The Labour Party - A History Of Betrayal

Labour are rising in the polls. They have always been an establishment party. Here we look at their 100 year history of betrayal.

“Some socialists not supporting a wealth tax!” said the tweets from Labour Party hacks. In September 2020 Dublin City Council was debating the property tax. Sinn Féin and the radical left proposed reducing it. Labour voted to increase it. The property tax was imposed as part of the deal with the “Troika” - the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commision.

In a country where many older working class people had bought their home it was a tax on workers. If a tax is paid by the working class then it’s not a tax on the rich, it’s not a ‘wealth tax’. But this simple logic seemed to evade the Labour Party. In any event, the Irish Labour Party never challenged the two-party set-up in Ireland. They have always been pets of the establishment. The Labour Party had failed to represent the working class for over a century. They claim to stand in the tradition of  the revolutionary socialist James Connolly, yet they reject the revolutionary core of Connolly’s politics. Some would argue the Labour Party “lost their way”. But that’s not true - They were never radical in the first place.

James Connolly put down a motion to a conference of Irish Trade Unions calling for a Labour Party in 1912, but nothing was done to act on it. The Trade Union leaders were terrified by the militancy of the Easter Rising of 1916 and feared Connolly’s participation in the rebellion. After the Rising the Trade Union leaders focused on consolidating their unions. They saw debate over the national question as “divisive” and at their 1916 conference in Sligo made no appeal on James Connolly’s behalf. They left him to his fate, shot by British forces.

One of the tragedies of the Rising was that it came only a few years before the outbreak of the Irish Revolution of 1918 to 1923, where massive working class strikes and protests were a regular occurrence.  A ‘Socialist Party of Ireland’ was set up in 1917 and most of the Trade Union leaders joined it, until it was taken over by revolutionaries led by Roddy Connolly, son of the great executed revolutionary. By 1918 the Trade Union leaders were preparing to enter into electoral politics, but their ‘Trade Union Congress and Labour Party’ stood aside in the 1918 elections saying that “the workers of Ireland would willingly sacrifice their aspirations towards political power” for the sake of the nation - “Labour must wait”. This disastrous strategy left the movement for national liberation in the hands of conservatives like Kevin O’Higgins. The Labour leaders were afraid to develop an independent path. 

The Trade Union Congress & Labour Party didn’t stand in a national election until 1922. Labour leaders like William O’Brien betrayed the Limerick Soviet, promising national actions that never came, in order to diffuse militancy. Workers had taken over the city in April 1919. The union leaders disarmed the working class. O’Brien had a reputation as a radical because he’d known James Connolly. O’Brien had helped to establish the Irish Transport & General Workers Union in 1909 and had played a role in organising the Lockout of 1913. He was committed to the ballot box over working class revolution.

So when he got up in front of a crowd of workers he got their attention and shone with some glory, borrowed from the martyred Connolly. There was no organised force to the left of O’Brien to point out his actual politics. He was known as the “Irish Lenin” but, apart from his facial hair, he had nothing in common with Lenin. His close friend Tom Johnson was the Labour leader from 1917 to 1927. Johnson was from Liverpool and had worked on the docks in Kinsale. He later moved to Belfast where he helped organise a strike on the docks with Jim Larkin. He’d played a role leading the anti-conscription general strike of 1918.

He arrived in Limerick on April 17th 1919 to tell the workers he “had the authority for announcing that the full strength of the Labour movement in Ireland, backed by the general public, would be exerted on behalf of the men and women of Limerick”. Yet daily discussion with Tom Johnson failed to materialise the promised support from the Trade Union Congress across the country. 

During the Irish Civil War the Labour Party failed to challenge growing sectarianism. In Northern Ireland bosses wanted to divide workers and break the strike movements that had challenged them. The Northern Ireland Labour Party accommodated to the politics of the Orange bosses, while the Labour Party in the South accommodated to the nationalists. When the debate about the Treaty broke out Labour organised a “strike against militarism” - a pacifist stance that got the enthusiastic backing of the Irish bosses.

Roddy Connolly described it as “more of the lockout” than a strike. The counter revolutionary Irish state, an imitation of the British state in Ireland, was consolidating itself while Labour tried to remain ‘neutral’, patiently waiting to take their seats in the parliament and become a tame British-style parliamentary “opposition”. When Jim Larkin returned to Ireland in April 1923 he passionately attacked the Labour Party for their “limitation of vision”. It was a Labour Party “lost to all sense of dignity, manipulated by ambitious self seekers, a feeble imitation of the British Labour party, and which, parrot-like repeats the phrases of its prototype.” 

James Connolly had seen the fight for liberation as organically connected to the fight for socialism. The working class was to fight the Empire with mass strikes and protests and fight for hegemony over the liberation movement, ousting the representatives of the Irish capitalist class and pushing forward to a worker led revolt. Then workers could shape the Ireland to come as part of the wave of Europe wide post-war worker revolts. 

