05.12.2024

On the merry-go-round

Discontent with the government has not translated into change. In fact, what is notable is the lack of change, reports Anne McShane

To quote from French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”.

The votes have been counted and we will soon have another Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition in government - this time with FF in the driving seat. In the November 29 general election it won 10 more seats, bringing it up to 48, which, with FG’s 35, leaves them just two short of a majority - and so the haggling for junior government partners has begun, as ever. There is no real prospect of Sinn Féin being able to form an alternative government with its 39 seats, as its potential partners, including People Before Profit, would add between them 25 seats at most, making 64 - far below the 88 required to form a government. There were 16 ‘independents’ elected, but they would be far more inclined towards supporting FF and FG.

The dictum that low numbers voting preserves the status quo certainly held true, with a 59.71% turnout, down from 2020 (itself an historic low of 62.7%). Voters, especially those in poor working class areas, saw little to inspire them from among the options on offer. Not because they are happy with their lot, as Irish Times journalists would have you believe - in fact there is immense anger and frustration directed against the political establishment. Not only has the gap between rich and poor grown even further since 2020, but homelessness is widespread, there is even less affordable childcare available and support for elderly and disabled people is in chronic short supply.

The economic boom and the ‘Apple tax windfall’ that FF and FG boast about has not trickled down - particularly not in parts of inner-city Dublin. The Dublin Central constituency, where wealth and gentrification sit alongside slum housing, had only a 52.27% turnout. Tensions have led to the targeting of migrants and scapegoating by far-right groups on social media. False claims that an asylum-seeker had stabbed children outside a school sparked race riots in November 2023. This is the patch of Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald, where her share of first preferences fell from 35.7 % in 2020 to 23.3% this time round, with votes lost to Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch, a gangland boss from the area, who came within a hair’s whisper of a Dáil seat - much to the horror of the political elite and media.

Unsurprisingly, one of the big media debates was on immigration. McDonald had shifted her party very firmly to the right on asylum-seekers, announcing that a SF government would be far tougher on illegal migrants than FF or FG, promising more deportations and a massive increase in government bureaucracy to enforce the tougher rules.

But the governing parties were able to retain the advantage, being the ones actually imposing attacks on asylum-seekers, promising more measures by participating in the EU Pact, and refusing to bend on some of their crueller decisions. In December 2023 minister of justice Helen McEntee announced that she could not accommodate single male applicants, with the excuse is that there is nowhere for them to stay. With the country littered with empty hotels and public buildings, it is evident that there is no truth to that claim. Indeed it is an open secret that her motivation is to deter asylum-seekers from travelling to Ireland - to make it clear that ‘we’ are not a ‘soft touch’. The result is that there are now more than 3,000 male asylum-seekers sleeping in tents on Dublin streets, subjected to regular attacks and harassment from state officials, police and rightwing gangs.

In a TV debate, Sinn Féin vied with the government, rightwing independents and Aontú (a split to the right from SF) to be the most hard-line. It truly was a sickening spectacle. The successful use of these anti-migrant platforms by FF, FG, SF and Aontú meant that the legs were taken out from under far right and individual populist candidates. Their failure to get elected owes a lot more to the success of anti-migrant propaganda by government parties and SF than it does to any lessening in hostility to immigrants. The lesson needs to be learned that the main danger comes from the bourgeois parties.

Left government

In my last article, I wrote about the debate on the call for a ‘left government’ at the national council meeting of PBP that month.¹ I reported on how members in the Red Network tendency and the Cork branch had asked for a review of the policy, but were unsuccessful.

In a later radio interview, Richard Boyd Barrett, official election spokesperson for PBP, successfully sidestepped a question on the opposition within his party to coalition with the ‘left government’ strategy. He continued to insist that the way forward was for the ‘left’, including SF, to come together in an alliance for government. He, of course, means the centre-left, as none of the parties he refers to have any notion of challenging the rule of capitalism in Ireland. The opposite is the case. The Labour Party has been in government with FG on seven occasions, and once with FF. It entered coalition with FG in 2011 to impose a savage European austerity package, met by mass protests and boycotts. In 2016 Labour was punished in a virtual wipe-out, losing 30 seats.

Now Labour leader Ivana Bacik wants to try again, this time in a bloc with the Social Democrats, who split from Labour in 2015. Neither of the two wants to experience the same fate as the Green Party, the junior partner of the 2020 election, which has been reduced from 12 TDs to one - their leader, Roderic O’Gorman, in a truly humiliating defeat, having been made the fall guy for everything that went wrong by their partners in government. The Social Democrats are up for going into government with FF and FG, once their “red lines” are met. SF is too, but FF and FG have been adamant that they will not countenance it. Remarkably both Micheál Martin, leader of FF, and Simon Harris of FG continue to insist that SF maintains close ties with terrorism and the IRA, as though the Good Friday agreement had never happened, along with decommissioning - as if SF has not shown itself to be a ‘responsible party of government’ in the Northern Ireland assembly.

