Jim Kemmy and the Democratic Socialist Party.

A remarkably honest assessment of the career of Jim Kemmy, founder and former leaders of the DSP, was given last week in the Irish Times by journalist Enda O’Doherty.

Jim Kemmy was a man of many and excellent parts – in the words of historian Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh “a stone mason and socialist, trade unionist and political activist, writer and historian, parliamentarian and humanist” – indeed he might well have added humorist.

Yet if he is most widely remembered as a politician it must in fairness be said that he was not always an entirely successful one.

O’Doherty notes that the…

…DSP, like most small political parties in Ireland or elsewhere, never really went anywhere, though it spent many years in doing so. As well as lacking sufficient organisational muscle it had the great misfortune to be in many respects ahead of its time.

Interestingly enough the DSP numbered amongst its membership playwright Paul Mercier and – I think – Roddy Doyle. Both taught in Greendale Community School and I think I can divine at least some element of the progressive thinking that was core to the DSP being reasonably easily assimilated into the Greendale ethos, although before we lose the run of ourselves worth noting that Principle Anton Carroll was identified with Fianna Fáil, which perhaps tells us something of the competing strands of progressivism on this island.

And the DSP was socially very progressive indeed.

During a period when the dominant view on the left was that the EC was a capitalist “rich man’s club” which should be shunned the party was fervently pro-European. Its support for contraception, divorce and limited access to abortion was a hot potato no one else at the time was prepared to touch. Its unabashed feminism was widely regarded as eccentric, even risible (“Kemmy’s femmies”, the establishment sneered).

As time progresses I’ve begun to wonder if in Ireland – the South at least – social issue activism served as initially a substitute, and in time as a replacement for class activism. In a context where we had not one, but two (count ’em!) centre or centre right parties with a predominant hold on the political system the space for progress on the left was limited, whereas the space for progress on liberal issues was much greater (actually, as time progresses I’m beginning to wonder if that was very much a case of kicking an open door – not that it seemed that way as I hauled my sorry ass around North Dublin housing estates canvassing for divorce in the mid-1980s). Perhaps we can add the ‘social’ or ‘liberal’ turn to the stock of ‘local turn’ or ‘right turn’ phrases.

In any case, the DSP was a curious beast in many many ways. Kemmy had been a Labour member until the early 1970s when in a dispute with the famously right of centre (and I mean right) Limerick Labour TD, Stephen Coughlan, he left that party. He soon founded the DSP, which as time progress accreted both BICO and the Socialist Party of Ireland (a left split from OSF which pilloried the poor old CPI for not adhering closely enough to a Moscow line amongst other failings). It’s probably true to say that neither formation massively added to the membership of the DSP, but in Kemmy they had something approaching a star and he managed to keep a seat intermittently in the Dáil from 1981 onwards.

O’Doherty notes one aspect of the party which loomed large in the minds of many of us at the time.

Its strongly argued position that unionists in Northern Ireland had a perfect right to decline to be part of a united Ireland (now pretty much the consensus) was regarded as little short of treason.

Unfortunately this wasn’t entirely the case. It would be more accurate to say that while they accepted the right of Unionists to decline to be part of a UI (entirely reasonably) they, as with others, had a curious blindspot as to how to deal with Nationalism and Republicanism. Nor was the DSP entirely unique in such a standpoint.

But in a way what is interesting is that if one removed the socialist element from the DSP one was left with something that looked remarkably like Fine Gael. This is not to suggest that the socialist element was inconsiderable, or that the two organisations were similar, simply that on paper their projects were not as dissimilar as one might expect.

And while I take O’Doherty’s point about Kemmy being ‘in many respects cut from very “Old Labour” cloth, a self-educated working class intellectual, a dedicated trade unionist and an uncompromising fighter for the underprivileged’, that does not mean that the message he promoted was quite as ‘Old Labour’ itself. Or perhaps it is better to see Kemmy as representative of the Old Labour strand which ignored constitutional issues, and in doing so managed to ignore their enormous centrality – rightly or wrongly – to Irish political life. Simple Labourism in an Irish context could be as much of an ideological cul-de-sac as simple Republicanism, each leading to a similar if opposite narrowness of political vision.

O’Doherty suggests that there is a contemporary relevance for the Labour Party.

Yet it should also be remembered that he had little respect for settled dogma and that he placed himself in firm and often lonely opposition to those aspects of left-wing tradition he thought outmoded or intellectually indefensible. It is far from certain that he would have dismissed the idea of reconstructing Labour’s image or “brand”, but as a serious thinker he would have insisted that any change in perception must be based on a corresponding change in substance.

Hmmm. Well that could lead us any number of places, now couldn’t it?

It’s hard not to have some fondness for Kemmy. He took a difficult path and retained a great sense of humour all the while. But then again, having met some who migrated from the DSP into Democratic Left (and who had originally been BICO members or supporters) I’m not entirely sure that the incomprehension of Northern nationalism and quite visceral hostility to Republicanism by Kemmy and others didn’t in some sense add to a gathering alienation in the South to the North. Even later talking to those people in DL from the DSP it was clear they were simply unable to understand that Provisional Sinn Féin might be moving towards an unarmed position [indeed back in 1994 I remember having a chat of one former DSP member who had the ear of a leading light of the DL. I was telling this member how Prionsias De Rossa had stated in an interview that week something along the lines of Gerry Adams being 25 years late in following the path taken by himself and OSF/WP and DL. Cue consternation along the lines ‘he’d never had said that’. I couldn’t quite understand his point until I realised that the very suggestion of any commonality between Adams and De Rossa was anathema.]

I was sorry, in a way, to see the DSP fold into Labour in the great conglomeration of smaller left groups into that party during the 1990s. I imagine that from Kemmy’s perspective it made sense, the DSP was limping along and what really was it saying that its larger rival wasn’t? As we now know the whole was not quite the sum of the parts. I didn’t laugh when I heard that the University of Limerick had named the College of Business the “Jim Kemmy Business School” in his memory. I don’t know enough about the details, but it struck me as arguably a bit snide and not representative of a man who, whatever about the critique above, was in his own way a very good socialist indeed.

A final note, I have no material at all from the DSP and if people have any it would be gratefully accepted for the Left Archive.