The question was asked today in the Irish Times: What would a new Irish political movement look like?
Good question.
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To be fair to Elaine Byrne, adjunct lecturer in politics at Trinity College Dublin, she makes a decent fist of answering it too. (And well she might, her own electoral aspirations are clearly evidenced in the slightly sycophantic pleas for her to run in Dublin South, included among the comments to her article.)
Byrne sees any new movement’s mission statement in the following terms. “It would be based on three platforms of radical and transformative change, focusing on fundamental questions of: governance (such as political reform); a redefinition of values; and most significantly, a complete revaluation of orthodox economic thinking.”
No arguments with the issues listed there but it’s the omissions that really rankle. As is all too often the case with the Southern Irish would-be intelligentsia, there is a manifest failure to take account of the Six Counties and their potential to influence the situation, particularly among the disaffected working classes on both sides of the border; now likely to be more militant than ever as the money trains in both jurisdictions roll into the sidings.
Byrne ventures that “a combination of electoral volatility, a public hungry for change and a political vacuum suggests that a very real possibility exists for a new political movement.” There is nothing wrong with that proposition and rightly, she points to the 1980s rise of the Progressive Democrats; Clann na Poblachta in the 1940s; Labour’s resurgence in the early 1990s and of course, Sinn Féin’s 1918 landslide.
Swept up however in poring excitedly over their blueprints for a new society, what the intellectual coteries of cosy Dublin salons seem not at all to grasp is, that while Ireland is indeed in turmoil; this is essentially a deeply conservative people and that being the case, the plain people of Ireland are much more likely to support a movement that looks like it can offer those certainties as sure as home and hearth.
But for all their intense conservatism, the Irish people are also, deeply imbued with an innate (and almost paradoxical) sense of communitarian socialism. And there is one party (already in situ on both sides of the border) that is better placed than any other to tap into that disaffection in the old ‘Republican Party’s’ heartlands, whether the nice people in Dublin like it or not.
Pearce Doherty’s recent by-election win seems to suggest there is mileage in this idea and TRWS is not alone in this assessment. Slugger O’Toole and The Guardian are both betting on a big Sinn Féin showing.
One can only hope this whole awful affair will, if nothing else, be at least remembered as the Fianna Fáil endgame. It’s fair to say that if a mortal blow is finally dealt to the greasy Fenian Failure machine, a new politics will naturally flower on that wasteland.
Again, it would be foolish to assume that Fenian Failure will just go off gently into that good night. But what Byrne and indeed many commentators in Ireland seem unable to confront right now is that the group best poised to capitalise on Fianna Fáil’s anticipated demise is not going to be some (as yet unconstituted) cadre of enlightened intellectuals, it will probably be Sinn Féin.
Contra this assessment, the fiasco of the 2007 election is not great precedent for the Shinners and showed up some serious shortcomings in the party machine south of the border (down Mexico way). Not just at grass roots but also, more critically, in the cockpit.
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If it is ever to seriously overcome ‘Mexican’ misgivings, Sinn Féin really needs to be able to present policies that stand up to scrutiny and for that they urgently need to expand their brain trust and try not to create the impression that Southern Sinn Féin always has to defer to head office in Belfast. Of course, if Wikileaks is to be believed in this instance, Sinn Féin (at least in the past) had a clear and robust policy for dealing with bankers....
Jibes aside, that brings us on to the other major problem for Sinn Féin: the past actions of its less than constitutional ‘evil twin’ and the ongoing allegations of the Shinners’ connivance therein.
At this stage, having been ‘in government’ on and off for over a decade now in the Stormont Assembly, Sinn Féin must surely be wondering what the fuss is about; after all, ‘Army rules’ meant that there were mercifully few open confrontations with the Free State Army or police down the years (and that is no way to diminish the tragic deaths of Guards and soldiers in the South in action against the Provisionals)...
Again, this kind of misjudgement of southern mood cannot go on for much longer and confines them to a strong-arm ghetto. The people of the North might have had to come to terms with the reality of former guerrillas in government but the South still sees itself as having more choice in the matter (preferring instead white-collar criminals).
Again, this kind of misjudgement of southern mood cannot go on for much longer and confines them to a strong-arm ghetto. The people of the North might have had to come to terms with the reality of former guerrillas in government but the South still sees itself as having more choice in the matter (preferring instead white-collar criminals).
As a strategic move nevertheless, Adams’ timing on a jump south of the border looks increasingly significant. But TRWS wonders whether Sinn Féin has yet properly grasped the nuances of southern politics and whether or not there is substantive credibility to their policies for digging Ireland out of the hole.
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This is political party that has, for some time now, been more preoccupied with the consolidation and expansion of power (plain and simple) than it has been in the formulation of a lucid revolutionary programme to catch the Irish imagination. Adams’ party badly needs new blood and robust intellectual debate if it is ever to really succeed in the South.
Byrne finishes her article on a knowing note: “With less than 90 days to an election, I would put money on the emergence of a new political movement, if I was a betting woman.” From this TRWS draws a couple of conclusions; either she knows something and she’s not telling us or she doesn't but wants us to think she does. Either way, any movement that is likely to emerge is unlikely, in the short time before an expected election, to make any significant impact.
There is also a curious anaemic detachment for example to the ten-point plan of St Fintan’s Solemn League and Covenant which is doubtless an expression of this same bourgeois fixation on institutional reform as societal panacea. We submit that is a mistake and if this particular approach succeeds, its lasting legacy will be another gravy train; only this one will be for the middle class lawyers who would people the endless tribunals that will almost inevitably follow.
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| Polite, middle-class turn-of-the century Dubliner |
As a number of the comments to Byrne's Irish Times article suggest, such high-falutin’ notions are not top of the list for the plain people of Ireland: “I have to say I think this writer lives in a cocoon where she thinks most people are out here worrying about the need for more grassroots democracy and whether there should be more women or young people in the Dáil...Ms. Byrne will gradually learn that the real world is different to her political books,” says 'Macker' (and he speaks for us all down here in SE8, hurling from a Deptford ditch).
Therein lies an interesting conundrum. The ‘intellectual reformers’ need a strong grassroots movement for change and the Shinners need some more joined up thinking on economics and a middle class vote...If Sinn Féin could just resurrect Arthur Griffith’s old Dual Monarchy policy we might be on to solution where everyone’s a winner... Could this be a match made in Machiavellian heaven?
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