The Cedar Lounge Revolution

It kills me to say this - particularly considering the source (Coir having something of the same sort of relationship to Youth Defence as People B4 Profit had to… well, you get the gist), but for some reason I kind of like this poster from them. Not sure whether it’s the kitsch element to it, or just the way it stands out from all the other Yes and No imagery. Someone today was telling me that at one of the Oireachtas Committee’s Billy Timmons and Mary O’Rourke were having a grand old time of it asking whether monkeys were part of the electorate. Five minutes or so discussion ensued, or so I’m told. What laughs!

Mind you, the rest of the Coir output is pretty grim, not that any of the contributions on either side are any great bonus to political visual communications. You can check them out on this useful thread on Politics.ie here…

The last six weeks or so I’ve been out socially with groups which have been made up in whole or large part from our leading left wing parties. And in a way these have been revealing for what they say about the culture of Irish left politics as much as the individual parties.

One aspect that intrigued me was that I found both the Labour Party and Sinn Féin groups most engaging on the political (and personal) level. There are many possible reasons for this. Primarily I’d suggest that it is the result of a shared political language. We all know the reference points even if we don’t actually share them precisely. So therefore while one may disagree with individual positions the basics are understood. I found by contrast that the Green Party groups I was out with tended to speak a substantially different political language.

Firstly there was the modernity of their project. The Green Party as we know it is barely twenty years old. People may say that Green philosophies have deep roots, and this is entirely true. But, unlike SF or Labour their party organisations are relatively recent - indeed can I suggest that it is this as much as anything else which allowed them to make the transition to government so easily? With a relatively short history theirs has been a rapid journey from periphery to centre. Where Labour and Sinn Féin might expend considerable energies (and angst) on the issue of coalition they simply didn’t have to face up to it in quite the same way. Indeed I recall some years ago suggesting to a long time GP member that if they were serious about influencing such matters they would contemplate coalition with FF. His aversion was entirely genuine, but clearly also - in retrospect - quite shallow. In truth I suspect he simply hadn’t thought about it that much one way or another and Fine Gael and Labour were the default option right up until the point where they weren’t. No hard feelings one way or another when they did jump across to FF. And that was probably writ large from the evidence of last year.

Their concerns in the GP were extremely similar, but their starting point was quite radically different. There might be a small s ’socialist’ element, or ‘left-wing’ to use a term bandied about, but it was far from the dominant element in their thinking. Indeed many of those I talked to were almost indifferent to it. For me coming from a background where people such as Andre Gorz and Rudolf Bahro, who forged aspects of Red/Green political thinking, are central to my own political beliefs this was - well, strange. More interesting again I found that those names weren’t widely known amongst the Green party members I met (although fair dues soubresauts). Now on one level that is a small thing. Gorz and Bahro are far from household names, even on the broader left. But it reinforced a sense that my green thinking was very much an outgrowth of socialism rather than the other way around. And that, I think, is a crucial distinction. It’s not that I see green policies as being lesser, but as being parallel. Whereas - entirely naturally - those within the GP see, for the most part, them being preeminent. And that being the case Labour could, to an extent, wait. Hence the reality that the GP has strands of left, centre and right. And to some degree overlaying this a remarkably pragmatic approach which, on reflection, makes them an interestingly fitting partner for Fianna Fáil.

A further observation. There’s a curious, albeit more muted, echo of this within SF, but the distinction there is not left/Green but… left/not left. Those I was talking to tended by their own admission to be socialists. Which is good. But with that there was also a further, implicit, admission that this was not the only strain within SF. I found that hard to read. What was the internal balance of forces? Who had the power? Who didn’t? How would this resolve - particularly (and this is something anyone from the WP would be at least partially conscious of, whatever way they lined up on the issue back in the day) in relation to the parliamentary party or elected representatives? And how did political partition in the broader political environment impact upon the party itself? But, here a shared Republicanism was another reference point in addition to leftism. In many ways they were most similar to the WP. Granted, on a policy level a WP from an alternate universe, but the same sense of being a small and embattled minority in a broadly antipathetic society. Now, it was ever thus in SF (having known quite a few members across the years), but the concentration on the left aspect was considerably more accentuated than in the past, at least to my ears (not to say that it wasn’t there previously, but now it was of central importance and crucial to forwarding the national project - at least to some).