The Labour vote fell dramatically and they hadn’t a single representative in Dublin or Cork. They had demoralised the working class by failing to resist the attacks of the new counter revolutionary Free State. Even the London Times said the reason was that Labour were a “very constitutional party”. High praise indeed from the mouthpiece of the British ruling class. The party was born in a period of revolution, yet showed to trace of that birth in its politics. It was the political expression of the timid and reformist trade union bureaucracy, not the workers. The Trade Union leaders saw themselves as mediating between workers and bosses - their job was to get a good price for the worker on the labour market, not to end a system that treated workers as a commodity.

Labour entered the 1930s incredibly weakened, as the 1929 stock market crash led to a jobs massacre, and growing polarisation between left and right. Catholic extremists stirred up mobs to attack Trade Union buildings. When the fascist Blueshirts emerged, the Labour Party condemned the anti-fascists as “thugs and rioters”. They issued statements condemning both sides in the Spanish Civil War. They had to put down a motion at their 1937 conference asking Labour representatives to stop talking on Catholic extremist “Irish Christian Front” platforms. 

Later, during the first Inter-Party government, Labour were accused of being socialists, so one Labour TD stood up in the Dáil and indignantly announced: “I was in charge of 250 men to go out and fight with General Franco!” When the fascist Blueshirts were banned they merged with Cumann na nGaedheal to form Fine Gael. Fine Gael represented some of the most right wing elements in Irish society - so that made them the perfect future coalition partners for the Labour Party.

Labour’s support grew in the 1940s as Fianna Fáil introduced anti-strike legislation. Thousands took to the streets against Fianna Fáil, breaking from the right wing party to make Labour the biggest party in Dublin in the 1941 local elections. But when Jim Larkin joined Labour, the conservative Trade Union leaders quit in protest to form a new ‘National Labour Party’. With the Irish Times describing Ireland as heading towards ‘anarchy’ in 1947 there was huge potential for struggle. But Labour bottled it, and went into government with Fine Gael. Another chance to challenge the counter revolutionary state was lost because of Labour. 

Four parties, including Labour, National Labour, Clann na Poblachta and Fine Gael formed the “First Inter-Party Government” in 1948. Fine Gael immediately vetoed any role for Jim Larkin in the government. They wanted to silence the voice of the most militant workers. Labour’s William Norton got the Welfare portfolio and also became Tánaiste. Noel Browne of Clann na Poblachta got the health portfolio. Norton had been a leader of the Post Office Workers Union. 

“Norton was a man of many talents, all dedicated exclusively to his own betterment in society”, said Noel Browne about the Labour leader. Browne tried to introduce a bill that would give free healthcare to mothers and children. The bishops wrote to the government objecting to any threat to their dictatorship over healthcare. They were terrified that providing decent healthcare to Irish women might lead to information about contraception getting out. Archbishop McQuaid stirred up poisonous hatred against the bill. He said that “the welfare state is diluted socialism and socialism is disguised communism!” The elite wanted the Irish working class kept in poverty and ignorance. So what did Labour do? Surely they took a stand? No, not at all. They said “we will not go flouting the advice of the bishops!” Militants like Roddy Connolly threatened to quit Labour, but he unfortunately held back. 

The result? - another collapse of Labour support, paying the price for disappointing the working class. They blamed the working class for the apathy Labour’s failure had caused. You can’t build the left in Ireland, said Tom Johnson, because of the “human material” available. What vile cowardice and hypocrisy - they let workers down, and then blamed the workers. Doesn’t this remind you of how Labour Minister Joan Burton spoke about water charges protesters in Jobstown in Dublin?

Fianna Fáil introduced what was known as the ‘famine budget’ in 1952 - giving Labour the opportunity to protest and grow. They immediately jumped back into bed with Fine Gael in another coalition government in 1954. Fianna Fáil had responded to the worsening economic situation with a deflationary budget of cuts. The anger found expression in the return of an Inter-Party Government. Labour leader William Norton got the Tánaiste job. The government’s economic policies caused growing unemployment, with the census of 1956 showing that emigration had reduced the population to just 2.6 million.

Working people were leaving to work abroad because they had no hope of change coming from government policy. Fine Gael took the lead in giving a helping hand to the Irish rich; they introduced a 50 per-cent tax break on profits from extra exports; grants for new factories; tax relief for hotels; a campaign to encourage savings and a Capital Investment Committee. 

Jim Larkin despaired, demanding to know if Labour even had a policy of its own? As the cost of living surged, Labour asked the working class to “not expect too much too soon!” This government forged links with the CIA in the battle against “communism”. Labour tailed along. Fine Gael were accused by Clann na Poblachta of being “Britain’s policeman against a section of the Irish people!” when they took a hard line against the IRA, who had initiated their border campaign. Labour tagged along. Fianna Fáil tabled a motion of no confidence in the government, triggering an election. Labour’s vote dropped again and they were left with only one seat in the whole of Dublin City. They went from 17 seats to 12 nationally. The Dublin working class went back to Fianna Fáil every time Labour let them down. Fianna Fáil were able to win back 10 Dáil seats. But Labour’s biggest failing came in the 1960s. 

