Battle for Labour
Labour TDs rarely show their faces in the Dáil chamber for leader’s questions in a fashion eerily reminiscent of the Greens
Like any good coup they pounced while the leader was out of the country.
As Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore toured war-ravaged Georgia, the first shots in the battle to topple him were being fired back home.
Some Labour TDs had already left the weekly parliamentary party meeting as chairman Colm Keaveney rose to signal the beginning of what some see as the battle for Labour’s soul — and survival.
Though not as hostile as the relationship between Georgia and its invading neighbour Russia, Keaveney and Gilmore fight for every inch of disputed territory in much the same way.
Gilmore wanted one of his placemen to take the chairmanship, fearing Keaveney, who has a history of arguments with the leadership, would emerge as Chairman Row due to his left-of-centre politics and knack for publicity.
But party members thought differently, and now Keaveney is keen to use and expand the formally invisible role to push a Real Labour agenda.
In Gilmore’s absence, the meeting of TDs and senators was overseen by Joan Burton, who many deputies believe has been positioning herself for a leadership push for some time.
Burton is known as the unofficial leader of the opposition by Fine Gael Cabinet colleagues and has been keen to stake out a more distinctive thrust for Labour within a coalition dominated by the troika’s Tory economic agenda.
Keaveney’s call for a ballot of party members before Labour signs up to a second humiliating bailout and the resulting austerity measures it would entail fits neatly into a shift to sharpen and redefine the junior coalition party’s image.
Labour TDs rarely show their faces in the Dáil chamber for leader’s questions these days in a fashion eerily reminiscent of the Greens when they became so embarrassed by the Fianna-Fáil-led coalition they were trapped in.
And like the Greens, Labour is flirting with electoral irrelevance as it crashes to 10% in the polls as Sinn Féin plunders its undefended social justice flank at will and soars into the mid-20s in some surveys.
Hence Keaveney’s attempt at putting some clear blue water between his party and the Blueshirts when he told the Irish Examiner that Fine Gael had a certain degree of comfort with the hardline right-wing measures imposed by Brussels.
One prominent Fine Gaeler agreed with Keaveney’s contention, saying: “He’s right about that, we do take comfort from it — it appeals to us and gives us cover to change the economy. But we also take comfort from the fact Labour is getting all the blame in the polls — that’s brilliant.”
A Fine Gael minister was less smug, musing: “The tipping point for Labour will be the next budget, if they get nothing out of it again, what is the point of them going on?”
Just like every other person who has ever planned to mount a leadership challenge, Burton strenuously denies she is planning to mount a leadership challenge, but backbenchers believe she will make a move in the run-up to the budget or its bloody aftermath.
Burton has already been demoted by Gilmore and as she will be 67 at the time of the next scheduled general election, must be aware a mid-term change of leader would be her last chance to wear the crown.
But even some of her supporters doubt she will ever achieve the top job, believing Brendan Howlin, her only ally in Cabinet, would emerge as the white knight unity candidate to succeed Gilmore.
The Tánaiste’s failure to take a key economic Cabinet post has a lot to do with his undoing, as Howlin is the “go-to minister” all Labour TDs and Fine Gael cabinet colleagues go to if they want to get something done, bypassing the foreign minister.
Labour has lost its way as it appears in office but not in power, buffeted by an austerity agenda forced on the country from abroad, and often outmanoeuvred by Fine Gael at home.
The botched budget was a public relations disaster, highlighting the amateur-hour media presentation skills of the handful of close flunkies Gilmore increasing relies on.
The party has failed markedly to carve out key territory it could claim as its own away from the right-wing thrust of economic policy, such as rescuing families from mortgage misery.
Despite the party having the super-junior Cabinet slot of housing minister, Labour has allowed the long-delayed insolvency law reform to get bogged down in a turf war between finance and justice.
If they had seized such an issue from the start and made it front and centre of their agenda in government, they would now have something to show for the compromises on welfare and privatisation they were forced to swallow by the troika.
After policy disasters like voting through budget cuts to get rid of hundreds of teachers in the most disadvantaged schools in the country, many are left wondering what the Labour Party is actually for anymore.
Keaveney and, in a (so far) subtler way, Burton clearly believe there is little time left to salvage the situation.
Any vote on the bailout terms would be a battle for the soul of the Labour Party and a nightmare for Gilmore, which in all probability would trigger Labour exiting government — but the fact the party’s chairman is demanding such a thing shows how bad moral has become.
But one loyalist spoke scathingly of Keaveney’s intervention, stating: “I think Keaveney’s a member of the ‘Joan For Leader group’. There’s two of them in it — him and Joan.”
But as the Tánaiste returns home, Gilmore has more than Georgia on his mind.