One interesting aspect of discussing various matters with SF people was the sense that they were open to alliances across the left. Whether that is a function of size or necessity is a further interesting question. In the era of the Peace Process, and in the wake of electoral setbacks (and some victories as with a Seanad seat) continued isolation might not be the most attractive strategy. But the interesting thing is, and go check out Irish Left Review, this is reciprocated, albeit hesitantly from other left poles. A cheering development considering that for many the idea that SF might be left took a considerable time to germinate. Again, that reciprocity may be making a virtue of necessity, but if necessity is the engine to drive these processes forward, well, so be it.

And what of the mostly Labour leaning crowd? Well, it is interesting, considering how in a previous piece over on the ILR I noted that I found it unlikely that I would ever join Labour (or Sinn Féin), how many shared reference points there were. This too was a shared language, one very much rooted in the left. That may well be down to a self-selecting group and unrepresentative of the party as a whole…

Does this amount to anything much one way or another? Probably not. But, communication is based on a shared and mutually comprehensible vocabulary, whatever the nature of that vocabulary. Building trust, and after that building alliances necessitates some common reference points. Alex Klemm on the ILR has suggested some starting points that are worthy of consideration by our larger left wing parties. A pity if such groups of reasonably like-minded people who share much the same goals even if the paths towards them differ are not to work together. The Irish left is far far too small for an overly competitive dynamic (although competition between left formations may, counterintuitively, reap rewards). And the Greens, clearly some way distant?

Who knows? They remain not merely distant, but now detached. They believe their agenda is being fulfilled even to a limited extent in this coalition of all the talents. They may well have a point as regards some aspects of that agenda. But each day that passes puts them some political distance further away from the rest of the left (and in doing so remarkably assists in incrementally building that left as it languishes in opposition). Their own ideologies sustain them in government in a way that even this time last year would have been almost unbelievable. And that too is sobering, the thought that it has been one year. Persuading them of the commonality of purpose of the broad centre left is a project almost as large as that of building a serious broad centre left. But, it’s going to have to be done, one way or another…isn’t it?

I meant to post this earlier, but events comrades, events… Reading the Irish Times two Saturday’s ago it was almost inevitable that my eye would stray to Breda O’Brien’s column. And with equal inevitability it was certain that Breda O’Brien would weigh in on the High Court case. Breda is gentler and less fluffy than John Waters… but the message?

Well we’re told that ‘it’s simply unjust that fathers do not have an automatic right to guardianship’. Well, yes and no. Circumstances are all. But we’ll get to that…
Then, we’re told that…

The real issue in this week’s case is the right of a child to know, and where possible, to be reared by his or her biological parents. There is also the reality that the child in this case cannot avoid eventually knowing that his mother took a conscious decision to exclude his father from a parenting role.

Two thoughts strike me. Firstly - despite the supposed exoticism of the particular case, this situation isn’t anywhere near as unusual as she presents it. I know of mothers who have also taken quite conscious decisions to exclude for a variety of reasons including drug-taking, fathers from a parenting role. I think that is a sensible and - unfortunately - sometimes inevitable outcome of such matters. Yet curiously, no hand-wringing about that then - eh?
Secondly, and interestingly, she seem less concerned with the context of the family than with the biological aspects. But then, presumably there are distinctions between good and bad families…

She notes that the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network havea ’suggested that family units of three parents should be recognised in these cases’.

She continues, ‘but where would the line be drawn? Why not four parents, if a gay couple and a lesbian couple decided to cooperate in producing children? Why not six, to allow for break-ups and reformed partnerships?’

Erm… well, again, this isn’t entirely novel. In the context of divorce something approaching this is already evident. And she knows that hence she says ‘we already have ample evidence of how difficult children find it to navigate te two seperate emotional worlds of their parents when a couple break up…’ Still, she doesn’t actually reference this evidence. Which is unhelpful. And then to continue ‘ … what will happen to children of three or more parents?’. Well, yes. But then what of the fact that the nuclear family is actually usually embedded within broader social networks. I was largely brought up practically on a day to day basis by my grandmother who lived with my parents. Is that not close to three? How on earth did I manage to ‘navigate’ the inevitable conflicts and issues that three adults living in a house brought up? No doubt Breda O’Brien would say that was ‘different’, but the distinction is not entirely clear.