The 1950s had been miserable for the working class in Ireland, with over 400,000 emigrating. The government made a turn towards opening up the economy to international capital and global corporations. The ruling class hadn’t done anything clever - they’d opened up a closed economy at a time when the world economy was experiencing a post-war boom. The global economy doubled in size after World War Two. Ireland was now hitching its wagon to this boom and getting pulled along by global growth. Growing employment gave Irish workers a new confidence to fight back. Strikes began to multiply. By the end of the 1960s, Charles McCarthy, President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, was worried: “The decade ended with many worrying we were on the brink of revolution.”

Labour benefited from this growing wave of working class militancy. They went from 9,100 members in 1966 to 15,300 in 1969. In 1967 they re-joined the Socialist International - an international grouping of Social Democratic parties. Even in Ireland in the 1960s there was a real feeling that change was in the air. 

The Labour leader Brendan Corish declared that the “seventies would be socialist!” Corish had been elected as Labour leader in 1960. He was born in Wexford into a Sinn Féin family; his dad was a member and also a well-known trade unionist. His father had later joined the Labour Party and was elected to the Dáil. When he died in 1945 Brendan won the seat. Corish was a devout Catholic and even a member of the Knights of St. Columbanus - a conservative Catholic lay group. He said “I am an Irishman second; I am a Catholic first … if the hierarchy give me any direction with regard to Catholic social teaching or Catholic moral teaching, I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the Hierarchy and the Church to which I belong.”

When the Church led an outrageous sectarian boycott of a mixed Protestant and Catholic family in Fethard-on-Sea in 1957 Corish was happy to stir up the Catholic bigotry, leading to Noel Browne labelling him “the Bastard of Fethard!” When the Pope relaxed Church condemnations of socialism Corish felt he had God’s approval to shift left - the rising militancy of workers during the 1960s also helped to shake off some of the Labour leader’s Catholic cobwebs. 

The rising strike wave forced the Labour Party to try keep its head above the water with left rhetoric. When the ITGWU re-affiliated to the party, Eamonn McCann remarked that the leader of the union would rather “be called a red by a rat than a rat by a red!” Housing activism by Republicans and revolutionaries generated further militancy, which helped the Labour Party. The head of the IRA, Cathal Goulding, complained that the housing protests were helping Labour. But Labour TDs demonstrated their ‘left wing’ credentials by threatening to quit when the party asked them to vote against a pay rise for TDs. There was a gap between an influx of left wing urban members and the mostly rural and reformist Labour TDs. The members were in charge of the party on paper, but in reality the decisions were made by the parliamentary group. Like all reformist parties the focus was on the Dáil and not on the workplaces and working class estates. 

During the 1969 election campaign Fianna Fáil accused Labour of being for “the red flames of burning homesteads in Meath!” The attacks on Labour made them out to be far more militant than they were, but it actually helped win them votes. Fianna Fáil threw nasty homophobic slurs at Labour saying they were all “political queers from Trinity College” - all designed to paint Labour as a party of privilege and Fianna Fáil as the party of the ‘common’ Irish man. Labour got a huge 29.5% of Dublin votes. But they hadn’t done as well outside the cities. They’d stood far too many candidates and lost 52 candidates’ deposits. An amazing electoral advance in working class areas was seen by Labour HQ as a massive defeat.

They were too focused on the ballot box, and not on the growth in their party as a movement of the left. Despite stating that Fine Gael “are a party of free enterprise and we are socialists” and that they would never go into government with Fine Gael again, Labour went into coalition with the “party of free enterprise” in 1973. They had failed to give a lead to a hugely radical situation in the 1960s. Workers joked among themselves that far from the seventies being socialist the “socialists would be seventy” by the time Labour did anything for the working class. Cynicism and demoralisation was the result of their growth. 

Labour failed the test of solidarity with the struggle in the North. When British troops were sent into the North they called for ‘normalisation’ of the situation. They took no real action in response to Bloody Sunday - despite Labour having control of many Trade Unions (the ITGWU had re-affiliated after 20 years). The Dublin members were angry about the North but the union leaders didn’t want to take any position that would offend their members across the whole 32 counties. Labour condemned the IRA’s use of violence without mention of context.

Brendan Corish had said that Labour didn’t exist to give “Fine Gael the kiss of life!” But Labour fought the 1973 election campaign on a joint platform with Fine Gael. At the Labour Party conference before the election, socialist Noel Browne had walked out with dozens of delegates at the proposed sell-out to Fine Gael. Socialists like Eamonn McCann had organised anti-coalition meetings over the weekend but in the end the leadership got the vote through 396 to 204. The top table had used every method they could to increase their vote - as one bureaucrat had said to Conor Cruise O’Brien: “That was a nice speech you made there, but that was a nice two busloads of delegates I brought”.  

