Labour is paying the price for unrealistic coalition expectations

IT was Nov 16, 1994, and I was so excited that I made an excuse to get off work and cycled home to watch telly. There was a motion of “no confidence” in Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Albert Reynolds amid controversy relating to his appointment of Harry Whelehan as President of the High Court.

There was an allegation that Whelehan had delayed the extradition of Fr Brendan Smyth to the North to face child sex abuse charges. In fact Whelehan had never been made aware of the case.

It was further alleged that Cardinal Cathal Daly had put pressure on Whelehan to delay the extradition. Pat Rabbitte, then of Democratic Left, suggested in the Dáil that there could be a letter to this effect in the Attorney General’s office which would “rock the foundations of this society.”

No such letter has ever been found. We are talking George W Bush looking under the desk for the weapons of mass destruction here. But I didn’t really care if the allegation was true or not. It felt true. The Left was doing battle with a nasty conspiracy between Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church, as far as I was concerned.

Wasn’t Whelehan as attorney general responsible for seeking the extradition of Ms X when she travelled to the UK for an abortion? Matter a damn that it was his job to defend the Constitution on which we, the people, had voted. He should have ignored the Constitution, that’s what he should have done, but word was out he was a practising Catholic.

I’ll never forget the speech Labour leader and Tánaiste Dick Spring gave that day. Well actually, I remember nothing about it except its oratorical structure, the build-up to the sudden explosion when he said his party was withdrawing from Government.

It helped that Spring was tall and handsome. I was quite sick with excitement and I remember friends calling over so we could crow over it together.

I never stopped to think about the progressive Programme for Government which Labour had put together with Fianna Fáil: the establishment of the Department of Equality and Law Reform, of the Department of Arts and Culture, provision for decriminalising male homosexual acts, provision for a referendum on divorce.

I only cared about the optics. Did the Labour leadership feel the same? They’d just had a bruising bye-election result and one of their candidates had lost to then-Democratic Left member, Kathleen Lynch. Were they looking for an out? Albert Reynolds mishandled the situation badly. But what was the point of Labour throwing the whole government down the swanney? Alright they entered a Rainbow Coalition with Fine Gael and DL, but their Spring Tide went right out in the election of 1997.

We got “Payback Time” and the administration of Bertie Ahern and the PDs and we got them again in 2002. Whose fault was that? Did the Labour Party not have a duty to fight to get into government with Fianna Fáil and save the tax base as a war chest against the collapse which eventually happened in 2008? Why did Labour not get into government and keep the Celtic Tiger in his cage? What was so bad about Fianna Fáil? Enough to mention Bertie’s quite astonishing wins on the horses, the house for his girlfriend’s auntie, his friends in the plastering trade....

There is a slieveen element in Fianna Fáil which I think relates to the cultural memory of poverty. I remember one stereotypical Fianna Fáiler telling me with bitterness how he spent long years saving to get married, shilling by shilling. As a politician he signed up for every junket going out of pure rage.

It has been Fine Gael, not Fianna Fáil, which has traditionally been closest to the Catholic Church. During the 1980s Fine Gael had a liberal foray under Garret FitzGerald with his feminist women and divorce referendum, but it was also Garret FitzGerald who agreed to run a referendum on the protection of the unborn child.

Fine Gael is officially a Christian Democrat party in Europe while Fianna Fáil is part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. FF have always been prepared to play virtually any card to win the game, and they have played the Catholic one from time to time.

Right now they’re shamelessly exploiting the divisions within the Government over abortion. But it flies in the face of the facts for Labour to cleave to FG rather than FF out of concern for the liberal agenda.

And really none of this should be the baseline issue for the Labour Party. What should concern them most is the redistribution of wealth. Unquestionably — as any secondary school student who has had free schooling thanks to Donogh O’Malley should be able to tell you — FF has the stronger record on redistribution. It was, after all, a struggle over the budget which led Labour to leave Coalition with Fine Gael in 1987.

In recent times, the FF/Green post-collapse budgets were progressive and we are now considered to have the most progressive tax regime in the OECD. The two Fine Gael/Labour budgets have been regressive — they have hurt the less well-off more than the better-off.

On these grounds, I neither understand nor accept Labour’s refusal to discuss Coalition with FF since Spring’s dramatic departure in 1994. I put it down to the fact that their vote is in the middle class just like Fine Gael’s. But a politician friend suggested it was because FF and Labour have so much in common that Labour would lose its identity in coalition with them.

THESE are selfish reasons. What we need in politics now, and have needed since 1994, are courage and generosity.

I could respect a Labour Party which refused coalition with FF or FG or any party which espouses capitalist economics, but not one which chooses one capitalist party over another to place their product better. Particularly as the Labour Party and the entire trade union movement is founded on capitalist economics. In fact there is currently no working alternative to capitalism which takes account of globalisation.

Globalised capitalism is making serious progress on reaching the Millennium Goals on woldwide poverty, though the development itself threatens to reverse all of this through climate change. Those of us who care about redistribution and environmental protection must attempt to regulate capitalism to bring it to heel.

That was what the Labour Party should have been doing from 1994 to 2011. Ruairi Quinn spoke recently about the frustration of sitting in Opposition unable to do anything. Why didn’t Labour go into coalition with Fianna Fáil any chance they got, then? Are they really so surprised to find themselves sitting in the ruins of Croke Park II watching a false dawn breaking on the horizon — where Fianna Fáil are encamped?