Irish Labour History is a Strange Fish
Feb 27th, 2007 by Conor McCabe
Most of Labour’s critics, armed with a deadly cocktail of ignorance and arrogance, have dismissed it as a sideshow. There was never a strong left-wing party in Ireland, they say, because there was never a strong industrial base from which to build such a party. The only place where a true working class existed, the argument goes, was in Belfast and the surrounding area. Partition left Ireland a truncated working-class movement, and saw mainstream politics dominated by the polarities of the Civil War.
It is an historical analysis that the Irish Labour party is all too willing to endorse. The party’s official history states the following:
“The Labour Party did not take part in the General Election of 1918 or the parliamentary elections of 1921. This decision was taken to facilitate a clear-cut decision by the electorate on the national question and to avoid the possibility of a split in the Labour Movement which was organised on an all-Ireland basis. This decision had serious implications for the future of the Party. In the 1918 election, two out of every three voters were voting for the first time and forming political links which were to last a lifetime. The national debate was not resolved by the elections of 1918 and 1921 or the civil war which followed. It has continued to be a part of politics in Ireland ever since.â€
The Irish Labour party’s analysis, however, is wrong.
In the 1920 local elections the Labour party emerged as the second largest party on the island. In 1922, the party went on to win seventeen seats out of eighteen candidates, with 20% of the vote. J.T. O’Farrell, secretary of the Railway Clerks’ Association, only lost out on making the Labour party’s campaign a perfect success by 361 votes. That was in Dublin. In Leix/Offaly, William Davin secured two quotas for the party, topping the poll with 15,167 first preference votes. There is no doubt that the Labour party would have won more seats had it fielded more candidates and engaged in the now mandatory vote management.
In 1922/23 Irish farm labourers, railwaymen, dockers, and teachers were engaged in a full-out wage war with their employers, and voted for the Labour party to fight on their behalf. However, the party’s leader, Thomas Johnston, entered the Dáil on a “moral†crusade. He decided that Labour’s role was to protect democracy, and not fight for its voters’ interests.
In the 1923 election the party’s vote shrank, leaving it with a slightly more modest fourteen seats. Thomas Johnston himself only retained his seat in Dublin North on the final count. Even with this, he failed to reach the quota, securing the seat through the elimination of the other candidates.
For the Labour party’s analysis - that the 1918 election somehow caused inter-generational voting patterns – to work, the Irish electorate must have undergone a collective amnesia for five years; or by consistently voting for a Labour party only to reject it in 1923 the party’s analysis is suggesting that the Irish electorate woke up on the morning of election day and said “Hey? Shouldn’t we be voting on Nationalist v Unionist patterns, like we did in 1918, even though the Unionists are gone and it is just us Nationalist here?”
That is quite a magic bullet.
Another analysis is that the Irish electorate voted for the Labour party in 1920 and 1922 to protect wages, and decided not to vote for them in 1923 when the party failed, under Johnston, to pursue that mandate.
The Labour party lost votes in 1923 through bad leadership and bad policies, and not through some mystical collective inter-generational voting pattern caused by a vote for Nationalism or Unionism in 1918.
From 1923 to 1932, bad leadership and a complete lack of vision conspired to create a labour party that was not a political party or a socialist party, or even a social democratic party.
It was trade union party - run by trade unionists for trade unionists, with trade union structures and procedures.
It organised branches only where there were trade union branches. All candidates for election had to be members of a trade union. All decisions and policies were taken with the interests of the trade union movement in mind (about 180,000 people), and not in interests of Irish labour (about 2 million people). It was a gap into which DeValera and Fianna Fáil rushed in, becoming in 1932 the largest party in the country with a potent mix of nationalism and social policies. Fianna Fáil became the working class party in Dublin, and apart from the odd upset- see 1992 for example – it has remained so.
That is where the Irish Labour party messed up. It had seventeen years (1912-1927) ahead of Fianna Fáil to secure those voters. Instead, it couldn’t see past the rule book and trade membership card.
No magic bullet. No inter-generational voting patterns. Just, no vision and no ambition.