By 1973 they were back in a coalition government. The post-war boom came crashing down that year - so the government moved to make the working class pay for the recession. Labour’s pre-election promise of a ‘wealth tax’ was scuppered by Fine Gael. As unemployment rose, Labour’s vote collapsed. With hatred for the Fine Gael/Labour government growing, Fianna Fáil were able to get 50.6% of votes, their biggest vote since 1938. Brendan Corish resigned and was replaced by Frank McCluskey, a senior Trade Union official with the Workers Union of Ireland. Labour went through another period of left rhetoric in an attempt to rebuild and win back working class support.

They became a very strange Labour Party by European standards, with support among more white-collar workers - while Fianna Fáil had the urban poor in their pockets. They spent the last year of the 1970s calling for a ‘classless society’ and said this time they were really against coalition with the right wing parties. In 1981 they went back into government with the right. They were down to 9.9% of the vote by 1981. How many times would they make a promise and then break it? The Irish working class had no natural aversion to left wing politics - they were just offered a very weak version of a left party. 

A massive movement emerged in 1979 with tens of thousands taking to the streets for PAYE reform. In 1978 ‘Pay As You Earn’ accounted for 87% of tax paid. The bosses weren’t carrying the tax burden; workers were. Rank and file Trade Union members demanded a strike movement in protest. The ICTU leaders refused to act. The Labour Party’s Barry Desmond said: “I will never support, as long as I am in public life, the idea, concept or practice of a political one-day strike. I believe in the ballot box.” Workers demanded that the Dublin Council of Trade Unions call a stoppage. They did. 150,000 workers marched through Dublin on March 20th in an enormous show of people power.

ICTU tried to distance themselves from the grassroots show of strength. Congress President, Harold O’Sullivan, said : “There is no connection between our talks with the Government and the march. What we were talking about does not derive from any march or protest, but from our own special delegate conference and our memorandum to the Government for a national plan.” They put out a petition to cut off further protest action. 30,000 workers still came out on the streets on May 1st despite the sabotage by the Trade Union leaders in the ICTU. Tax reform was exchanged for wage restraint. But what did the ballot box deliver the movement?

Labour got back into government in 1981, once more with Fine Gael. They introduced a savage budget and attacks on working class people. They put an embargo on public sector recruitment and a tax on children’s clothing. Charlie Haughey of Fianna Fáil accused the government of ‘monetarism’ - the new nasty political approach of Margaret Thatcher. Ironically Haughey was a gangster and a Thatcherite politician - but it was Labour who gave Fianna Fáil the opening to masquerade as friends of the working class.  The 1981 general election was held in the shadow of the H-Block hunger strikes and the death of the heroic Bobby Sands.

The Irish Labour Party did nothing to help the mass movement that arose in response to the Hunger Strikes. When Southern workers walked out of work to protest the injustices in the North, it was the grassroots that drove the action. This government lasted until the Spring of 1982 when Fine Gael’s Garret FitzGerald went to the President to dissolve the Dáil. Labour elected Dick Spring to lead them back to success. 

Dick Spring had qualified as a barrister before standing in local elections in Kerry in 1979. He was another politician from a political dynasty - his father had stood for Labour and National Labour. Spring was elected to the Dáil in 1981 before winning the leadership of the Labour Party. 

The November 1982 election returned another Fine Gael/Labour coalition that would last until 1987. Dick Spring became Tánaiste and Minister for the Environment. Despite heaping praise on themselves for the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, this government was in power while unemployment continued to spiral out of control, leading to massive emigration. Bono even called a “Self-Aid” concert to invite donations and job offers - to give his good mate Garret FitzGerald a hand. By the end of the 1980s almost 30% of our college graduates would leave these shores looking for work. There were horrific cuts to the health service and to social services which eventually led to Labour pulling out of government. They were facing collapse if they didn’t. They were rewarded for their implementation of austerity with a tiny 6.4% vote. Dick Spring himself only won a Dáil seat by a margin of 4 votes. 

Spring moved to witch-hunt the left out of the party. From 1987 a left wing anti-coalition movement had grown in the party around Emmet Stagg. They wanted the Labour leader chosen by the members and not by the TDs. Spring, with support from the Trade Union leaders, was determined to silence the left and evict those who wouldn’t be silenced from the party. At a conference in Tralee the right wing leadership put down a motion to expel the “Militant Tendency” - a far left Trotskyist group with key figures such as Joe Higgins. While the conference hall only seated 1,000, over 1,600 delegates were registered to vote.

The Irish Times reported at the time that: “A motion from Dublin West constituency council calling for the exclusion of Militant Tendency members from the party was passed on a show of hands by at least two to one. The motion, which was amended, also debarred from membership supporters of the Militant Tendency. Two prominent Labour TDs, Mr. Michael D. Higgins and Mr. Emmet Stagg, voted against the motion.” Joe Higgins said the motion was “extremely destructive of the traditions of socialism, of Connolly and Larkin. Banning a group because they supported a newspaper might be appropriate in South Africa, but not in the Irish Labour Party.” He was right to be angry, but Labour had never stood in the traditions of Connolly and Larkin. 