And then she cuts to the chase…

The simplest but no longer politically correct solution is to do everything possbiel to support the changes of children being reared by biological parents, or carefully screened adoptive parents. That means supporting heterosexual marriage and enabling those who are not married to shoulder the rights and responsibilities of parenthood.

But, predictably she shies away - perhaps in a fit of political correctness - from the logical conclusion of her thoughts. The only way to ensure the above is to prohibit sperm donation or egg donation or gay marriage or whatever. Except that won’t actually stop Irish people from going abroad, as countless numbers of them have already, or gay and lesbian couples entering into private arrangements which result in the birth of children which they will parent (verb, Breda, not just a noun). And unless she’s suggesting some form of truly draconian social measures I can’t see how matters would be markedly different from the current de facto situation.

And the paucity of her argument is found in the following:

It is even worse when the State colludes in the idea that it is acceptable to plan to exclude either a father or a mother from their proper role in a child’s life before the child is even conceived.

Well perhaps. But the State didn’t collude as such, it merely had to adjudicate on the actually existing family which came about as a result of the various events. Not quite the same thing (incidentally what, one wonders would Waters view be of two gay men acting as a couple entering into a similar situation with a woman - would their wheel of life be regarded as coming loose?). And again, what sanction does she suggest for such things? Prison for those involved?
Is that what she is proposing? I think we should be told.

OSF/USSR
So, here from 1973 is a document published by REPSOL for Official Sinn Féin as a submission to the “World Cogress of Peace Forces” in Moscow. Much of it as would be expected. Consider the references to “Ireland [joining] the so-called European Economic Community thus adding to the domination and exploitation of our people by this new modern imperialist bloc.”

The language as regards armed struggle is ambiguous. Note that it argues that “…we have realised that armed struggle on its own, or as an end in itself, is doomed to failure. Armed struggle must always be related to the needs of the people.”

Yet it continues… “The most consistent element in the Irish Republican tradition is armed resistance to British imperialism. It was only out of this armed resistance that our revolutionary vision of the Ireland of tomorrow came”

And as a nod towards Moscow’s sensitivities it argues that “It is essential that all who are involved in the National Struggle for Liberation realise that the national struggle is a people’s struggle - a class struggle”.

The language as regards Britain is much stronger than might be expected, to the point that we read “There is only one issue on which practically everyone in Ireland is agreed. We do not want to be ruled by Britain. This fact must therefore be made clear and emphatic. All should unite on the demand “Britain get out”.

Indeed Tomas Mac Giolla (sans fada’s) is quoted as urging delegates to the Congress to ’support the short and long term Republican demands which called for the withdrawal of British Troops and an end to all repression in Ireland’.

Which is interesting, but no more so than the following: “Clearly as with the British imposed arrangement of 1920, any solution which advocates the continuation of a Six or Nine County Ulster state, whether it has constitutional links with Britain, or not, must be rejected.”. A dig at PSF who had recently issued Éire Nua? More than likely. But interesting how in order to fend off the Provisionals it was necessary to ramp up the anti-British rhetoric.

It’s a brief document but a telling insight into the direction of a much harder edged ‘Republican’ stance evident in Official Sinn Féin at this point in time.

Very briefly, perhaps everyone does love Brian as much as was suggested here. For the latest poll from the Sunday Business Post is fairly revealing.

As Pat Leahy in the SBP reports:

Support for the Lisbon Treaty has recovered slightly in the past fortnight and the gap between the Yes and No sides has increased from four points to ten, according to the latest Sunday Business Post/Red C tracking poll.

Not that it’s all good news for the Yes side…

However, over a third of voters remain undecided, reflecting the continuing uncertainty among the electorate.

Overall the figures are 38 per cent for, 28 per cent against and 34 undecided. That’s a shift of 3 points up for the Yes side and 3 points down for the No side. Early days, clearly, but perhaps indicative of the pro-Lisbon lobby beginning to cohere with Brian Cowen and Fianna Fáil back fully engaged. And that’s no small thing. A united Fianna Fáil, enthused by Cowen’s ascension is a strongly proactive force for pushing the process to a Yes. Cowen has made it his priority. I see no reason to doubt him, and with that there is a lot riding on it.

