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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— village June – July 2013
I
F you take the long view of the history of
Irish radical movements, the main surprise
about the split in the United Left Alliance
(ULA), and the biggest of small mercies, is
that there appear to be no weapons involved.
If that paragraph looks like a case of clutch-
ing at straws by someone who not so long ago
explained to Village readers why he’d be voting
ULA at the last general election, so be it. (Fancy
a straw? I’ve got a few of them here.) It’s hard to
avoid regrets, because of the hopes that were
invested by a few activists in the new organisa-
tion that had some success in the election.
But the fact is, most ULA voters in that year were
casting their ballots not for that novel set of ini-
tials but for well-established local candidates:
all five TDs elected on the ULA ticket would have
almost certainly landed in the Dáil anyway on the
strength of nothing more than their own names.
So, nothing ventured etc. And what has been
gained from the comic soap opera of the alli-
ance’s dissolution includes a little clarity. The two
major party-political components of the ULA, the
Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party, have
laboured tirelessly for decades to earn the mis-
trust of non-aligned leftists who were nonetheless
drawn to working beside them; this time, they
may at last have succeeded in convincing us to
stay away for good.
That’s not a personal judgment. Those parties
are full of good, committed people who will con-
tinue to deserve our votes, and perhaps even our
wary participation in campaigns that they lead.
The retrospective inevitability of their inability
to work together in the ULA shouldn’t blind us to
the odd, contingent, absurd factors that actually
unpopULAr
The collapse of the United Left Alliance
suggests the Left’s future is beyond
passive electoralism
opinion
harry browne
precipitated the split.
But there is also probably something cen-
trifugal in the traditional dynamic of those
organisations, in their congenital determination
to ‘build a mass party’ with themselves at the cen-
tre. Things fall apart. Sometimes I wonder if some
of us should set out intending to ‘build a very, very
small party’ and see what happens.
May saw the first stirrings of a new effort to
‘build’ a new broad-left network beyond, unreliant
upon, the main far-left parties. The Left Forum in
the Teachers Club in Dublin, which saw up to
people involved in discussions and workshops for
a day, even included (whisper it) members of the
Labour Party. It is some measure of the event’s
prevailing spirit of open-minded tolerance that
those Labour people weren’t chased into the
Parnell Square traffic.
But is electoralism, in the name of whatever
party, alliance or front, itself a dead end? I was
encouraged by the election result because it
indicated that voters, roused from their slumber
in what bourgeois democracy insists is the limit
of participation for the vast majority of people,
that is merely voting, showed an unprecedented
willingness to support left candidates. In Dublin
the left, broadly understood, got about per
cent of the first-preferences, and about half of
that was left-of-Labour. So aside from what ULA
and other left TDs would or could actually achieve,
the election said something encouraging about
popular consciousness. I was similarly encour-
aged in by the election of Barack Obama
because of what it said about people’s appetite
for change, but it was better in Ireland, because
some of those elected were actually socialists in
something other than the fevered imaginings of
deluded right-wingers.
But as the Meath by-election showed, protest
votes can swing hither and yon. If we’re going to
be encouraged when a few per cent of voters turn
toward the cogent ideas of, say, People Before
Profit, we’ve got to face up to the full horror of
those who temporarily embrace the dopey poli-
tics of Direct Democracy Ireland.
And we should face, too, the reality of how dis-
appointingly the socialists have used the Dáil over
the last two years. This no doubt has something
to do with the aforementioned soap opera: left-
wing TDs squabbling over where Mick Wallace
sits in the chamber is a pretty good metaphor-
and-more for how political effectiveness has given
way to in-fighting.
This is not a trivial squandering. You don’t have
to believe in the redeemability of parliament to
think that left-wing politicians should seize their
chance to shout from its highly visible rooftop. As
capitalism staggers through its worst crisis in the
best part of a century, there has not been what
we had every right to expect in : a coherent
group of TDs critiquing it and pointing the way
to an alternative. This may have something to do
with their lack of clarity about that alternative
– I’ve noted before how much these Trotskyites
sounded like social-democrats, an understand-
able tactic when the nominal social-democrats
sound like Thatcherites – but it must surely also
have something to do with their personal failure
to cohere.
Some of the politicians formerly known as
ULA remain quite good opposition spokespeo-
ple – I think of Richard Boyd Barrett in particular
- but their voices lack the amplification an effec-
tive bloc might have provided, and it’s not always
obvious what differentiates them from Sinn Féin,
or even, as Micheál Martin’s party sneaks steadily
leftward, from Fianna Fáil.
On the other hand, the most certain answer
to the question of what-good-are-they has come
from Clare Daly and Joan Collins. (Disclosure:
the latter is my constituency TD and I have leaf-
letted for her.) In the context of a depressingly
familiar national ‘debate’ about abortion, these
women have staked out important ground; and
with Labour’s pro-choice elements corralled by
coalition with Fine Gael, it is ground that would
have been unoccupied in the national political
field had they not been elected to the Dáil two
years ago.
That is, as Noam Chomsky might say, non-
trivial. At the same time, however, the renewed
activism of the pro-choice movement in Ireland
has not relied on them or on any other national
politician for its vigour. Savita Halappanavar
and a really inspiring bunch of committed activ-
ists have made that happen. Given the passions
and money that the other side of the abortion
debate can mobilise, they’ll have to keep work-
ing hard, with the Oireachtas merely the most
obvious arena of struggle, not necessarily the
most important.
So if the bad news is that it’s just as hard in this
State to squeeze left-wing ideas into the Dáil as
into the mainstream media, the good news is that
we can still make our own politics just as we make
our own media. This is not defeatism or a prefer-
ence for permanent marginalisation: the task is
to take the alienation that huge numbers of vot-
ers have been expressing in elections for the last
several years and turn it into something less pas-
sive than a vote, to turn it into genuine struggle in
workplaces, in communities, on the streets.
We’re still probably (maybe) a long way from
a general election. I don’t know any more than
anyone else where the Labour votes are going to
go either then or in the local and European elec-
tions in the interim, but I wouldn’t be confident
that the fragments of the ULA, even with their
local strengths, will be better positioned than SF
or FF to collect them.
This will, as always, be interesting as an exer-
cise and as a gauge of political trends, but we
shouldn’t let it consume us. After all, the ULA’s
success was built on the reputations of local
activists who earned the respect of their neigh-
bours long before a seat in the Dáil or even the
local council seemed like a realistic prospect. We
should be making and linking campaigns for their
own sake, and for the sake of collectively fight-
ing the forces that threaten to consume us. And
maybe even take our lead from the Troika: if they
can make the Dáil irrelevant, we can too.
Good people with bad eye contact
The Socialist Party and
Socialist Workers Party may
at last have succeeded in
convincing us to stay away
for good
“
