POLITICS: Democratic Left: The Life and Death of an Irish Political PartyBy Kevin Rafter, Irish Academic Press, 272pp. €19.95
ACROSS THE country, lamp posts are clad in posters proclaiming “Gilmore for Taoiseach”. If the more recent polls are to be believed, the chances of this happening after the election are not good. But if Gilmore as Taoiseach is improbable, it remains possible nonetheless.
This is quite a turn-up for the Labour Party. But it is a greater turn-up still for Eamon Gilmore.
Only four elections ago, in 1992, his then party, Democratic Left, had taken a miserable 2.8 per cent of the national vote and Gilmore could count his parliamentary colleagues on the fingers of one hand.
Democratic Left had been set up only months earlier following a breakaway from the Workers’ Party. If its first election was not a good start, its second was no better. Once again, only four deputies were returned. Within 18 months, a letter had been sent to the Registrar of Political Parties in Leinster House, informing him that Democratic Left had ceased to function as a political party.
Though it lasted only seven years, the story of Democratic Left is one of remarkable survival. It not only merged with the Labour Party, but two of its four deputies subsequently became Labour leaders. The history of Irish political parties has its share of mergers, but no other group can boast of such an afterlife.
On February 15th, 1992, some 400 delegates gathered at a hotel in Dún Laoghaire for a special Workers’ Party Árd Fheis. They considered a proposal tabled by party leader Proinsias De Rossa that the party renounce old tactics and ideas and adopt a New Departure. At that time, the Workers’ Party had reached its electoral zenith.
In 1989, it had out-polled Labour in Dublin, won seven seats in the Dáil and one in the European Parliament. However, that year also saw the fall of the Berlin Wall which sent shockwaves through the European left. Reformists within the party felt it was time to dump revolutionary Marxist-Leninism in favour of more commonplace social democracy.
There was other baggage weighing down the party, however. While the Official IRA had gone on ceasefire in 1972, it remained active in the areas of feuding and fundraising. In early 1982, Magill magazine ran a two-part series on the Workers’ Party and the OIRA, claiming that the party was the wealthiest in Ireland and that the equivalent of €3 million had been generated by the OIRA through robberies. As Kevin Rafter notes, “while the ideological debate had been developing over several years, the question of members with links to criminal activities eventually pushed the divisions to a stage where even reconstitution of the party was unlikely to overcome the deep internal tensions”. A split was inevitable.
Having established a new left-wing party, which seemed nothing more than a hairier version of Labour, Democratic Left foundered. Its unique selling point was its vehement anti-nationalism but as the peace process established itself their Provophobia – not to mention their antipathy to the SDLP in general and John Hume in particular – looked increasingly redundant.
A stint in government beside Fine Gael and Labour from 1994-97 gave them the opportunity, as Pat Rabbitte put it, to show they could hold their knives and forks at the table, as well as the chance to convert John Bruton to social democracy. An extraordinarily harmonious government which went to the country with a not unimpressive record, the rainbow coalition failed to convince voters to bring them back for a second term in 1997.
Soul-searching and a task force ensued, as did talks between Pat Rabbitte and the new Labour leader, Ruairí Quinn. Rabbitte alone among his colleagues had favoured joining Labour after leaving the Workers’ Party rather than establish a new party. Even then, however, after a gap of several years, there was significant opposition on both sides to any cooperation. Rafter quotes Fergus Finlay’s description of the different attitudes towards Democratic Left, “ranging from envy for their discipline and coherence to outright hatred, arising from individual incidents in the past”.
In the end, however, Democratic Left and Labour merged under the Labour banner. To date, it has borne out the contention that when parties merge “the new party’s vote share is less than the sum of its component parts” and it has failed to reach the heights of the Spring tide although this coming election may well see Labour’s 1992 vote surpassed.
Although a very different style of book, Rafter's study takes up where Brian Hanley and Scott Millar's excellent The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Partyconcluded, charting the group's remarkable transition from revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party to centrist democratic socialist party in seven short years through interviews with some key activists and internal policy documents.
There are some strange omissions: inadequate attention is given to the role of the trade unions in this study (Des Geraghty, Gilmore and Rabbitte were dubbed the “Siptu Tendency” by one Workers’ Party opponent); and the thesis that there was no ideological Left after 1989 is contradicted by the success of Joe Higgins’s Socialist Party and the increasing popularity of People Before Profit. Sinn Féin’s positioning to the left of Labour, and Eamon Gilmore’s refusal to cooperate with the party complicate the thesis further. Still, this study shines a light on a most remarkable political transformation.
Niamh Puirséil is the author of The Irish Labour Party, 1922-73 ( UCD Press )
Ivan Yates will launch Democratic Left: The Life and Death of an Irish Political Partyin Dublin on March 2nd
