The presiding goddess of the Irish left is a bogus Aurora. False dawns brighten the gloom of repeated failure, heralding a day that never breaks. Catherine Connolly’s stunning victory in the presidential election lights the way to a possible transformation. But it also sheds light on the great paradox of Irish politics: a left-of-centre country that has never had a left-led government.
We’ve been here before. Mary Robinson’s victory in 1990 showed that the left could win a national election and put wind in the sails of Dick Spring’s Labour Party. Yet by the end of what would have been her full term, Bertie Ahern, Mary Harney and Charlie McCreevy were swanking with a Celtic Tiger fed by tax cuts and deregulation.
The veteran champion of the left, Michael D Higgins, won the presidency in 2011. His win did not seem to be an isolated event – Labour had won 37 seats in that year’s general election, Fianna Fáil was in meltdown and the long-awaited realignment of Irish party politics was visible on the horizon.
What happened? Labour helped to implement a brutal austerity programme in which working people paid for the sins of property developers, a corrupt banking system and the follies of deregulation.
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In both cases, Aurora was an impostor. The left’s presidential victories ushered in not social democracy but feral finance capitalism – first in its phase of irrational exuberance and then in its determination to ensure that ordinary citizens picked up the tab for its wild excesses.
There’s no point just hoping it will be third time lucky. The presidential campaign dramatised the exhaustion of the Civil War parties. They have neither passion nor cunning. They lack a theme and they have lost their touch. Well over half the electorate is crying out for an alternative.
The alternative, however, has to be real. For the first time ever, Connolly managed to bring together a working coalition of the social democratic, environmentalist, left-populist and neo-communist left. There is the rudimentary outline of an alliance that could actually take power.
[ Catherine Connolly deserves her landslide victory, but it’s a hollow crownOpens in new window ]
But rudimentary outlines don’t win general elections. If this combined left is to convince the electorate to hand it the keys to Government Buildings, it has to colour in a picture that is not just vivid but recognisable to voters as a realistic representation of what a better Ireland might look like.
To achieve this, five basic things have to happen.
Firstly, Sinn Féin has to deal honestly with its past. The single biggest obstacle to the creation of a left government is the reluctance of many voters to trust a party that remains ambivalent about a disastrous sectarian conflict. Some of that reluctance is direct – older voters have too many bad memories. But more of it is indirect – speaking out of both sides of its mouth in relation to the legacies of violence makes the party look shifty.
Left-wing parties believe in dynamic, active government – a State that gets good stuff done. The next general election will be won and lost not just on ideas and values but on delivery
Second, the left parties have to get real about taxation. The weakness of the Irish left is that the money it wants to spend is the windfall from the dodgy accounting practices of multinational corporations. This dubious bounty allows many on the left to indulge in anti-tax rhetoric. It won’t last: an honest proposition on a just and sustainable tax system has to be at the core of any left alternative.
Third, a united Ireland has to be more than a slogan. The Irish public will not elect a government that demands immediate Irish unification with no preparation and no serious engagement with the scale of the challenges involved. Preparation requires realism – an honest accounting of the costs and compromises as well as of the opportunities and excitements.
Fourth, the left has to stop being a vehicle for serial objection. Left-wing parties believe in dynamic, active government – a State that gets good stuff done. The next general election will be won and lost not just on ideas and values but on delivery. The status quo (as detailed rather depressingly by Stripe’s John Collison in Saturday’s Irish Times) is sclerosis. The population is growing rapidly but everything it needs – housing, transport, infrastructure, radical reform of the health and education systems, the transition to a decarbonised economy – moves slowly.
Left parties earned their right to govern in other democracies by being able to make sweeping changes happen in ways that were immediately visible to citizens. The Irish left has to emerge from a culture of complaint (even while there is a great deal to complain about) into nation-building mode. It has to look shovel-ready.
Fifth, the left as a whole has to commit itself to Ireland’s European future. Much of the left already recognises that democracy is in an existential crisis and that the European Union is the best hope of saving it. There’s a reason why the EU is under attack from its western flank by Trump and from the east by Putin – it must be destroyed if authoritarianism and oligarchy are to compete their victories.
This is not about being uncritical of the EU – on the contrary, democratic engagement demands constant questioning of all power structures. But it is about saying, clearly and sincerely, that the left is pro-European. Sinn Féin has gradually accepted this necessity. But the far left has not. No alliance will win a general election if the Irish public does not trust it to hold our place in the European project.
These conditions are not sufficient – but they are necessary. There’s a reason why voters use the presidency to embody their broadly leftist values yet ultimately default to right-of-centre governments. These impulses seem contradictory but they are in fact complementary: having a left-winger in the Arás makes the grim pragmatism of the centre-right seem just about tolerable.
That will change only when the alternative is more than aspirational. If this dawn is to be followed by a real daybreak for the left, its light has to illuminate a path to power. For that path to open up, the left has to show that it is ready to turn its noble aspirations into convincing propositions.