Fianna Fáil were back in government, but Labour had to face the job of re-building support. They chose Mary Robinson as their candidate for the 1990 Presidential election campaign. The left in the Labour Party had wanted Noel Browne to stand, but he wasn’t close enough to Dick Spring. Spring felt that if Browne won, Labour wouldn’t be able to control everything Browne would say, and they couldn’t have a socialist running about the place and on the national media representing the Labour Party. When Mary Robinson won the Presidency the international media spoke of Ireland having a “socialist feminist” President. Her election was two-sided - the big vote for her represented a desire for change, especially seeing as she was the first woman nominated for the role. Fianna Fáil got more first preferences but Robinson got transfers that pushed her into the lead.

She was the first Labour Party candidate, the first woman and the first non-Fianna Fáil politician to win the Presidency. Irish women, Mary Robinson said, had stopped rocking the cradle and were “rocking the system” instead. Her election was a slap in the face for the Catholic right, not that Labour were about “rocking the system” - but tens of thousands of Irish women had their aspirations lifted by the presence of a liberal woman in the President’s house in the Phoenix Park. 

Her election didn’t prevent the establishment from pushing back, as we saw with the X case in 1992. She was a figurehead that could do little to stop the collapse of the Irish economy; and while Fianna Fáil were in government she signed their bills into law. She tried to be “balanced” inviting both the Christian Brothers to the Áras and later the Gay & Lesbian Equality Network. But her personal intelligence and aura of progress saw her approval rating reach as high as 93%.

She shook hands with Gerry Adams when he was still banned from the Irish airwaves - she gave the Irish state a liberal veneer which suited the powers that be. The position of President is so removed from actual power that her progressive statements from the Park never interfered with the business of government. On Black Wednesday, 16th of September 1992, a collapse of the British pound saw them withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism - the impact of the crisis was felt in Ireland, which was still in a terrible economic state. A series of scandals, to include the Beef Tribunal, Greencore and the X case, combined with the grim economic outlook, led to a massive growth in the Labour vote; they got 20% of the vote and 33 seats. 

They called it the “Spring Tide” - the Winter election of November 1992 saw 68.5% of eligible voters come out and vote, Labour winning it’s highest vote in years. After six weeks of negotiations they decided to join Fianna Fáil in government. Labour had benefited from the huge anger against Fianna Fáil - but the numbers made sense and they’d be at the table with the big boys. They returned Albert Reynolds to power while Spring got to be Tánaiste. The corrupt Fianna Fáil show was kept on the road with anti-Fianna Fáil votes which had been wasted on Labour. Fianna Fáil had introduced the Industrial Relations Act that tied workers hand and foot, they’d made workers pay for the economic crisis and were exposed by the revelation of scandal after scandal. Some Labour TDs complained about the coalition with Fianna Fáil - because they preferred to go in with Fine Gael! Working class voters were furious with Labour, and their support dropped in two by-elections, one in Dublin South Central and the other in Cork North Central. 

Fianna Fáil allowed Labour to enact legislation to lead to the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and also to allow the purchase of condoms - measures that should have been won decades before. Dick Spring and Albert Reynolds fell out over the appointment to the High Court of Attorney General Harry Whelehan. Whelehan was damaged by his failure to take timely action against paedophile priest Brendan Smyth. The government fell as Labour switched sides. During negotiations with Bertie Ahern they went and formed a government with Fine Gael and Democratic Left. This government was called the ‘Rainbow Coalition’ with Spring getting his job as Tánaiste back under Fine Gael’s John Bruton as Taoiseach.

This government helped finalise the European Union’s “Stability and Growth Pact” which gave the EU power of oversight over Irish budgets - it was a step towards an undemocratic neo-liberal prison house of nations where countries like Ireland and Greece would eventually be forced to bail out Europe’s bankers. The pact was all about “strengthening of the surveillance of budgetary positions and the surveillance and co-ordination of economic policies”. Popular power under capitalism is undermined at many levels - the rich have control of the wealth and of the state. Votes for left policies can be filtered through the civil service to remove their impact on business. The EU was installing another layer of filtration to weed out any move to wealth redistribution or policies that favoured people before profit. 

The “Rainbow Coalition” was hit by corruption scandal after corruption scandal. A Fine Gael politician Michael Lowry was forced to resign because he hadn’t paid tax on payments from millionaire Ben Dunne. A Fine Gael councillor had asked developer Frank Dunlop for a £250,000 bribe to rezone land at Quarryvale in Clondalkin. Dunlop later revealed he’d told John Bruton about the bribe request. When asked why they were voting Labour in 1992 most people said “to stand up to that shower!” But they didn’t break the establishment. They had no intention of breaking the establishment.