And, as the SBP notes, the farmers are back on board, having done the protesting thing…

Where previous polls had shown farmers were opposed to the treaty, today’s numbers show a small lead of four points for the Yes side among farmers, though a quarter remain undecided.

And inconceivable that the following demographic won’t weigh in on the Yes side…

Fine Gael voters, previously lukewarm, now back the treaty, with 42 per cent saying they will vote Yes. The poll was conducted between May 3 and7 among over 1,000 voters nationwide.

All rosy in the garden? Well, no, not at all. Many a slip twixt cup and lip, sure… for now, though, Cowen can be privately pleased at just how a tide might be turning. How different too, the reception for him contrasted with that of Gordon Brown. But that’s another story.

Incidentally, Vincent Browne has a fascinating column also in the SBP which bemoans the lack of experience or specialised knowledge of ‘at least five members of the cabinet’ in ‘the departments they are now expected to manage’.

There’s something in this. Consider his following points…

Brian Lenihan is a clever barrister and a skilled communicator, but does he have knowledge of economic management, fiscal policy, official and economic priorities? None at all.

As executive head of the Department of Finance, he is expected to manage that department, having had no experience of managing anything, aside from 11 months in the Department of Justice.

And he recognises that:

They are elected to the Dáil, not on the basis of their ability to manage anything, but on a hodgepodge of other criteria: likeability, party affiliation, geographic location, personal acquaintance, appearance and, maybe occasionally, policy grounds. But certainly not because they have any ability to manage anything.

Which is true as well. His solution?

I have proposed a resolution for this before: get rid of the government as we know it. Let the executive branch be unelected and fully professional. Let them get on with the execution of policies defined by the people (ideally), or the people’s representatives in parliament.

I’m not entirely certain about that. It’s a technocratic approach which is fair enough (and is it my imagination, but doesn’t something somewhat similar happen with the US cabinet system? Or indeed what of Gordon Brown bringing in external ‘talent’ to his cabinet, well, that’s working out just fine, isn’t it… errrr….lets not talk about the extraordinary Digby Jones). But he ignores the reality of a civil service which is meant to act and advise. Whatever about the egregious deflections of genuine ‘public interest’ by our current democratic structures, the idea that another layer of unelected managers are necessarily the best people to intercede between representatives and state structures seems a bit counterintuitive. Again, what do people think?

No sign, as the Daily Show noted, that Hillary Clinton is seriously conceding the Presidential nomination. Which on one reading is fair enough. It ain’t over til it’s over.

But, just when one thinks her campaign is unable to surprise, what of this?

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Is she saying that hard-working Americans are white? Or are the comma’s between each term meant to indicate distinctions? In either case how very very interesting. Or depressing. And how very telling that the spouse of ‘first black’ President of the United States should come to this. Does she not get how this sort of language is comprehensively deconstructing her reputation amongst many people?

Meanwhile as also reported on the Huffington Post, John Edwards has suggested that for Clinton:

“it’s very difficult to make the math work”

Well that’s the kind way to put it. But with noises off like this, how long can the Clinton campaign continue in its current mode?

Socialist Unity has carried an interview from the Morning Star last week with Eric Hobsbawm. For those of us interested in one of the more serious thinkers on the further left across decades it makes for provocative reading. Hobsbawm is far from without flaws, membership of the CPGB across those same decades would indicate at least some question marks, but, at the same time he is a genuinely humane and thoughtful individual who has dedicated his life to political activity that many of us, whatever our positions will recognise as of some utility.

I won’t go into this in any great detail but just draw attention to a couple of aspects I thought worthy of brief consideration. This follows on from a comment that Graham from the Irish Liberty Forum posted the other day. He asked…

What would political success look like to you? In other words, what are you trying to achieve? At what point is your work complete? I mean this for you personally and/or for the movement with which you are associated.

Well, before getting to that - which should be dealt with in greater detail anyhow later, let’s consider what Hobsbawm has to say about it…

He argues that:

21st-century socialism will be based on the survival of the planet and reconstruction of a society disintegrating under capitalist development.

Well, we all go down that road sooner or later. Gorz, Bahro, and now Hobsbawm, at least to an extent. But he adds:

…the idea of socialism as a 100 per cent publicly planned collective economy has not survived the end of ‘really existing socialism’ and will not return.