In Stormont SF has acted in compliance with the directives of the British government and within budgets, leading to more austerity for the working class. PBP members facing the Six County government must have some views on the decision of the PBP nationally to include SF as one of the main components in a ‘left government’ in the republic. They know through direct experience that SF is a thoroughly bourgeois party.

PBP

PBP itself stood 41 candidates, including its four sitting TDs. It lost one TD, Gino Kenny, and failed to get Hazel de Nortúin elected in place of Brid Smith, who had retired. Left independent Joan Collins also lost her seat, as did Mick Barry of Solidarity (Socialist Party) in Cork, but his comrade in Dublin, Ruth Coppinger, regained her seat that she lost in 2020. Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, who had been MEPs up to June, both got derisory votes. As a whole, not a good election for the left, and there are important lessons to be learned.

PBP’s 40-page election manifesto states that it “wants a 32-county eco-socialist republic, where working people control the wealth and the needs of people, and the planet comes before the profits of the few”. It then moves on to state:

The first step in bringing about fundamental change will be the formation of a left government - one that excludes FF and FG. We know, however, from the experience of other countries that such a government must be willing to take the fight to the rich and privileged. Ireland needs a party that fights for workers, the poor and oppressed with all the energy and enthusiasm that FF/FG defend the rich. Voting People Before Profit number 1 will give a strong indication that people want real change. The kind of radical change set out in this manifesto.²

The manifesto gives detailed demands for what PBP will push for or do as part of a ‘left government’. They include €300 a week for unemployed people and pensioners, and €350 a week for people with disabilities. Given that the current pension is between €266 and €276 weekly, for job seekers it is €232 and the same for disability benefit, these are utterly paltry demands. The call for a minimum “living wage” of €15 per hour is equally derisory - only €2.30 more than the present minimum €12.70 per hour. It is very far from what working class people actually need to live any kind of a life in today’s society: to pay for housing, enjoy a healthy diet, social life, travel, enjoy cultural events - all the things workers should have, but which the capitalist system says it cannot afford. I would suggest that an hourly rate of €30 is the very least needed. But what is important is your political economy behind the assessment.

The problem here and in general throughout the manifesto is that it has been budgeted for within the existing framework, with any improvement in living standards depending on raising taxes from the wealthy and corporations - a ‘Multi-Millionaires Tax’, more tax bands for the better off, an increase in employers’ payments, and a corporation tax of 20% for large businesses. All very good, but they do not seem to have considered the possibility of a flight of those millionaires and corporations, who currently enjoy the delights of Ireland as a tax haven. Why would they stay here, when there are plenty other parts of the world willing and happy to have them? Indeed bourgeois economists and politicians are already very jittery about Trump’s plans to incentivise US corporations to repatriate production. The Irish economy is heavily dependent on these entities, with 210,000 workers employed directly, and another 168,000 in connected employment.³ It is little wonder that Micheál Martin recently backed off on legislating for sanctions on Israeli products from the occupied territories, after being warned by the US ambassador that such a move would result in US businesses relocating.

SF knows how important it is to keep the US government sweet. Despite demands for Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill, first minister in Stormont, to boycott the Patrick’s Day celebrations in Washington in protest at the US arming of the Israeli genocide, they both went and prostrated themselves before Biden. Mary Lou may have called for a left government at the 11th hour of the election campaign, but this was just her making sure of transfers from the left. She has consistently said she is open to going into government with FF and FG. She is hungry for political office - and is prepared to take those “tough decisions” to maintain profits and keep Ireland as an attractive destination for transnationals. There is absolutely no way she would be signing up to a Multi-Millionaires Tax!

In fairness, the PBP manifesto has some good demands too - the ending of deportation and for integration of migrants as equals, immediate citizenship rights for all children born in Ireland, free childcare, secular education, a national building programme of social housing, and the separation of church and state are just some.

However, in order to make sense as a political strategy for power and be in any way achievable, these demands need to be part of a minimum programme to take the working class to a position where it can take power on its own. In turn it needs to be connected to a maximum programme for communism, and be part of an internationalist strategy. In other words, it must be a programme for working class self-emancipation.

Going into government with capitalist parties - even those who say they will be ‘more humane’ - is a dead end. Once in power, the logic of the market dictates. We have learned this again and again and do not need another defeat. In fact PBP members should count themselves lucky that the ‘left government’ strategy was a failure this time.

1. ‘Best laid plans go awry’ Weekly Worker September 19: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1507/best-laid-plans-go-awry.↩︎

2. www.pbp.ie/content/files/2024/11/PBP-Manifesto-GE2024-2.pdf.↩︎

3. See thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/11/29/ireland-election-its-economic-model-under-threat.↩︎