This round of governmental power saw Labour support fall once again - they went from 33 seats to just 17 in the 1997 election. They bitterly denounced voters, once again blaming the Irish people for their own failings. Labour’s Niamh Bhreathnach complained that she’d put millions into education. Dick Spring blamed a hostile press, singling out journalist Eamonn Dunphy’s attacks on his leadership. The tide came in, the tide went out - and Fianna Fáil were to rule the country for the next 13 years straight. 

When the Labour Presidential candidate came fourth out of five candidates the gig was up for Dick Spring. He quit the leadership of Labour while remaining a TD and getting a nice little reward from the ruling class - he took a position as a director at Eircom which had just been privatised. Ruari Quinn took on the mantle of leading the Labour Party. He was from a family of wealthy merchants and he was educated at the posh St.Michael’s College in Dublin 4 and at Blackrock College. He joined the Labour Party in the mid-1960s getting swept along with student radicalism and earning himself the nickname “Ho Chi Quinn” after the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. He got a seat on Dublin Corporation in the 1974 local elections and became a TD in 1977.

In the 1982 government he was Minister for State at the Department of the Environment, and later in the 1980s was Minister for Labour. He was Minister for Enterprise & Employment in the mid-90s and even the Minister for Finance for the Rainbow Coalition. You’d think the first Labour Party person appointed to controlling the purse strings might be progressive? No. Quinn was known for his conservatism when it came to economic management. 

In 1999 Democratic Left joined the Labour Party. The Democratic Left TDs had broken from the Workers Party and had moved to the right until their vision coalesced with that of the timid Labour Party. Labour tried to re-invigorate itself in opposition and develop new policy platforms, but the Fianna Fáil-led government claimed the Tiger economic growth as a reason to leave them in charge. Labour came out of the 2002 election down 1 seat. Quinn stepped down as leader and was replaced by Pat Rabbitte, the first leader directly elected by the members. Rabbitte had been a Democratic Left TD. The Mayo born TD had studied Arts & Law at University College, Galway where he was a leading student union activist. He was the president of the Union of Students in Ireland before taking a job as an official with the ITGWU Trade Union. He ran for the Workers Party and was elected to Dublin City Council in 1985. He was eventually elected to the Dáil as a TD for Democratic Left and subsequently stood for Labour after their merger. 

He worked as a junior minister in the Rainbow government before becoming Labour leader in 2002. Labour were able to claw back some support in the local elections in 2004 before Rabbitte tied them to Fine Gael with the ‘Mullingar Accord’- a deal to offer the voters a Fine Gael/Labour government in the next general election. Pat Rabbitte said that this “alternative” Government would represent “decent and humane values” as well as possess “competent management skills”. The last part of that sentence was a nod to the Celtic Tiger bankers and developers that capitalism would be “competently managed” in their interests. The agreement with Fine Gael caused arguments between the Labour TDs - not that they wouldn’t all go into government with Fine Gael at the drop of a hat - but some thought it tactically best to not announce that fact beforehand. After another disappointing election result for Labour Rabbitte stepped down in 2007 to make way for Eamonn Gilmore. The world economy was about to go belly-up and take out the Celtic Tiger - leading to huge frustration with Fianna Fáil and the growth of the so-called “Gilmore Gale.”

“In this job, as Leader of the Labour Party, I get lots of occasions to talk, but what I like best are the opportunities I get to listen. To hear the stories, the life experiences and the worries of people all over this great country. Like, the businessman in Galway who told me how his business has folded. That everything is now gone, and the humiliation he felt queuing for welfare for the first time ever. The young solicitor from Limerick, who had come first in her Law class at university - who has just been let go from the practice where she had worked for the past three years. The bricklayer from Ballybrack in my own constituency, now out of work - who would love to get the chance to lay the blocks for the badly needed clubhouse where he trains a boys’ football team every Saturday morning.”

The capitalist boss, the middle class solicitor and then the working class bricklayer - Gilmore’s speech to the Labour conference of March 2009 clearly showed their priorities: get capitalism working first and then deal with the problems of workers. The problem was that getting capitalism working would require huge “sacrifices” from workers and Labour were willing to punish workers and make them pay so that one day, after waiting God knows how long, we all might reach the promised land. 

Gilmore was born in Galway to a farming family and studied psychology at University College, Galway. In the mid-1970s he joined the Republican movement and found his way to Official Sinn Féin - later the Workers Party. He joined the ITGWU, the forerunner of SIPTU, in the late 70s and was soon the secretary of the Galway branch of the Trade Union. When he moved up to Dublin he stood for the Workers Party in Dun Laoghaire, winning a Dáil seat for them in 1989. That was the year the Berlin Wall fell. Stalinists like Gilmore had put all their eggs in the soviet basket and shifted to the right in response to the fall of the Eastern Bloc regimes. 7 Workers Party TDs jumped ship and formed ‘New Agenda’ which subsequently changed its name to ‘Democratic Left’ - embracing the ideology of the “free market” they wanted to discard any association with Marxism. When the new party lost seats and ended up in financial debt, they joined the Labour Party in January 1999. 

