Dublin Opinion

There is nothing new in saying that when it comes to the economy, the Irish Labour party is Billy-no-mates. Michael Taft has covered this topic on Notes On The Front, while Damian O’Broin pre-empted my article in a comment he left yesterday. It is downright bizzare that criticism of government economic policy has been left in the hands of right-wing commentators such as David McWilliams and Eddie Hobbs. There are people making hay, when the Labour party should be making policy.

The main problem, however, is the fact that Labour’s silence has given a consensus to economic policy. To quote Michael Taft’s above-linked article, “Like rabbits staring into the headlights of a neo-liberal juggernaut, we scamper into the hedges to debate how the money should be spent, not how it should be created.” Eamon Gilmore’s leadership acceptance press release sent out the message that rabbits caught in headlights will remain party policy.

Today, our country is already on the next stage of the journey, shaping the Ireland of the future. And Labour’s place is up at the front, once again leading the way. How to harness our economic success to make a better society and to end poverty; how to secure the future, economically and ecologically, for our children; how to make the public space safe and the public services more efficient; how to get climate change under control and how to put people first in this changing global century.”

So. The policy remains the prudent management of this wealth, not to expose its increasingly shaky foundations, and provide alternatives. This policy leaves the Labour party in the same corner as Fianna Fáil once the mortgage bubble bursts. It places the Labour party within the ruling consensus, whereas its policy should be the attainment of an alternative consensus on the political, cultural, economic, and social future of this island. It needs to challenge the current “common sense” view of Ireland. It needs to make alliances with genuine oppositional and non-elite voices. In other words, it needs to think.

Fortunately, there are groups out there that have been doing a lot of thinking about Ireland, and not just on how to carve a niche in the present consensus, but how to go about setting up a new one completely. These include TASC, for example, as well as the loose grouping of scholars and academics with links to the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the Field Day publications. In terms of summation and interpretation, Joe Cleary’s latest book, Outrageous Fortune, contains a succinct introduction both to the idea of Irish studies, as well as an engrossing critique of current Irish intellectual hegemony. I hope to have written a review of the book by tomorrow.

For now, though, it is enough to signpost the alternatives to the narrow, and socially destructive, consensus that pervades Ireland these days. Also, it is important to note that there is nothing new about a socially destructive consensus having primacy in Ireland - in fact, we’ve had such a situation for the past eighty years or so. The Irish Labour party, under Gilmore, has an opportunity to become the political expression of a new consensus, one that has already found voice in the Irish academic and socially aware worlds. It will not be easy, but the opportunity is there.