Twenty-first-century socialism will be an economy combining the public and private, non-market and market elements, but one whose object is not maximising economic growth and profit but the survival of the planet and the reconstruction of a human society battered and increasingly disintegrating under the impact of the past half-century of capitalist development. How this is to be achieved is the big question for this century’s socialists.

I broadly speaking don’t disagree, but it’s not exactly meaty stuff is it? Social democracy by another name and all that.

And this brings me back to a thought Nick Cohen raised in one of his more interesting moments in “What’s Left?” where he wondered “if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left-wing than ours would look like and how its economy and government would work. (Let alone whether a majority of their fellow citizens would want to live there.)”. His implicit answer - that the status quo was just about okey dokey - was on a superficial analysis similar in some respects to that posited by Hobsbawm, a strong social welfare/public infrastructure, etc, etc. Yet, within his analysis was contained a remarkable defeatism for a man who had spent years excoriating New Labour and its works. Because unlike Hobsbawm he was unable to frame a left approach within a broader socio-political and cultural vision, one that sought to reshape not so much the ‘how’, as the ‘why’. Survival and reconstruction. It’s possibly the biggest project socialists - or anyone - could engage in. Now, there are those who will argue that all this is reformism of the most insipid kind, and perhaps they’re correct. But, the path from here to there, wherever there is, will have to be built on the Irish (and other) people as they are now, not as we would wish them to be. And that has obvious implications, unless we shift towards an unconsidered, and essentially futile, utopianism.

Hobsbawm is far from uncritical about the contemporary situation.

“I don’t see much prospect of a revival of the classical socialist and communist movements of the 20th century.

In the West, their basic constituency, the industrial working class, which they saw as the main agent of social change, could no longer play this role even if labour movements wanted to.

“Their basic form of political action and mobilisation, the mass-membership party of the social-democratic type and the vanguard party of the Leninist type, have not survived the old century.

And the newer forms of activity?

“What survives of such movements in the West must work as part of new, wider political and social movements and find new forms of action, notably transnational ones.

“Some such movements are coming into being, generally as a succession of ad hoc campaigns, but, as yet, they show no signs of being capable of changing society.

To be honest I’m dubious about transnational political structures. But that’s for another day.

And yet I can’t help feeling that simply reworking the objectives as Hobsbawm proposes from maximisation of growth and profit to the well being of a planetary society would be an enormous shift in and of itself. That it also chimes with left Green thinking is both unsurprising and important. Here on the CLR the issue of just where the Green Party (and the broader global Green movement) is positioned has exercised people. Naturally so. The capacity for left and ‘right’ Green political approaches is both opportunity and danger. But some serious work by the left might keep the Green Party within the broader left umbrella. Ironically, so might coalition with Fianna Fáil since that party too has populist instincts that can sometimes, but often not, be indistinguishable from our supposed left parties responses.

Consider again Hobsbawm’s point about societies ‘disintegrating under the impact of the past half-century of capitalist development’. Actually, I’d argue it predates that, but the point is that our societies have undergone massive shifts in their socio-political and cultural positionings. Some of these are easily assimilated, others not so much. But a political dynamic, that of capitalism, or whatever, is in many ways destructive and dissonant. This sense that we must ‘reconstruct’ is important.

And that to address Graham’s question, even obliquely, underscores the point that this is a process. There is no end point, at least none I can think of, outside the confines of a techno-utopian future. Just slow and steady progress to extend and maximise the autonomy of individuals and groups within the context of the society, both within the nation-state and beyond it. Do we wind up at a point where the state evaporates as individual and communal autonomy come to the fore? It’s possible, but not yet. Definitely not yet.

Indeed for these processes to arrive at a point of completion is perhaps to argue for human perfectibility, which seems unlikely.

Note that Hobsbawm, like many on the - and I use the term advisedly - ‘traditional’ left has moved from the position that the state is in and of itself the solution. There are huge dangers here as evidenced by the facile approaches New Labour project where the concept of state as enabler rapidly seems to have shifted to one of state as patsy to the wiles of the private sector, and private interests (and once upon a time a certain N. Cohen had much the most convincing analysis of such matters that I read). But, there’s scope there for new spaces and approaches to be opened up. If that sounds like an experiment, well, why not? The dangers of the current situation with an effective planetary crisis, allied with the opportunities of reworking our societies into more humane and sustainable structures (and for all the techno-utopians out there, being smart about using technology) surely justify this…

Still, all that said, what do other people think? Should it be simply short, medium and long term goals, and if so what are they?

