Hard Labour

The Labour party has lost a top line leader.

And so the 2007 General Election has created another victim. Following Michael McDowell and Trevor Sargent’s decisions to step down, Pat Rabbitte’s failure to deliver the Labour Party into government has lead to his relinquishing leadership, to not a small amount of surprise. In fact, it makes you wonder if Mark Little put some sort of curse on them all during their leadership debate before the election (Gerry Adams being the only one who participated that night who’s still a leader, and even he technically doesn’t count).

While the reasons for McDowell’s and Sargent’s resignations could be seen a mile off (Complete meltdown and soul-selling pact respectively), Rabbitte’s stepping down didn’t have the same set of circumstances about it at all. Granted, he may not have got into government, but he held his numbers steady whilst the smaller parties were run into the ground, and left not a bad base with which to run for next time.

But political parties can treat leaders like Italian Chairmen deal with football managers: Either get immediate success or your gone, and no sooner were the election results becoming clear that recriminations of Rabbite’s leadership, and in particular his electoral strategy to coalesce with Fine Gael, weren’t slow in forthcoming. Dublin TD Tommy Broughan went live on TV to register his dissatisfaction at the Mullingar Accord, and no doubt there were more who did so privately.

At any rate, we’ve lost not only a top line party leader put a top line Dáil character whose rapier wit, eloquence and propensity to rile his political opponents will be sadly missed. The question is, who can do the job that neither Rabbitte, nor any of his predecessors for that matter, have managed to do?

It seems to be a Labour supporter is to be perennially disappointed. The second oldest political party in Ireland (only Sinn Féin and its Doctor Who-esque tendency to regenerate can boast being around longer), it looked for a while that under the stewardship of Larkin and Connolly that the Party would have a significant part to play in representing the Irish working classes, but it didn’t quite work out like that.

Their first big mistake was stepping aside during the 1918 Westminster elections to give people a clear choice between Sinn Fein and the Home Rule Party, but out of sight proved to be out of mind, and their abstinence during one of the most important elections in the country’s history has haunted them since. By the 1920’s Eamon de Valera’s populist Fianna Fáil had positioned itself as the party of, amongst others, the working man, and this seriously undercut Labour’s position. To this day, Labour still achieves a greater percentage of votes from middle class liberals that they do from working class.

Even when things looked good, they weren’t. In 1943 they received their highest ever percentage of the seats and votes and looked set to take second place, but then in-fighting broke out and the party split. In 1992 they got an even higher percentage of seats and votes, but then decided to coalesce with Fianna Fail, and I don’t need to draw a diagram to tell you how that worked out.

Whoever takes over the leadership will have lots of hard thinking to do on numerous topics: Do they stay aligned with Fine Gael, or plough their own furrow? Should they swing to the left in an attempt to go back to their roots, or stay in an insulated centre? Whatever they decide, it’ll never be easy for a Labour leader.

By: Paddy Duffy