Burton fighting to lead discredited and dying Labour

IT WAS billed as a major shift in the tectonic political plates, but did the Earth really move for you?

Probably not for the women of Ireland anyway, even though the two Dáil by-elections pushed the number of female TDs to a new all time high of — wait for it — 27 out of 166.

That’s a whopping 16.3% of the main house of the legislature.

That’s less than Cameroon and Malawi — developing nations we like to patronisingly look down upon.

Imagine if that situation was flipped and the Dáil continued to be, stubbornly, 83.7% female, election after election?

There would be daily uproar at the crushing imbalance of numbers, and urgent, emergency action brought in to bring about equality.

Anxious, outraged, national soul searching would follow about how we could include men in the decision-making process, or at least get them somewhere near parity.

Sure, some sexist women would brand the men pushing for equality as too “emotional” and “fanatical” in their aim, but something would be done nonetheless. Something more radical than the timid push for a third of candidates to be women at the next general election anyway.

Ah, but quotas and all that? You’d be scraping the barrel to make up the numbers?

Really? Have you seen the state of some of our political representatives at the moment?

If you are going to have a culture of deadbeat Dáil deputies they should at least reflect the population at large.

But, we could soon have a woman leading the Labour Party. Though the frequency with which Joan Burton dyes her hair seems to have attracted almost as much attention as the contents of her head (but, to be fair, there has been widespread suspicion in the past about how 63-year-old Enda Kenny stays so boy-band-blond).

After all that scheming and manoeuvring to oust Eamon Gilmore as leader it must be a bitter sweet moment as Ms Burton reaches for the crown of a party that looks set to crumple away to nothing.

Still, as tánaiste, at least Ms Burton will give Labour a bit of the distinction and difference it has sorely lacked during its self-imprisonment in a Tory coalition of misery.

But to get there, Ms Burton must first beat bland technocrat, Alex White, whose name is the only hint of colour about him.

So, the Labour Party will spend the next month talking to itself rather than listening to the clear message its core voters gave it.

Suddenly, it’s all about the end of austerity for Ms Burton, who did well to hold the line on most welfare payments, but was also complicit in the shameful cut in child benefit to the most vulnerable families in the country, and medical card snatching junior health minister, Mr White.

And the backbenchers who could not even organise a decent coup against Eamon Gilmore on the tip of such calamitous results, now bleat the same sheepy, soulless group-think that saw the electorate deliver such a contemptuous verdict on them.

Now it has all changed from “Austerity: Good. Shatter: Good. Medical card withdrawal: Good.” to “Austerity: Bad. Shatter: Bad. Medical card withdrawal: Bad.”

The backlash against that kind of politics as usual was the primal scream of the elections with more than a quarter of voters opting for independents rather than turn to a Sinn Féin that still very much has something of the North about it.

One of the more intriguing comments on the election came from thrusting Thatcherite Leo Varadkar who mused that Fine Gael and Sinn Féin would be battling to lead the next coalition.

Untried and untainted by government, Sinn Féin has a particular pull as the only party outside the austerity consensus, despite the fact that in its very recent past it equated the use of an armalite with that of a ballot box.

But is it a left-wing party? It has leftist, conveniently populist, policies, but left-wing parties traditionally have a class agenda, and speak for a section of society rooted in the trade union movement.

Sinn Féin, like Fianna Fáil, would see itself as representing the nation, in the republican tradition born in the 1789 French revolution, and so its ideology is fluid.

Labour on the other hand is meant to be a class-based engine of radical reform and equality (memo to Mr Gilmore: There was a hint in the name — Labour — remember?)

The few supporters Mr Gilmore has left claim that history will be kind to him. The harsh reality is, it will not.

Despite all the bluster of opposition, when given a once in a political generation mandate, Mr Gilmore was shown to be weak and indecisive. He hid in the sumptuous elegance of the Iveagh House foreign ministry, and failed to lead the fight for the downtrodden at home who voted for him in record numbers.

To use the damning metaphor once hurled at British prime minister John Major, Mr Gilmore was a human cushion — he bore the imprint of the last Fine Gael minister to sit on him.

And now Ms Burton, and the ‘Munster Mash’ gaggle of Cork and Tipp TDs battling for the deputy position, have all suddenly stumbled across something called “core Labour values” and are demanding a return to them.

But, despite the denials, Ms Burton has clearly done a deal with Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin to keep him in his Cabinet post in return for staying out of the leadership race.

This will prove a fatal error as with Mr Howlin in the key economic role nothing changes regardless of all Ms Burton’s empty rhetoric about reaching the limits of austerity.

With growlin’ Howlin — the so-called socialist who demanded health cuts from a Fine Gael minister — stuck in place it is a case of: “Austerity is dead. Long live austerity.”

And that means the Labour Party is dead — at least until the election after next when the voters begin to return to its empty husk in despair at having nowhere else to go.

Such is the dispiriting cyclical nature of a political system that keeps the Dáil 83% male year after year after year.