Chance to revive social democracy
His resignation makes possible the remodelling of the Labour Party, and perhaps a refreshed agenda for the Irish people, a future that is ours and not ‘owned’ by faceless bureaucrats.
What the Labour Parliamentary Party addresses now is an extraordinarily difficult and delicate management change.
Labour’s objective is not to ‘save this Government’. Nor is it to save the party. Nor is it even to save its individual members’ seats. Though, if they fail to save as many of those seats as possible, in the long-term the entire operation would be academic and irrelevant.
The goal must be to save and revive the presence in Irish politics of that distinctive, Irish constitutional social democracy for which the Labour Party stood traditionally. An Irish version of a remodelled Scandinavian future, to be built by Irish political action.
Mention philosophy, ideology, even ‘vision’ — and the conventional, standard Irish ‘political animal’ becomes uneasy. ! Yet one of the lessons to be learnt from the recent elections is that the voters’ concerns were not only ‘who will pay the mortgage, provide the basic sustenance, pick up the medical bills’.
It was the not knowing ‘where we are’ and ‘where we might be going, if we only knew’ that caused the bitter angst and the visceral need to kick a fuddled, out-of-date Government. Too many of its ministers have never left the 20th century — or are just incompetent. Most of all: politically clumsy, communication-stupid, seemingly determined not to be inclusive of us, the people.
Whoever Labour chooses as the new party leader must be able to articulate and communicate a vision. A vision for our people in a century when everything on the planet is changing at an unprecedented pace — and a terrible ugliness, not a beauty, is being constructed by default. Where politics may be expressed locally, but, ultimately and decisively, is European and global. Nations, by themselves, are too small.
We rediscovered such a vision of national aims, in various forms, in the 1960s — and came close to achieving it. That was before we lost the run of ourselves. Despite all the bad marks against us, our native creativity can still recreate the equivalent of that almost-dawn.
Time is not on Labour’s side. The autumn Budget, and an election more likely to be in 2015 than 2016, pressurise decisions which, more ideally, would, and should, be slow and methodical in the reaching.
It may well be that Labour has left it late and that we must settle for a two-election strategy, with some parched and hungry years in the wilderness.
But if the prize were to be what drove our ancestors, a truly Irish Republic which cherished all the children of the nation, it would be more than worth the wait, the sweat and tears.
Shouldered together.
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