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A new palsy walsy ‘Glasnov’ between Labour and S. Fein !
AMONG the many eulogies to Pat Rabbitte on the occasion of his resignation as leader of the Labour Party, one stood out, not so much for the repressed glee at seeing the mischievous old Stickie getting his comeuppance, but for indicating a new political path for the Cloth Cap Brigade – close cooperation with Sinn Fein!
Caoimhgin O Caolain, Dáil leader of a party that's in danger of becoming a barnacled national institution, wished Rabbitte all the best and hoped the two parties, Labour and Sinn Fein, would continue to support each other on 'socio-economic' issues. Visibly emitting a warm glow of congeniality, he looked forward to working with 'Pat's successor'.
The two parties would be able to present “a truly left opposition to the current FF-Green-PD coalition,” he said. It was so moving a statement that it almost brought tears to the eyes of this scribe.
So, was the Sinn Fein man talking codswollop or was there something in it? Certainly there's heart-searching presently going on within Labour about allying themselves to Sinn Fein – for tactical reasons only, doncha know! With a kind of exotic conviction, rank and filers are expressing the opinion that new blood was attracted into the Seanad through the voting pact with SF.
And, that's good, they say. It shows Labour can do business with the Provos.
A RABBITTE STRATEGY
What's interesting is that Rabbitte was responsibe for sanctioning the Senate arrangement whereby Shinners voted for Labour candidates and Labour did the same for SF. A quid pro quo element to the arrangement was that O Caolain and his lads got more speaking time in the Dail.
The plan was to help secure the election of Labour’s Alex White and Phil Prendergast and, in return, Sinn Fein would get Pearse Doherty a place in the sun. Old Labour -the Brendan Howlin-Joan Burton wing- wasn't pleased. In fact, they were outraged at supping with the devil.
And, of course, there are many within Sinn Fein increasingly nervous of having a touchy-feely love-in with a gang that spent decades trying to demonise them. Is this what entering Leinster House is all about, they're asking. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the dark mutterings from the SF councillors who were ordered to support particular candidates in the Senate elections.
The arm twisting did not go down well with Cork councillor Jonathan O'Brien, who later told his Leeside comrades that he voted with his head, not his feet and ignored the ultimatum. The Corkman was not on his own. Galway councillor, Daniel Callanan, also made clear his distaste at being told the way to vote, particularly since allegiances were being switched from Labhras O Murchu to Labour's Alex White.
And an even bigger pill was swallowed by eminent Republican activist councillor, Sean MacManus, who was ordered to support the anti-republican Phil Prendergast instead of trade union leader Mick O'Reilly, a good friend of the party.
CHUMS AGAIN?
Other observers see in the present cosy relations with Labour a kind of resolution of the catastrophic Sinn Fein split of the early 1970s, when a pro-Moscow element broke away to form the Sinn Fein-The Workers Party and the Official IRA, a conglomorate later known as the Stickies. Yet, in a sense these people continued to be considered part of the republican family. They were Sinn Fein's weirdo step brothers, estranged and dangerous but nevertheless related to them despite ending up in the Labour Party – or (to be more precise) despite taking over the Labour Party.
But, many traditional Republicans are not so optimistic. Doing business with Stickies dressed as Labourites upsets them. The Stickies, after all, had done their damnest to present Republicans as creatures from Hell and their Moscow line left wounds that have not yet healed.
Indeed it's still difficult for many Shinners (and for democrats who are not members of the party) to forgive the revisionist, anti-nationalist and pro-unionist warfare that Harris, De Rossa, Rabbitte, Gilmore and others waged. Nor can the suffocating grip that Workers Party-Democratic Left cadres exercised on huge areas of Irish public life – controlling newspapers, running unions, and infiltrating key areas of the civil service – be easily forgotten.
Or the fact that the Workers Party-Democratic Left people brought into TV and print journalism a degree of malice and scurrility not known since Civil War times (a flavour of it can still be found in the anti-nationalist bile written by that jaded stable of ‘Sunday Independent’ drayhorses).
BARK BUT NO BITE
But, it seems, that's all now in the past as a new palsy-walsy 'Glasnov', emerges between Sinn Fein and the Labour Party. Question is what's in store for the punter when the only two 'left wing' parties in the Oireachtas develop a policy of political cooperation – a so called Alliance of the Left; God help us!
Are they really serious when they splutter stuff about socio-economic issues on which a common front can be constructed? Let's not forget that ‘serious politics,’ as Rabbitte explained some weeks ago, is nothing more than getting into government. Adams seems to hold the same viewpoint, otherwise his party would not have performed the policy-change antics they thought the southern electorate would buy into before the last general election.
Demands for a fair and equal society are common to both parties, as is the usual blah-de-blah about rectifying inequalities in health, housing, education and wealth, but, one feels, the bite has disappeared from Sinn Fein. Labour never had it.
RESPECTABILITY RULES
Sinn Fein's objective seems to be to impress us with a 'look how respectable we've become -you can trust us' sort of image. Labour under Rabbitte has no image, thanks to attaching the party to the most rightwing people in European politics, Fine Gael.
Indeed, the General Election demonstrated that there was nothing particularly distinctive about either of the parties, a fact that came painfully across in Adams’ performance on the TV leaders’ debate. That disaster made clear that if the two parties have anything in commmon it’s nothing more than the utterance of sound-bites in which no one believes.
The Labour gurus think all that the party needs is a bit of 'branding and presentation'; what Rabbitte last week described as the need to boast more about the role Labour plays in ushering in a progressive and tolerant society. The suspicion is that a similar ideology underpins Sinn Fein – the 'put us into power and we too will do a good job' syndrome – which is a far cry from the position Sinn Fein had up to recently and which could be summed up with the phrase “Our policies are radical, even revolutionary. If you like what we're saying vote for us and we'll change society.”
Still and all, it's a sign of the times that a Cork Labour councillor endorsed the call for greater co-operation between the ‘left-wing’ (code for Sinn Fein) parties in the Dail and Senate. Some years ago, after Republicans in his town painted political slogans on a wall, he demanded their hairy heads should be used as brushes to clean up the place. Clearly those days are over and, one supposes, that's no bad thing.