Sinn Fein make solid gains as Irish voters eject government
The political map of the Republic of Ireland has undergone an unprecedented change as a result of the general
election held in that state on 25 February 2011.
Occurring against the backdrop of the impact on
Ireland of the eurozone crisis, which has seen Ireland forced into a
humiliating £72 billion EU-IMF bailout to rescue its failed banks at the
expense of the country’s working people and economic sovereignty, the hitherto
ruling Fianna Fail party went down to its greatest ever defeat.
At 9pm on Sunday February 27, with 153 seats in the
Dail (Irish parliament) declared, and 13 results still awaited, Fianna Fail was
left with just 18 seats, a loss of 60, including nearly all well-known leaders
of the party and members of the outgoing government. Its junior coalition
partner, the Green Party, paid the price for its selling out of whatever
political principles it may once have had, losing all six of its seats. Fine
Gael, traditionally the most right wing of mainstream parties in Ireland, came off the clear winner, with 68 seats, an increase of 17, and meaning that it
becomes the biggest party in the Dail for the first time in its history. The
Labour Party was on 36 seats, an increase of 16.
The other clear winner from the election was the
left nationalist party, Sinn Fein, who were on 13 seats, an increase of nine
compared to their result at the last general election, with the prospect of
winning possibly two more in the final recounts. Reflecting the volatile state
of Irish politics, and the influence of local factors and personalities in a
number of areas, a total of 18 independents of varying hues had been elected,
an increase of 13. This included five members of the United Left Alliance, a
hastily cobbled together alliance mainly of various Trotskyite parties, but
also including some independent leftists with localised support.
The share of first-preference votes (Ireland has an
electoral system of proportional representation with multi-member constituencies)
was: Fine Gael 36.1%; Labour 19.4%; Fianna Fail 17.4% (from 41.5% in 2007);
Sinn Fein 9.9%; Independents 15.2%; and Green Party 1.8%. The turn out was
70.1%, the highest since 1987.
To grasp the scale of Fianna Fail’s defeat, it
should be noted that this party has been in power for more than 60 years of the
nearly eight decades since an Irish government was formed in Dublin. Apart from
two-and-a-half years in the mid-1990s, it has been continuously in power since
1987.
Writing in the Irish Times, analyst Stephen
Collins observed: “Irish politics will never be the same again. The era of
Fianna Fail dominance, which lasted for three-quarters of a century, came to an
abrupt end at the weekend as the voters expressed their fury in the ballot at
the way the party has run the country for the past decade and more…
Proportional representation saved Fianna Fail from total obliteration but
whether the party can survive as a serious political force is open to question.
One thing is certain; it will never recover its place as the dominant party of
power” (‘FF will never recover former position’, 28 February 2011).
Another commentator in the same newspaper put
matters more poetically: “The Irish people looked back in anger this weekend
and then they coldly voted to liquidate the party that plunged their country
into liquidation.” (‘Angry electorate coldly voted to liquidate Fianna
Fail’, Miriam Lord, op. cit.)
It is not hard to ascertain the cause of the Irish
people’s anger. An economic policy grounded in corruption and cronyism between
politicians and big business, based on property speculation and tax breaks for
imperialist capital, and vaingloriously dubbed the ‘Celtic Tiger’, has ended in
an EU-IMF bailout that is set to consume 85% of Ireland’s income tax revenue by
2012. The cost in extra taxes for the average family has been estimated at
£3,900 a year. Meanwhile, in a savage austerity programme of £13 billion of tax
rises and spending cuts drawn up by the EU, there are to be reductions in the
minimum wage, unprecedented cuts in public services, and 90,000 job losses in a
country where unemployment is already running at almost 14%. In a word, it is a
programme of: “Make the poor pay.”
For the Irish people, this evokes still vivid
memories of famine, absentee, rack-renting landlords and forced emigration. For
a country that only secured a limited degree of independence last century,
after centuries of often bloody struggle, and which is still to end partition
and achieve the reunification of the country, through the return of the six
north-eastern counties still occupied by Britain, the anger of the working
class at being made to pay the price of the capitalists’ crisis must inevitably
merge with the need to complete the national liberation struggle once and for all.
Even as the Irish electorate was heading to the
polls, they were being delivered a brutal message from the new imperialist
masters in the EU that, so far as they were concerned, voting would change
nothing. As the Sunday Telegraph reported:
“As Irish voters headed for the polling booths
on Friday, the European Commission bluntly declared that the terms of the
EU-IMF bailout ‘must be applied’ whatever the will of Ireland’s people or regardless of any change of government.