Gilmore had been a minister in the Rainbow coalition government before being elected as Labour leader in August 2007. The financial crash improved the fortunes of the party as they presented themselves as a stand-alone party. They gained 43 council seats in the local elections of 2009 and became the biggest party on Dublin City Council. While the Fianna Fáil government took the heat nationally, the councillors of Labour and Fine Gael were voting through austerity measures in the local councils. Dublin City Council got rid of the bin tax waiver - hitting pensioners and the poor; they increased waste charges by 5% and reduced commercial rates on businesses by 2%.

Wikileaks revealed that after the defeat of the Lisbon Treaty, while Gilmore was telling the Irish people “Lisbon is dead”, he told the US ambassador that he’d support a second vote. The whole establishment united to see that democracy was overturned when the second Lisbon referendum passed a Yes vote. The US Ambassador said that: “He explained his public posture of opposition to a second referendum as ‘politically necessary’ for the time being”

“It’s an historic day for the Labour Party. This is the first election in the history of the state that the Labour Party is going to emerge as the second largest.” The 2011 election saw Labour get its highest vote in a century, going from 20 seats to 37 - almost doubling the size of their parliamentary representation. Fianna Fáil lost 51 seats - with their support collapsing in Dublin. Gilmore topped the poll in Dun Laoghaire. After campaigning as a stand-alone party they immediately changed tack and went in with Fine Gael - tying themselves to a party that was determined to save capitalism at huge cost to the working people of Ireland. Fine Gael and Labour had promised to burn the bondholders and renegotiate with the IMF and EU. They did no such thing.

The election of Labour’s Michael D. Higgins to the Presidency in late 2011 did little to stop the demoralisation spreading through the working class. People had been bitterly betrayed by Labour, which led to very few mass protests. People were hurt, and despite small protests like Occupy Dame Street, it would take a while for mass anger to rise up from a state of depression. 

We had marched from Eyre Square in Galway, a few thousand strong, chanting “No way, we won’t pay!” It was April the 14th 2012 and the march was organised by the Campaign Against Home and Water Taxes - but over a thousand people came, with a significant number breaking away to march right up to the door of the Labour conference in NUIG. I remember we came to a narrow bridge where there were only a small handful of police. When they saw the crowd approaching they held people back for a few minutes and then gave up. Before their election Gilmore had said it was “Labour’s way, not Frankfurts!” - protesters held up signs saying “It’s Merkel’s way, not Gilmores!” Although the protest was small it was the campaigns against the household tax and property tax that laid down a national network of activists who would help to shape resistance to the water charges two years later. Many of the key organisers in those campaigns joined the radical left, who saw an expansion as anger with Labour increased. 

The government attacked lone parents, cutting child benefit, increasing VAT and cutting public services - but it was the introduction of water charges by Fine Gael/Labour that was the last straw for people. By the close of 2014 there were regular massive protests in Dublin while mass civil disobedience to water meter installation flowered across the country. Water had been the spark, but the frustration had been growing for years. Labour were able to use their control of the main unions like SIPTU to keep them out of the movement. They were useful to Fine Gael throughout the austerity years - most of the big Trade Unions had Labour Party hacks at the top, who would use their control of these workers’ organisations to stifle opposition to Labour in government.

In May 2014 they had been punished in the local elections, but the austerity budgets of the previous years had seen their party lose TDs who came under pressure from their constituents: Willie Penrose had quit over the closure of an army barracks and Tommy Broughan had voted against the bank guarantee scheme. Gilmore stepped down and was replaced by Joan Burton. 

“If somebody is 14 or 15 years of age, and perhaps they’re not doing very well in school, what happens in the current climate of jobs, they tend to drift out of school and end up not working (and become) dependent on social welfare,” said Joan Burton when Minister for Welfare - social welfare, she continued, was becoming a “lifestyle choice”. This was a Labour Party minister echoing the right wing Tory line on welfare supports to justify a raft of policies designed to hound the poorest people into unpaid and low-paid work. This was especially insulting considering a huge number of people on the dole queues were people who had been working in the construction industry and had lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Burton had grown up in Dublin’s Inchicore, her adoptive father a worker at an iron foundry.

She really was a working class traitor - someone from a working class background who went over to the other side. She got a degree in commerce from UCD before being elected as a local councillor in Mulhuddart in Dublin for the Labour Party. She was a minister for state in the Fianna Fáil/Labour government in the 1990s and in the Rainbow coalition that followed it. The attempted introduction of water charges in the 90s saw Joe Higgins win a seat and Burton lose, before returning to the Dáil in 1992. 

“This always happens at the end of a protest, the f*****g dregs decide not to finish it.” said Joan Burton’s assistant Karen O’Connell. The “dregs” were the people of Jobstown, a working class estate in Dublin South West. When she visited Jobstown in November 2014 her car was surrounded by water charges protesters leading to their arrest and trial, including TD Paul Murphy. Jobstown is one of the poorest and most neglected estates in Ireland and people were legitimately angry that the Labour Party had been destroying working class communities with vicious austerity. The right wing media went into overdrive describing the sit-down protest as if it was something from ‘Black Hawk Down’.

