Red Statement: The Truth About The Presidential Election

We’ve less than two weeks to go until Ireland picks a new President. Let’s be clear, the Presidency in Ireland is a powerless figurehead who sits in a big white house in the Phoenix Park Dublin, signs whatever government bills are put before them and hosts expensive dinner parties.

The President’s wage is €325,507 a year - that works out at €891 a day!

Even if a candidate wanted to be a candidate for “change” the role is structurally limited and constitutionally tied up in knots. Yet the establishment understands that a strong vote for an opposition candidate would be a blow to their domination over the working people of Ireland.

That’s why the Red Network are absolutely honest about the role of the President, it’s the election of a powerless figurehead, but we also understand the propaganda value of delivering a blow to the government by electing someone like Catherine Connolly who is for defending Irish neutrality and has been a critic of the government on housing and cost of living.

Let’s be clear Catherine Connolly doesn’t share our vision and is not that radical. As a former Labour Party member and Mayor of Galway she led that party into a coalition with Fine Gael to run the council. She quit the Labour Party before the banking crash in a scrap over candidacy, not over political principles.

Members of the Red Network have faced the horrors of eviction and we aren’t so forgiving of the fact that someone would act as a lawyer for a bank throwing families out of their homes. Evictions leave deep emotional scars and all the mechanisms for evicting families should be resisted by every means possible.

But when the choice is a former Labour Party Mayor with left reformist politics or an out and out Thatcherite like Heather Humphreys there’s no contest, you have to vote to hurt the Blueshirts.

Humphreys goes on about “our allies” as if Ireland is already in military alliance with the USA and the EU. That’s the shape of things to come if Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael get their way.

As Minister For Justice Heather Humphreys refused to meet the family of Terence Wheelock, who was beaten in a Garda cell and later died. She instead wrote to them saying the case had already been investigated.

Other people looking for justice like Lucia O’Farrell, mother of hit and run victim Shane O’Farrell, were met with the same cold shoulder. Shane’s mother said “Humphreys is not capable of being the president for the people of Ireland, when she can’t represent her own people in Monaghan”.

How are the left characterising this election? For Sinn Féin it’s a chance to present themselves as key players in removing Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Their line is to get the establishment out of the Áras and then out of the Dáil. This will be enough, they argue, to transform the country.

Unless you challenge capitalism you aren’t going to deliver on any of your promises to the working class. You can’t keep bosses and workers happy at the same time. You have to pick a side. Of course, after the loss of 100,000 votes in the General Election Sinn Féin now talks about “activism” and “campaigning” as key to their strategy.

But this activism is subordinate to the capturing of power under the present system. A goal that subverts the empowering potential of social movements and guides them safely back to an electoral goal - the system is in safe hands.

Even Davy Stockbrokers thinks so. They said Sinn Féin were “More New Labour than Corbyn Labour” following a briefing for wealthy investors in London in 2024.

People Before Profit have joined mass canvasses for Catherine Connolly, campaigning alongside the Labour Party, the Social Democrats and Sinn Féin. The problem with this is it provides no socialist pole of attraction in the campaign. They all hand out the same bland flyers.

If you’re canvassing with the likes of Labour then the flyers you’re handing out have to be acceptable to that establishment party. That means you aren’t promoting your own politics or a radical programme but the politics of the pro-capitalist so-called left.

The Red Network is for united front movements when it comes to fighting for the needs of the working class or taking on issues like the water charges. United front movements empower working class people and by articulating your own clear line in those movements you can pull radicalising working class supporters of the middle class left away from the middle class left.

Political alliances achieve the opposite result because of necessity they involve creating a political platform acceptable to the larger parties like Labour or Sinn Féin. Political alliances aren’t united front movements. They shouldn’t be conflated. Political alliances favour the larger party, united front movements can help build radical forces.

Of course we’ve always said a future Red TD would vote for a Sinn Féin led government case by case and externally, that way you could help kick out Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael but would have the freedom to mobilise working class people when Sinn Féin bottle it and fail to deliver on their promises.

Or deliver on the promises made to Davy Stockbrokers!

But People Before Profit tell workers they’d enter a Sinn Féin government if the price is right and they see the Presidential campaign is a trial run to show the people the future government on offer. They’re a fifth wheel on the Sinn Féin promotional bandwagon.

Behind the scenes they’ll talk about anti-capitalism but don’t talk about it in front of the working class who they treat like children. The Red Network position on the Presidential election and on the state in general is honest and clear.

It’s a powerless figurehead, Catherine Connolly is a moderate but is far better than Fine Gael. We should vote to defend neutrality and in protest at the housing and cost of living crises, then we need to organise to protest and strike to build up working class confidence to see beyond a system that’s a rigged game.

We need a working class rising to change this country.