“‘It’s an agreement between the EU and the Republic of Ireland, it’s not an agreement between an institution and a particular government,’
said a Brussels spokesman.
“A European diplomat, from a large eurozone
country, told The Sunday Telegraph that ‘the more the Irish make a big deal about
renegotiation in public, the more attitudes will harden’.
“‘It is not even take it or leave it. It’s done.
Ireland’s only role in this now is to implement the programme agreed with the
EU, IMF and European Central Bank. Irish voters are not a party in this
process, whatever they have been told,’ said the diplomat.” (‘Ireland’s new government on a collision course with EU’, 27 February 2011.)
One could scarcely ask for a starker affirmation of
the truth of the words written by James Connolly, Ireland’s greatest socialist
and revolutionary, in January 1897:
“If you remove the English army tomorrow and
hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation
of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her
landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and
individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the
tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs” (‘Socialism and
Nationalism’).
As this newspaper goes to press, talks are
beginning on the formation of a new Irish government. The most likely outcome
remains the formation of a coalition between Fine Gael and the Labour Party,
which would enjoy a substantial majority. Despite ostensibly occupying
divergent places on the right and left of the Irish political spectrum, these
two parties have generally enjoyed a cosy cohabitation in government whenever
the opportunity has presented itself.
However, there is some speculation that Fine Gael
will try to cobble together a minority administration with the support of
sundry independents. And a few voices in the Labour Party, perhaps astutely
observing the fate meted out to the Green Party for its shameful role in
propping up an anti-working class, anti-national government, and mindful that
Labour will scarcely avoid the same fate in exchange for a few years of the
‘mercs and perks’ of ministerial office, are also cautioning against a rush to
govern with Fine Gael.
But whatever the shape of the new government, with
Fianna Fail licking its wounds, and possessing no alternative to the
anti-working class, nation-selling programme it shares with Fine Gael, real
leadership of the opposition has now clearly passed to Sinn Fein.
Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, who resigned his
seat at Westminster (which he held on an abstentionist platform), as well as in
the Northern Ireland Assembly, said, when he was elected on the first count,
topping the poll, in Louth: “Next Tuesday is the day that Bobby Sands
started his hunger strike… So this isn’t just about who wins what and who tops
the poll and who doesn’t, this is about actual sacrifice in terms of ongoing
reconquest of Ireland by the people of Ireland.”
Challenged on his grasp of economic issues, Comrade
Adams rightly retorted: “The people who are challenging me on our economic
position are the people who brought the economy to its knees” (Gains
reflect ‘reconquest’ of Ireland, says Adams, Irish Times, 28
February 2011). (‘The reconquest of Ireland’ is a celebrated work by James
Connolly, written in 1915 – Ed.)
Writing in the Workers’ Republic, on 8 April
1916, practically on the eve of the historic Easter Rising, in words that have
lost none of their validity nearly a century later, James Connolly had this to
say:
“We are out for Ireland for the Irish. But who
are the Irish? Not the rack-renting, slum-owning landlord; not the sweating,
profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute
pressman – the hired liars of the enemy. Not these are the Irish upon whom the
future depends. Not these, but the Irish working class, the only secure
foundation upon which a free nation can be reared.
“The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered. Ireland seeks freedom. Labour seeks that an Ireland free should be the sole mistress of her
own destiny, supreme owner of all material things within and upon her soil.
Labour seeks to make the free Irish nation the guardian of the interests of the
people of Ireland, and to secure that end would vest in that free Irish nation
all property rights as against the claims of the individual, with the end in
view that the individual may be enriched by the nation, and not by the spoiling
of his fellows.
“Having in view such a high and holy function
for the nation to perform, is it not well and fitting that we of the working
class should fight for the freedom of the nation from foreign rule, as the
first requisite for the free development of the national powers needed for our
class? It is so fitting” (The Irish Flag).
The only
significant political party in Ireland that upholds and creatively applies this
correct analysis of James Connolly is Sinn Fein, led by Gerry Adams. Lalkar
congratulates Sinn Fein on its excellent election result and wishes them well
in the new and complex struggles that will now open up, confident that they
will wage them with the same tenacity, imagination and integrity that they have
brought to bear in every stage of the protracted struggle for Ireland’s complete freedom.