Stephen Collins: Labour needs 15 seats in order to survive

The election campaign poses one of the biggest challenges the Labour Party has faced in more than a century of existence. Its capacity to exist as a viable force is now at stake.

As it meets for its national conference in Mullingar today, the mood in the party will be a far cry from that of the final conference before the last election when delegates joyfully held aloft “Gilmore for taoiseach” posters.

Less than six months before that landmark election of 2011, opinion polls were showing Labour as the biggest party in the State. Although support dropped as the election neared, the party still won more than 19 per cent of the vote and 37 seats, and became the second-biggest Dáil party for the first time in its history.

All of that is a distant memory now as the party languishes in the polls, and the prophets of doom gleefully predict disaster with only eight or nine of the party’s TDs seeming assured of holding their seats. Where did it all go wrong?

Looking at it objectively it is hard to argue with the fact that Labour has played an important role in a successful Government that has turned the economy around. Instead of being impressed it seems the electorate has turned its back on Labour and is giving any of the credit that is going to Fine Gael.

The problem appears to be that Labour’s aggressive performance in opposition between 2008 and 2011 gave voters the impression that in power the party would somehow be able to wish away the economic crisis facing the country.

To its credit, once in office Eamon Gilmore and his ministerial team knuckled down with their Fine Gael colleagues to implement the policies necessary for economic recovery.

The outline of these policies had been laid down by the troika but there were significant modifications designed to ease the impact on ordinary people. Social welfare spending was largely protected by Joan Burton, low-paid workers taken out of the tax system and the minimum wage increased.

The problem is this is not what many of those who voted Labour had been expecting.

The party's rhetoric in opposition had encouraged people to believe the troika's bailout programme would be dumped and bank bondholders burnt in a spectacular display of defiance. Such an approach would have been disastrous, as events in Greece following Syriza's victory demonstrated. The recovery would have been far slower, and might not have taken place at all if the Coalition had attempted to pursue the hard line advocated by the burn-the-bondholders brigade.

The paradox is that the same voters who rewarded Labour so handsomely for being irresponsible in opposition before 2011 now look set to punish it for being responsible in government.

Failure

The parliamentary party didn’t help itself by the way it turned on Gilmore after the disappointing local and European election performance in 2014. The change of leadership and ministerial personnel has done nothing to restore Labour’s fortunes. If anything, it worked to reinforce the view that the party’s tenure in office has been a failure.

Yet all is not lost. The campaign itself will decide Labour’s fate, and there is still time to claw back support as voters come to a decision about what kind of government they want as distinct from venting their frustrations about what has happened in the past.

The challenge facing Labour candidates and canvassers over the coming weeks is twofold. First, they need to show people the recovery is actually delivering real benefits in their pockets.

Secondly, Labour needs to convince enough voters that its involvement in the Coalition has helped to make the recovery as fair as possible, and that its future participation is vital to ensure the fruits of continued recovery are fairly distributed.

Getting a hearing for that case is going to be very difficult, particularly in its traditional working class base where the party has haemorrhaged support to Sinn Féin and the hard left.

The task of the party leadership at today’s conference is to lift morale and send delegates home with the enthusiasm to go out and campaign for the next few weeks as if their lives depend on it.

Upward blips

Since the foundation of the State Labour has averaged about 10 per cent of the vote in elections and about the same percentage of Dáil seats. There have been a few upward blips, the most spectacular being in 1992 and 2011, but the party has subsequently dropped back to its historic average. The task now is to get to that average so that Labour can come back to the Dáil with about 15 seats.

If it falls well short of that target there will be serious implications not only for the party but for the country.

There is no guarantee that a Labour parliamentary party of just 10 members or so would go back into government with Fine Gael even if the numbers add up.

A special delegate conference will be required to endorse any coalition arrangement, and a number of TDs are already on record as saying that the party should stay out of government if the result confirms the worst expectations.

For the moment, though, the task confronting Labour is to eke out every possible vote in a battle for survival.