Who is it who:

has made an extraordinary contribution to the advance of this State in many spheres during his eleven years in high office.

Who…

played a phenomenal role in bringing about peace in Northern Ireland;

and…

presided over the best of the Celtic Tiger years which define Ireland’s position, strategically and economically, in the world today;

But not stopping there, who:

unified his party in the wake of the disastrous and damaging divisions of the 1980s; espoused consensus, not just in successive national wage agreements but on the greater European stage; and, excelled at the art of politics by embracing coalition and…

and?

…making Fianna Fáil indispensible to the formation of government for the forseeable future.

Whose…

achievements, to coin the phrase of the celebrity culture in which he lives, are awesome.

Wait a second. That’s Bertie Ahern they’re talking about… and it’s the Irish Times these words appear in. And not merely the Irish Times, but the Irish Times editorial. And this on foot of a multi-page overview, retrospective and biography of the man in the paper itself.

Such honeyed words, such praise… for consider the following…

Cumulatively, historians will judge whether they exceed those of any other Fianna Fáil leader or Taoiseach in their day. His place in Irish history is guaranteed. His electoral success, the real test of any party leader, comes closest to that of Eamon de Valera.

Of course this being the Irish Times editorial there has to be a bit of grit in the honey, the sort of grit that is impossible to remove without smashing the jar, discarding what is left and forgetting about the toast… for…

It could be argued that his performance exceeds de Valera’s in one important respect because he held office for three terms without ever winning an overall majority for Fianna Fáil.

Ouch!

But after this slight case of leaves on the tracks it’s everyone back on the praise train…

His lasting legacy is the achievement of the Belfast Agreement which led him to claim in his address to the Joint Houses of Congress in the United States last week: “I am so proud, Madam Speaker, to be the first Irish leader to inform the United States Congress: Ireland is at peace”.

His human qualities?

Unlike the eleven Taoisigh to preceed him, Bertie Ahern earned the respect of the people in the manner in which he grasped the opportunities presented to him. His support from the people was hard won by achievement in many different spheres. And, over-riding it all, there was an affection for his affability, his ordinariness, his common touch. He was always a man of the people. He struck a chord with voters: businessmen and Belfast men, trade union activists and members, women and separated families, culchies and North Dublin Dubs.

Then come these…

* * *

Praise over, down to the hard stuff? Well yes and no.

There is no doubt that his historic achievement was the successful negotiation of the Belfast Agreement and the bedding down of the peace process which, on his resignation, has a devolved, multi-party coalition government in operation in Northern Ireland controlled by the extremes of Dr Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party and Gerry Adams’s Sinn Fein.

See? They’re still not happy about the ‘extremes’ (although go read Jonathan Powells excellent point in this months Prospect which notes that it was John Hume who opened the door to Adams and Sinn Féin in the 1980s, and who refused to countenance any agreement without them - a very different proposition from that implicitly made by the Irish Times and others about the ‘moderates’ being shouldered aside) And then a masterfully ambiguous line…

This development may not have happened without the presence of Mr Ahern.

Indeed.

While other party leaders had the grand vision to dare imagine a possible solution - ….Mr Ahern was the man to deliver on the day. He was the right man in the right place at the right time.

Well, that’s history for you. Them’s the breaks. Still, the text becomes - shall we say - more double-edged in its assessment… consider the following…

He may not have had the vision of his predecessors to construct the framework for peace, but his particular skills came into play in the intense negotiations to follow.

The first part of that sentence is extraordinary. How on earth can we tell? Since he wasn’t Taoiseach in earlier times it’s unknowable.

He achieved the consensus to bring the peace process forward, not just in constitutional, administrative and political terms, but he built up a relationship with the unionists, a trust between Dr Paisely and himself, the likes of which has never been seen before. He has transformed the North/South and the Anglo/Irish relationship.

