One morning in 1938, a South African museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer spotted a strange blue fish in a fishing-boat catch. Unwittingly, she had discovered the coelecanth, previously believed extinct for hundreds of millions of years.
This living fossil caused a worldwide sensation - to the complete surprise of the fisherman of the Comoris Islands, who knew the fish by the name "gombessa", regarding it a useless, pitiful creature.
Sometimes it seems we have our very own living fossils here in Ireland: Ictu, led by its gombessa, David Begg, and its cousin, Siptu, under fellow gombessa Jack O'Connor. Siptu is now threatening to blockade our ports, ostensibly because 10 per cent of the employees of Irish Ferries are rejecting the financial redundancy package being offered by the company. This is the group always quoted in the media; the 90 per cent who want the deal, including the employee who stands to gain €300,000 in pay-off money, are invariably ignored.
Of course, for the gombessas the key issue in this dispute is not just a few hundred jobs on boats plying to and from our shores, but the entire future of the trade union movement in Ireland. Siptucanth is fighting for the power and prestige of the living fossil that is itself, invoking an archaic vocabulary of class warfare in the process. And naturally, the reactionary palaeo-left supports it, dusting down its faded red banners and trying to remember the words of We Shall Overcome. One is inclined to sympathise. Nostalgia masquerading as politics is very appealing. Perhaps we should have a combined Vietnam/Irish Ferries/Anti-Apartheid retro-demo, and make peace signs at one another.
That's before we wake up and realise that we inhabit the world of 2005, not 1970, and we must play by the EU rules we signed up to. This is a world which baffles the coelacanths of the trade union movement; hence their obsolete language of victimhood, as in these words from the ictucanth David Begg: "Starting from first principles we must condemn Irish Ferries on [ its] exploitation of vulnerable workers from other countries." Now that's enough to make you weep tears of joy. Has he tried telling the Estonians or Latvians, who will earn five times what they would at home, that they are being exploited, and they should really go home and leave the jobs to good Irish boys at twice their wages?
Probably not. It's a difficult act, trying to prevent foreigners from working in an Irish company without saying as much. No wonder the poor old gombessa sometimes ties himself up in knots, as in: "The simple fact is that an open labour market and the model of regulation and non-enforcement we have are mutually exclusive options. The only way forward is through high standards and effective enforcement. This will require a 360-degree shift in public policy." Well, coelacanths, like any fossils, are not exactly famous for their sense of direction, so we'll just point out as gently as possible that a 360 degree shift in policy is one which will bring you right back to where you started.
Then, no doubt, to put himself on the side of the angels when what he is really doing is trying to deprive foreigners of jobs in the broader Irish company, the dear old ictucanth cast his mind back to Enoch Powell's speech on immigration in Britain. "I remember too that the dockers of London, solid trade unionists to a man, downed tools and marched to the House of Commons to support him. That is not a sight that I want to ever see here!" Well, we can safely say that this time he is on sure ground: no one is going to see the dockers of London downing tools and marching to the House of Commons in Ireland. But is the real message that he wants to stop immigration? If that's so, why doesn't he say it?
He concluded with these ringing words: "The philosophy of trade unionism is that all people are born equal, are endowed with certain fundamental rights and their labour cannot be treated as a commodity in the market system. Our task now is to turn this philosophy into a practical reality." This is fossilised 1970 Woodstock-economics, palaeontology masquerading as policy. For the one lesson we have learned in the past 15 years of unbroken growth is that labour is a commodity that is totally subject to market forces. Only in the protected world of the state sector, where siptucanths still rule, is it possible to pretend that labour is immune to market forces. For the rest of us, market forces really do decide what we do and how much we earn for doing it.
The largely unreported truth is that, apart from Stena Sealink, which has negotiated a highly flexible deal with its Irish workforce, 90 per cent of vessels berthing in Irish ports use cheap foreign labour. Moreover, Irish Ferries is returning just 2 per cent a year on capital invested, when money costs 4 per cent. Its owner, Irish Continental, would be better off putting its money in the bank. The mathematics are simple and deadly. Without cost-cutting, the company closes.
To survive, Irish Ferries must pay wages comparable to those of the competition. The high seas have long borne different labour rates from domestic markets - hence the decades-long tradition of Lascar and Chinese deck hands being employed on British-registered vessels. So within the enlarged EU, which we all agreed to, the market rate for ocean-going labour is set by the seafarers of the Baltic, not by those other dozy denizens of the deep, the trade union gombessas of Ireland.