have been a simple feeling that, given the size of Labour's Dail representation, it would be almost unnatural to refuse involvement in government when, after all, it had participated in four previous coalitions with much smaller D ail numbers.
We now know that Dick Spring had another reason to form a coalition with Fianna Fail:
the knowledge of a possible Northern peace initiative shared with him by Albert Reynolds.
Given his earlier experience of working on Northern Ireland policy in the 1982-87 government, Dick Spring must have felt an obligation to assist this process. And perhaps also he may have felt some concern lest without a Labour presence in government Albert Reynolds might be tempted to concede too much to the IRA in order to secure a cessation of violence, and thus prejudice the possibility of subsequently drawing the unionists into a negotiation.
In retrospect it would seem that from the point of view of Labour as a party it was a mistake to have allowed even this combination of factors to outweigh the inevitable negative public reaction to the U-turn that this involved by a party and a leader who had just fought such a vigorous anti-Fianna Fail electio n campaign.
Nevertheless this may not have been the sole cause of the collapse in Labour's vote in the recent election. Public opinion polls suggest that only about half of Labour's loss of support between 1992 and 1997 occurred at this point; the other half coming, for reasons that are still far from clear, some 2 1/2 years later, viz six to nine months after the formation of the Fine Gael-Labour-Democratic Left rainbow coalition. The decision about whether to participate in a coalition with Fianna Fail was not, however, the only dilemma facing Labour as the result of Dick Spring's remarkable success in that election. For a very important component of those gains was a jump in middle-class support for Labour, which the polls show actually doubled, whereas the increase in workingclass support was less than 50 per cent. And a party which, as was the case with Labour, has just won new support will be particularly concerned to retain what it has won.
The result, it seems to me, was that during this period in government, first with Fianna F ail and then with Fine Gael and Democratic Left, Labour tended to concentrate more on liberal reform issues that primarily concern a middle-class electorate rather than on consolidating its working-class support.
This was very evident, for example, in its decision on university fees. What inhibits working-class entry to higher education is principally the inadequacy of means-tested maintenance grants: fees have been a problem mainly for middle-class families whose incomes are over the means-test limit. The decision to abolish fees rather than to put the money into improved access to higher education for the less privileged was universally seen as an anti-social bid by Labour to retain middle-class support.
But this was the wrong market to aim at. The Labour Party was always bound to lose some of what was certainly an ephemeral increase in its middle-class vote. But it could perhaps have retained much more of its working-class support if it had concentrated rather on redistributive and socially progressive policies directed particularly towards areas of underprivilege.
Thus it was that Labour's 1992 success tended to trap it into a stance that may have been inimical to its long-term success. The blame for this must, I think, be widely spread within the party and should not all be loaded on to Dick Spring's shoulders. It seems clear that the preoccupation with middle-class support came from a large number of its TDs, who feared the loss of their seats if this source of votes evaporated.
There is a moment now for Labour, under either of the able men now competing for leadership, to re-evaluate it stance and its role in Irish politics in full recognition of the party's enduring capacity to influence the direction of policy of the two major parties, which in the future as in the past will often need Labour's support in order to form a government with a majority in the Dail.