Some more of these…

* * *

And this time we have praise and criticism…

On the home front, Mr Ahern had hugely significant achivements also. He presided over the best of the Celtic Tiger years when this State witnessed wealth beyond our wildest dreams…But, there are two areas, in retrospect now, where he did not make progress: on the health service and on infrastructual development…

A bit of party politics…

In his years as Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil, Bertie Ahern brought politicis to a fine art. He inherited a deeply divided party after the Haughey years and made it whole again. He crafted coalition governments to suit the electoral mood of the day. He introduced the concept of the five-year term of office. He did the unthinkable by bringing the Green Party into the current coalition arrrangement even when their numbers were not strictly needed. In the process, he has made Fianna Fáil almost indispensible to government-formation.

No dispute there… but a shadow passes in front of the sun…

Yet, any honest attempt to assess the legacy of Bertie Ahern must record that there was another side to the man. He espoused a set of political standards for others that he did not live by himself. He had to resign, in the end, because of his handling of matters before the Mahon Tribunal relating to the controversial payments he received when he was Minister for Finance. He was caught by the culture of a former time. He breached a trust with the people today.

Interesting. Not the issues themselves, but the ‘handling’… very interesting. Still, every cloud has a silver lining…

His departure marks the end of the Haughey era.

And even that is better than bad…

Unlike his mentor, … , Mr Ahern did this State considerable service over many, many years. He lived for politics. And when history comes to be written, Bertie Ahern will be remembered for the political achievments of a lifetime far more than the squalid stories about his monies.

Hmmmm… squalid stories you say? What an interesting, and almost detached phrase. No mention of the small matter that the Irish Times, and in particular its editorial pages has been at the forefront of discussing these issues. Still, perhaps even the IT worries a bit about the heavy and un-nuanced hand of history and after all, why spoil a beautiful early Summers day?

I can’t decide is this completely craven or of a piece with the statements in the Dáil a week or so back, where the great and the good turned their noses up at Caoimhín O’Caoláin for actually having the temerity in a fairly straightforward, and not ungracious, piece to point out some of the garments that the emperor appeared to be lacking (most entertaining was Stephen Collins inevitably sniffy remarks about C O’C in the Irish Times the following weekend, considering Collins approach to this matter over the years). There is something distasteful about the way in which bonhomie asserts itself in these instances. Either the situation is serious enough to require a serious response, or it isn’t. And I’m not talking about the scattergun approach of insulting Ahern personally that appears almost like a therapeutic process for some which has absolutely no purchase on the political realities, but a considered and collected engagement with these issues, warts and all.

Still, the biscuit is well and truly taken in a further piece by Harry McGee which seriously discusses his future prospects as either President of Ireland, or President of the council of Ministers of the EU. Sure…

The major stumbling block is how his ongoing dealings with the Mahon tribunal play to other EU political leaders.

But that these, a potential political life post Tribunal - are potential outcomes tells us a lot about both the process we have seen and the reality of political life. Because the nearly but not quite approach of the Irish Times is both reflection and exemplar of a dynamic whereby we mean it but we don’t really approach to politics and political life in this country. Afraid to strike, afraid to hold back. ‘Sure you’re an awful man…’ but what precisely do they mean? Or is it fingers crossed and let’s leave it to history to judge?

Fascinating comments by Martin McGuinness, Deputy First Minster of the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly. In a response to Unionist demands for the IRA to be dismantled in order to speed the way towards transfer of policing and justice powers he is reported in today’s Irish Times as follows:

McGuinness has stated that he does not know whether the IRA army council remains in existence.

That’s entertaining and to the inevitable follow-on he responded that: his focus was on Government in Northern Ireland. Excellent. He continued:

“The IRA have left the stage, they are totally and utterly out of the equation.

“Any attempt to drag them back on to the stage is a big mistake.”

And he added:

Referring to Dr Paisley’s recent visit to Cork, he noted how he was picketed by members of Republican Sinn Féin. “Specifically talking of what Ian Paisley has done over the course of the last year, who is doing more to end division on this island, Ian Paisley or the so-called Republican Sinn Féin protesters? I say give me Ian Paisley any time.”

Of course, the thought strikes that the good Dr. will have left the stage soon. Perhaps the words he meant to say were… given the choice between Peter Robinson and Ian Paisley… Well, on the other hand it is RSF, so maybe not.