Burton gave testimony against the protesters in court - who were eventually cleared of the charge of false imprisonment. “Labour traitors!” became one of the most popular chants on protests between 2014 and 2016 - the growing resistance movement leading to a huge electoral defeat for the party in the 2016 general election. They collapsed from 33 seats to only 7 - a massive loss. Labour’s election slogan of “standing up for working families” fell on deaf ears in the estates. It was their worse election performance for a century. Joan Burton was tone deaf when she said Labour “will continue to fight for social justice in the next Dáil even though our numbers are diminished”.

Joan Burton stepped down, a vilified and despised leader of the Labour Party, to be replaced by Brendan Howlin. Howlin took over a decimated party, destroyed by doing the work of the establishment. Labour would have to fight hard to rebuild, especially in the poorest estates. Brendan Howlin was born into a Trade Union family; his father had been a union official. He first ran for Labour in Wexford in 1982 but after failing to get elected he was appointed to the Senate by Fine Gael leader Garret FitzGerald. He got a Dáil seat in 1987, was Minister for Health under Albert Reynolds, and Environment Minister under John Bruton. 

“Minister for cuts” - that was Howlin’s nickname as Minister for Social Expenditure and Reform. When Fine Gael and Labour took office in 2011 he was in charge of serious cuts to government spending. “All of that was awful,” he said in an RTÉ interview, “We made very difficult decisions to save a country from economic collapse.” Those “difficult decisions” included choosing to cut child benefit and rent allowance and deepen inequality, rather than taxing the billionaires or repudiating the odious banking debt. 

With Labour still at a low point Howlin was challenged by Alan Kelly for “not turning the ship around”. Howlin had claimed he could double the party’s seat numbers in the 2020 election, but they returned only 6 TDs. He stepped down on February 12th 2020. Alan “AK47” Kelly was to take his place. “Power is a drug . . . it suits me” he’d said in a newspaper interview. As Minister of the Environment, Community and Local Government it was his job to get water charges through. At one point he even threatened to take the hated charge from working people’s wages. Kelly was raised on a dairy farm in Tipperary before his father got a job working on the roads for the local County Council.

He did English and History at University College, Cork before working as an eBusiness manager at Bord Fáilte and Fáilte Ireland. He was the chair of Labour Youth for a while before being nominated for the Senate on the Agricultural Panel. He did a stint as an MEP, eventually making it into the Dáil. This arrogant bully was the Labour Party’s best hope to rebuild in 2020. Eventually they put middle class lawyer Ivana Bacik up front and saw a pick up in the polls.

So why did Labour throw away so many opportunities to take on the political establishment? Some might argue that Labour were a left party that lost their way - but a close study of history shows they were never on the right path to begin with. Labour have always taken for granted that we live in a capitalist world and that they have to reconcile the interests of workers and bosses. But we’ve seen where that leads - during the austerity years after the 2008 crash they tried to nurture Irish capitalism at the expense of workers, the logic being that once the system was healthy again, workers would reap the reward for their sacrifice.

But when the recovery came it was a recovery for those at the top. The other problem with their politics is that they see parliament as the centre of power - the place to get things done and engage in “practical” politics (as opposed to the daydreams of the radical left). But they are the utopians. The capitalists have power over the economy, which they use to bend politicians to their will. Without a strategy that challenges that control over wealth, the rich will call the shots. Even the state machinery that Labour so desperately wants to help run is populated with members of the ruling class - whether top civil servants, judges or the unelected heads of the Army and Gardaí. 

The focus on Parliament over struggle puts the Dáil deputies in charge of the party - conferences are just nice places to have debates, but the day-to-day running of the Labour Party is with the TDs. As a vote-catching machine Labour tried to position itself as a party for everyone - the problem is they ended up reflecting the views of progressive workers and also the most backward elements, the party for striking workers and the scabs.

That’s not to say socialists shouldn’t stand in elections - we should. But to promote the politics of revolution, to rouse struggle, to test our support, to be what James Connolly called “disturbers of the political peace!”

The Russian revolutionary Lenin once called the British Labour Party a “capitalist workers party” - that is, a party with working class members that was run in the interests of capitalism. But the British Labour Party was big, it involved thousands of left wing clubs, Trade Union groups and working class brass bands. The Irish Labour Party was a pale and weak little thing, mostly populated with conservative Trade Union bureaucrats and existing on the margins of the Irish working class, who in the main (until the banking crash) voted for Fianna Fáil.

But there were so many times when a militant working class turned to Labour looking for an alternative, but Labour’s focus on running the corrupt system, instead of dismantling it, saw them betray workers time and time again. As James Connolly so eloquently put it so long ago: “It’s not a Labour party the workers need. It’s a revolutionary party pledged to overthrow the capitalist class in the only way it can be done - by putting up barricades and taking over factories by force. There is no other way.”

Only such a party can break the two-party state. We need to find a way to build one.