Labour rebels struggle to justify cause, says deputy whip

He says he doesn’t mean it in a disrespectful way, but three of the four ex-Labour TDs now in exile on the opposition benches may not like John Lyons’ comments very much.

“If you were to ask most people in the public eye, and even in here, can you remember why the first three decided to go, they couldn’t tell you, I’d say, without thinking for a while, and possibly they still couldn’t come up with the answer,” he says.

That, the Labour deputy whip says, leads to an obvious question: “Was it a good enough reason to go?”

For the record, junior minister Willie Penrose resigned last November in protest at defence cuts in his constituency.

He was followed on Dec 1 by Tommy Broughan, who lost the party whip after voting against extending the bank guarantee.

Patrick Nulty followed soon after in protest at “unjust” cuts in the budget.

Those cuts were in areas such as health and education, areas Labour had promised to protect. Were they not a good enough reason to go?

Unsurprisingly, Mr Lyons throws out the old argument that any TD can do more within their party than outside.

But on the budget, he has evidence to support his case — namely the delegation of Labour TDs (including, unusually, a senior minister in the shape of Pat Rabbitte) who successfully lobbied Education Minister Ruairi Quinn to reduce the cuts to Deis, or disadvantaged, schools.

“Pat Nulty had a lot of issues that I would have had a concern over — Deis was a big thing. But at the end of the day, what we did was we negotiated, we spoke to Ruairi, and we managed to overcome that issue. And I think that’s where Pat could have worked on things.”

But why does he clearly separate Penrose, Broughan, and Nulty from the fourth and most recent to depart — Roisín Shortall? The answer is that he views Ms Shortall’s departure as junior minister from the Department of Health in a different light.

“She firmly believes in the principles that she stands for and it’s quite clear from the information that has come out that she felt that some of those principles, which were also part of the Programme for Government, were being jeopardised.

“I think Roisín’s situation just is a little bit different because she’d given something a shot for 18 months and she’d been working exceptionally hard at it, and I think it’s quite clear that she felt that she just wasn’t getting where she wanted to get with the job.”

The fact that he is making this distinction is hardly surprising, given the influence Ms Shortall has had on Mr Lyons’ career.

It was she who urged him to take a co-opted seat on Dublin City Council in 2008. Then, in last year’s general election, he successfully stood as Ms Shortall’s running mate in Dublin North West.

So it’s impossible to imagine him saying anything against Ms Shortall. On the other hand, his job as deputy whip entails maintaining party discipline.

Labour can’t afford many more defections. Couldn’t the party have done more to keep her?

His response is open to interpretation: He believes Ms Shortall would have received much more support from Labour TDs had she asked, but doesn’t quite say if he believes she received enough support from the party leadership.

“Roisín would have been given fantastic support from any of the members within the PLP [parliamentary Labour party]. But there’s a number of members who felt that that support just wasn’t asked for.”

He stresses the distinction between the PLP and the “management system” surrounding the party in government.

Asked if that meant there was an issue at management level, he responds: “I think there’s a bit of a deficit in the information and in how the story has been told in the public arena.”

So, with another hairshirt budget looming, are there red lines for Labour in order to stave off more defections?

“Rather than single out an item, I think there has to be a principle which is a red line, and I really, really do mean this. There’s a word called fairness, and I think it’s bounced around way too often by politicians on every side of the house, but it should only be used when people really mean it.

“If people can genuinely turn around and say, ‘Well, do you know what, that was really goddamn tough but do you know what, that’s kind of fair, I can see where the fairness came into that’ — that has to be the red-line issue.”

But should the Coalition even be proceeding with €3.5bn of an adjustment at this stage, given the IMF’s own admission that it had underestimated the effects of austerity?

“Yes” appears to be the answer, but it’s provisional, and he says there’s no question but that Ireland needs a break from the troika on its debt.

“This country has jumped through absolutely every single hoop to meet the criteria, and we’ve done it well. And I think there’s a straw that may break the camel’s back unless there’s an acknowledgement from our funders at this stage to say that ‘we need to give you some sort of a break’. Because it’s wearing very, very thin when it comes to how much people can take.”