Thinking about Boris Johnson as Mayor it struck me that my feelings were not dissimilar to those I had when John Major swept into power in 1992. Not so much that I loved Livingstone as that I loathed his successor. It’s not identical, beyond politics some good stuff is happening which ameliorates it hugely, but, on the political level there is now, as then, a certain sick feeling that history had gone awry. There are many, no doubt, for whom Kinnock represented all that was wrong with Labour, but, having lived on and off in the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s my only sense then (and now) was that Labour in power was vastly superior to the Tories in power. That election night was probably the worst I have ever sat through. The subsequent hangover exacerbated by the reality of, at least, five more years of Conservative rule.

A few years later when John Smith died there was a further sense of loss, a sense that once more a response, emotional, societal, left, progressive that had been shaped was pulled away. In retrospect I cannot but feel that Smith, again far from unproblematic politically, might well have been able to maintain a slightly more leftward tilt to the Labour party than that we subsequently experienced under Blair and Brown. Whether we would be where we are today is a fascinating, but essentially unknowable question. Would the responses to a myriad of domestic and international issues have been the same, or would we have seen a transition to a Blair-led government around 2002? With not dissimilar results?

And Brown? What next? What does he do to counter the events of this week? Because his task is monumental. A resurgent Cameron able to tour the country, a sort of pseudo-Blairism of the right somehow connecting with the British people (or more likely a weariness with New Labour) despite the reality of the genuine article over the past eight years. And here’s a thought, seems to me the British people liked Blair considerably more than they admitted, and considerably more than his party. There is relatively little time for Brown to staunch these troubles, many of his own making. For him time, the crucial element of political activity, is running out. He is unpopular, his party is unpopular, their lack of ideological clarity now hostage to precisely the same attacks that New Labour made upon Conservative territory in the early and mid-1990s. The ‘moderation’ of Cameron is the front end of a formidable party which has survived through many different periods by tacking one way or another. But its project is grounded in reaction. It is that simple.

And what of London, and more broadly the British people? I’m intrigued as to how this might impact on Scotland, indeed on the devolutionary project more widely. Yesterday it seemed possible that this might have negative effects upon Ireland, but counterintuitively it might also serve to further emphasise the distance between Scotland and London. And nationalism is a funny old thing. The political winds shifting might underscore the necessity for greater autonomy, if not quite independence. That could be quite a headache for a future Cameron administration. Good.

Repent at leisure. It’s a terrible phrase, at least in terms of its inherent meaning. The sense that events occur which require us to deal with them, that we have to endure them and that somewhere further on there is no guarantee of better. Odd really that some of those of us on the left in an Irish context should feel this way, since we’ve been perpetually denied a seat at the table, our projects permanently left on hold as our ‘betters’ shape the society to their own ends. But, perhaps that is a function of seeing some virtues, some improvements, whatever about neo-liberalism, the failings of Blair and so on and so forth in the left project(s) on the island to the East.

People live political lives vicariously, particularly on the left. A hint of the progressive and we’re in there, rooting for one candidate or another. I’ve sat on aircraft scanning columns of election returns in the Guardian about Italian general elections (this is back when such coverage was a fair bit more detailed in print than it is today), in cafes weighing up the respective worth of candidates for the Mayor of New York, fretted watching Channel4 News (and isn’t that getting just a tad tabloid these days - consider their coverage of the Austrian case) over the situation on the left in Chile. Who to give allegiance to? Even at three thousand miles? The larger left party or the smaller Marxist one? Or both? Or, rarely, neither? And the big paradox, as ever, is that while the heart may be with those smaller battalions, the splinter parties, the further left, the disciples of Lenin and Trotsky, the post-Marxists, the Green movement, and each seat gained is a triumph wrung in the face of adversity, that is not to deny that the victories of the larger left parties still mean something, still indicate some hope in a gloomy political world.

John Sullivan had it right when he suggested that:

In sum, political sects provide a refuge which many people need, either permanently or temporarily. They are the heart of a heartless world, and will disappear only when that world begins to change.

These days it’s not just the sects, is it? My biggest fear is that we will wind up in a world where the left isn’t crushed or annihilated, but is merely an irrelevance in the face of a centre and right wing hegemony. As significant politically as those who would argue for the restoration of the Scottish monarchy. A sort of US situation where the very terms of the debate are structured in such a way as to shut out the left. And the events of the last week assist that process incrementally, and the left space contracts just a little. Sometimes it’s good there’s more to life than politics.