The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Having recently visited Planet Myers, and his version of The Workers’ Party’s relationship to the eastern European socialist states, we are today treated to free entrance to The Imaginarium of Eoghan Harris on the same topic. Harris begins by arguing that in the coverage of the fall of the Berlin wall, the Irish media has missed its only significant impact on Irish politics – its effect on The Workers’ Party. This has been , he entertainingly says, an exercise in airbrushing history that Stalin could have learned from (and perhaps inspired by Myers’ concern over a missing file in the Irish Times archive?).

However, we might question Harris’ grasp on history (and given this load of nonsense about where Dev got his ideas on religious toleration from, that of his most recent acolyte too). What was it that meant that while other Communist and workers’ parties faced collapse, The WP had its best ever election result in 1989, overtaking Labour as the second biggest party in Dublin? Eamon Smullen’s Department of Economic Affairs had injected some social democratic ideas that vaccinated it against the consequences of the collapsing eastern regimes. The fact that the wall fell five months later is somehow ignored in this account, although he does say that De Rossa’s Presidential speech that year helped protect The WP from any backlash against events in China. I suspect myself, however, that the amazing WP result in Dublin reflected the hard work put in on the ground over two decades and the unashamed commitment to representing the interests of working people against the interest groups that dominated state and society. The reality of The Workers’ Party in community groups, trade unions, local government, and the Dáil is what people voted on: why would events elsewhere change that?

However, The WP missed its chance to overtake the Labour Party once and for all. Why was this? All because Eoghan’s now hard-to-get The Necessity of Social Democracy (Eoghan mustn’t be a fan of the CLR) was suppressed by the Party, and Eamon Smullen disciplined for publishing it. We are then treated to the Harris account of how the “Garland Old Guard” (interesting that Goulding is not mentioned – obviously he remains on the list of iconclastic heroes) and the Student Princes aligned to force De Rossa off the path of social democracy mapped out by Smullen (recte Harris) at the 1990 Ard Fheis. Thereafter, all the fresh thinkers, idealistic and imaginative people were forced out. Yes that’s right. No-one who has stayed loyal to The WP all these years is in any way motivated by ideology and a vision of a better future.

Eamon Smullen was subjected to two days of diatribes, “disciplined” and driven from the Workers’ Party — the name was his — which he had transformed from a narrow nationalist sect into a successful progressive workers’ party.

I could have sworn I’ve read something like this before.

Twenty years on, those who behaved badly should stop brazening it out. Had they published the Necessity of Social Democracy in 1990, Ireland would now have a powerful non-nationalist party of social democracy. But they blew it, they know they blew it, and they should admit they blew it.

And here we have the rub. The mere act of publishing Eoghan’s pamphlet would have made the last two decades entirely different in Irish politics. Although given that Senator Harris has been singing the praises of the Ireland created in the last two decades, I wonder why he would want such a party to exist?