Fine Gael making an honest show of Labour

YOU’D ALMOST feel sorry for the Labour Party. Almost. Individually, they’re not bad people – I’d count a number of them among my friends and there are, hidden here and there within it, a few remaining Labour politicians of genuine conviction and principle
But as a group of people you’d travel a long way to find any to beat them for that sense of arrogant, smug, self-entitlement. As a political party they’ve always seemed to share a deep conviction in their shared sense of moral superiority, combined with despair at the foolishness of the Irish people for not recognising their ability.
Despite this self-regard, the last couple of months has shown that the Irish Labour Party is set to continue its allotted role in Irish life: of serving as a plaything for Fine Gael, what some of Labour’s leaders once of the old Workers’ Party and with a passing familiarity with Lenin might once have described as ‘useful idiots’ for the Blueshirts.
The week before I write this, Labour backbenchers sat in silence while Enda Kenny told the Dáil that he was going to make an “honest man” of Eamon Gilmore.
They grinned and bore it when Kenny pointed out that Labour’s election promises were all well and good but that, when it came to negotiating the Programme for Government, Labour’s leaders fell into line behind Fine Gael like good little boys and girls. They’ll do what they’re told. They’ll take their marching orders from Michael Noonan. They’ll bail out Fine Gael’s mates in the banking industry. And they’ll like it.
According to The Irish Examiner, only a couple of TDs in the parliamentary party objected:
Addressing Mr Gilmore at the party meeting later, one prominent TD said: “I can’t believe you’d let the prime minister of the country stand up in the Dáil and say he is going to make an honest man of you.”
Mr Gilmore was then asked: “Are you going to let this pass?”
A Labour TD said after the meeting: “Enda Kenny tried to humiliate us — if this is what is being said on the floor of the parliament, I’d hate to think what is happening in private.”
Of course Eamon Gilmore’s going to let this pass. Have the members of the Labour parliamentary party really not noticed what’s been going on? Are they that naive, that fundamentally out of touch? Have they not noticed the difference between what Labour promised voters at the start of the year and what they’re committed to now?
Last February, Labour ran a series of advertisements in the papers warning against putting Fine Gael in power. They said if Fine Gael was elected, VAT would go up two per cent; now Labour’s planning to help them do it.
They said if Fine Gael got in, Child Benefit would be cut; now a Labour minister will be doing it. They accused Fine Gael of planning to put up Car Tax; and now they’re going to help make it happen.
They claimed only Labour would reverse increases in college registration fees; now a Labour minister is plotting to bring fees back in full. They said it was ‘Labour’s way or Frankfurt’s way’; and so the German parliament debates our Budget before the people of this country are told what’s in it.
Now they’re intimidating their own members to try and ensure Kevin Cardiff gets a plum EU job. Ireland’s great tradition (begun by Fianna Fáil but continued by this crowd) of dealing with failure through promotion, seems set to continue. A civil servant who presided over a disastrous series of decisions by a functionally innumerate Department of Finance is the best we can do to audit Europe’s byzantine budgeting system?
Of course, Labour’s leadership is happy enough. A string of mediocre second-rater media darlings like Rabbitte and Quinn get to top up their ministerial pensions for a couple of years and retire on bloated annual incomes. That chance at high office, of bums on Cabinet seats, is what made Labour’s ageing leadership so desperate for office. The swathe of new TDs elected in February are simply there to ensure Ruairí Quinn will not want for anything in retirement and, for some of them, this is beginning to sink in.
New Dublin West Labour TD Patrick Nulty however, doesn’t seem to have got the message. In a piece for The Irish Daily Mail he described the Government’s (his Government’s) economic strategy as “insanity” and warned that those who argued for cuts, like Fine Gael and Labour, are “wrong, wrong, wrong”. It’s still the same strategy he’s likely to endorse come Budget Day.
As time goes by, it’s going to become increasingly clear to Labour voters, and maybe even some of their TDs, what their role is in this new government, and that the arguments made by Sinn Féin are far closer to traditional Labour values than the diktats of their Blueshirt bosses.