Is the Irish Labour party finished, is a question that’s been asked for nearly as long as the party has existed. In the last year or so however, or more accurately since a couple of years into the Fine Gael-led coalition, the party’s tail-spinning poll numbers have started to feel symptomatic of a terminal decline. The old question has a new urgency. The regular Irish Times’ poll with Ipsos/MRBI hasn’t placed Labour over 10% since February 2013. The same poll has yet to rise above the benchmark set in February last year, when the party’s support bottomed out at 6.6% in the general election. On some level, the party recognises that the negative association with the last government isn’t going away in a hurry. Asked whether Labour’s problems might stem from increased competition on the left, Councillor Martina Genockey, recently selected as the party’s candidate in Dublin South-West, is quick to retort that no, “our biggest problem is that we were in government for five years”. Abatement of hostility? “People are still seeing things through that lens”, she says. A year on from the nadir of Labour’s worst general election result, policy proposals are still met on the doorstep with shouts of “you didn’t do this when you were in government, you didn’t do that”. That isn’t to say that canvassing is as rough as it once was. The increased amiability on doorsteps is a recurring line in conversations with the new array of candidates. “I wouldn’t say there’s a swing to Labour”, says Andrew Montague, selected to run in Dublin North-West, “but the anger against Labour has dissipated”. Ged Nash, elected to the Seanad and selected in April to run for his old Dáil seat in Louth, says that “there’s been an abatement of the hostility experienced on the doors”. That the polls have, if anything, gone in the wrong direction since the election, misses the point, says Kevin Humphreys, also a Senator. “Don’t necessarily expect movement in the polls”. Labour, he says, are focussing on 15-20 winnable constituencies, such that national opinion polls may not reflect the party’s strength. How credible is this? According to a spokesperson for the parliamentary party, plans are well underway for the next election, whenever it comes. The plan is to contest a minimum of 30 out of 39 constituencies. All selection conventions are intended to be completed by Christmas, with conventions already on the cards to select Brendan Howlin, Alan Kelly, Seán Sherlock, Brendan Ryan and in Meath West, newcomer Tracy McElhenny. A draft manifesto has been prepared, a fundraising drive is underway, while a membership recruitment drive is ongoing, said the spokesperson. The stated aim of party leader Howlin has been to double the party’s Dáil representation at the next election. Achieving that, bringing Labour to around 14 seats, would see it back around its historical average. That’s when the real rebuild could begin, you might think. Labour’s problem lies partially in its vote distribution, says Adrian Kavanagh, a lecturer in political geography at Maynooth University. Until not that long ago, Labour’s real base was in rural Leinster and Munster, and not necessarily in Dublin. That changed after the amalgamation with Democratic Left in 1999. “The change in the last number of years is in the loss of traditional working-class areas”, says Kavanagh. The party’s result last year saw it shrink back to a core of largely personal votes in rural Leinster and Munster – with the likes of Howlin in Wexford, Willie Penrose in Longford- Westmeath, and Alan Kelly in Tipperary clinging on. This leaves the party in a precarious position as regards vote share. Its vote is more thinly spread than that of Solidarity-People Before Profit, who won only one less seat on a lower vote total. If Labour falls a few percentage points below the 6.6% from last year, “they’ll struggle to win any seats” says Kavanagh – his analysis of the most recent Sunday Business Post poll has Labour winning only one, with Brendan Howlin in Wexford perhaps the sole survivor. Such is the geographical distribution of Labour’s vote, this could come about even as Solidarity- People Before Profit leapfrog them to 7 seats, still on a lower vote share. On the other hand, if Labour go up a few percentage points, “then it’d be possible to get back up to the mid-teens in terms of seats, which is quite a respectable result”. Separate, and socialist? Fairly or not, the primary accusation that’s been levelled at Labour in the years since it entered government has been that it turned away from its working-class base, with the consequences being felt at the ballot box. Joan Burton, the then-leader, lost more than 3,000 votes at the 2016 election. Party figures are reluctant to give credence to this viewpoint – Labour stepped up in the national interest, they still say. According to Nash, Labour’s “unique selling point is that we’re prepared to put our money where our mouth is”, minus a harmful obsession with being “philosophically pure”. Humphreys rejects the idea that Labour’s social democratic roots were abandoned, and emphasises the traditional idea that the party has a record of delivery. “Protest, not People: is all those on the hard left are good for”. Labour are in many ways dealing with an old problem, says DCU academic Eoin O’Malley. “They’re not radical enough for lots of people, while at the same time, they’re a bit too radical for a lot of people in centrist Ireland”. Furthermore, says O’Malley, “as pragmatic as the Labour Party is, it damaged them as a brand to go into government”. Better in 2011, would have been to lean on Fianna Fáil to prop up a Fine Gael government, sailing into 2016 as the uncontested leader of the opposition for the first time in its history. Counter-factuals are fine but what should the party be doing? The party has taken the implications of its diminished representation seriously – rewriting the party constitution, re-energising ordinary supporters and, says
![]()