Still waiting for Labour to work

LABOUR must wait, Eamon de Valera once famously said when explaining why socialism was ephemeral in the febrile post-revolutionary atmosphere of the 1930s.

Seventy years later when all but the last embers of the civil war have been quenched in the common memory, Labour is still waiting.

A decade ago, there were signs that the party was on the cusp of a monumental breakthrough. The gains of the Spring Tide in 1992 lifted the party to its high watermark of representation, returning 33 TDs to Dáil Eireann.