Its relevance for today is that people continue to see the Irish Labour party’s lack of success as somehow out of the party’s control; that somehow, history is to blame. Civil war politics and all that. Concurrent with this is the recent debate on Rabbitte’s tax cut and the assumption that the Labour Party was, and is, a normal political party. The facts, I’m afraid, tell otherwise.
The party’s failure to see beyond its trade union template affected the party from the 1910s up to the 1980s, and continues to affect its performance today. The party needs to start looking towards becoming the largest party in any future coalition. Its analysis that the past is somehow to blame for its lack of progress in this regard is, quite simply, wrong. The prize is there, but whether the party is strong enough and ambitious enough to take it – well, that’s where the failing be.
That’s a very interesting analysis indeed. I have to go away and think about it. I particularly think your point about it ceding the field to FF hits home.
Makes me wonder about whether the more syndicalist amongst the left (or indeed any who cleave to rigid political structures) have looked at that history.
Thanks worldbystorm. The main point I’m trying to make is that the Irish Labour party did not just rise out of the trade union movement - it was more than happy to stay within it. It was never a community-based party the way that other social democrat parties are/were. Its branches and structures mirrored those of the ITGWU et al. And the William O’Brien, anti-Larkin ITGWU as well. since the 1980s it has tried to change, but has fallen into this creation myth about itself that external forces, and not its own actions, are responsible for its lack of success in becoming the leading opposition party inthe country. I mean, WHY is it willing to support a right-wing idiot like Enda Kenny for Taoiseach? Why not Pat Rabbitte as Taoiseach? Fine Gael LOST 23 seats last time, and Rabbitte sees it as his duty to prop them up? Has this guy been taking lessons from Thomas Johnston? In politics, when your opponent is on the ground, you kick him. The Irish electorate do not want Fine Gael, and Rabbitte’s their lifeboat.
By the way, my analysis is heavily influenced by Emmet O’Connor. If you get a chance, read any of his stuff.
One last point. in 1927, the Labour party won 22 seats in one of its best showings ever. The party’s election results from 1920 to 1932 make a mockery of its inter-generational voting patterns excuse for not securing the Irish working class vote. Quite simply, it never chased it and stuck to the trade union movement - working people who, nowadays, would be quite content to regard themselves as middle-class. Skilled workers, office workers, teachers, and clerical grade civil servants.
[…] In truth, The Labour party handed Fianna Fáil the cities, and Fianna Fáil have not let go since. (for a further analysis, see here.) […]
A few points on the matter of the Labour Party.
Firstly, yer man’s name was Johnson not Johnston (Tom Johnston was a contemporary Scottish Labour leader.).
Secondly, the connection with the unions is not really the crux of the problem.
Admittedly, the union leaders constituted a major factor holding back Labour after the Rising, as they fell in behind Johnson’s idea of concentrating on the industrial struggle and leaving the national issue to Sinn Fein. As the national issue was the one which necessitated claiming state power, Labour kept on the sidelines, hoping that its quite real success in building its union organization would continue indefinitely until their sheer numbers would break the shell of the capitalist political state the it expected Sinn Fein would achieve.
Of course, this did not happen. Not only did the Articles of Agreement split SF and the IRA, but the split came after the post-war boom had collapsed and stimulated a social counter-attack by the bosses. Resistance to this, as well as general alienation from the feuding SF factions (and, also, the hint that a Workers’ republic might be won without ‘immediate and terrible war’) combined to make Labour the second party in votes in the 1922 election) (The locals of 1920 did put Labour in second place behind SF but ahead of Unionists and Nationalists, but only in the towns.) After trying to keep its options open, Labour became loyal opposition to the Saorstat government that was aiding the bosses, while the Anti-Treaty forces were shooting at its scabs. This helps explain its decline in 1923.
From then until 2011, Labour has been the third, sometimes the fourth Dail party, and is likely to be so again after the next election. Fianna Fail did steal its clothes, but in doing so, it was consolidating its existing lead.
The overall point is that it was the unions but their leaders that stimied Labour originally. Since Congress and Party divided in 1930, an even bigger handicap has been the Oireachtas Party itself. It has been only too happy to keep the membership consciousness low (and, in the case of Conor Cruise O’Brien, even to lower it further), lest people with more radical strategies imperil its control of the constituencies or even take them altogether.