Labour squeezed in the middleas Sinn Féin eats at its support

AS the Green Party’s former senator Dan Boyle launches his book detailing his party’s deeply troubled time in the previous government, many in the Labour Party should read it and worry whether the Green experience as the junior partner in a coalition government is instructive in predicting what will happen to it.

After all, the Greens are in near oblivion, without a single representative in either chamber of Leinster House, and its predecessor as the junior, the Progressive Democrats, doesn’t even exist. Is Labour sowing the seeds of its own demise?

Labour undoubtedly will console itself with a few facts: it has a much bigger electoral representation in the Dáil than either the PDs or Greens ever had, and has far larger cabinet representation too. It also has a far deeper and more sustainable heritage, turning 100 years old this. It retains strong links to the trade union movement, which provides both funding and apparently measurable support. It also has had the experience previously of being the junior partner in a coalition and has never gone out of business because of it.