Clambering back aboard the sinking ship…

I’d manage to miss this from the Irish Times a week or so ago:

Clare TD Michael McNamara is set to return to the Labour fold after losing the party whip in May.

And return he did, as this fulsome statement from the LP itself attests:

Emmet Stagg said: “I was happy to be in a position today to inform Party Leader Joan Burton that Michael McNamara has been readmitted to the Parliamentary Labour Party.
“I will be informing Labour TDs and Senators of this development at the next meeting of the Parliamentary Party.”
Michael McNamara said: “Labour has a huge amount of work to do in the coming months, and in the run-up to the election and I want to play a full part in that work.  I will be making it my priority to seek to reform Dáil procedures to ensure that it reflects the priorities of those who vote at elections.
“I am proud of the record of this government and, in particular, I am proud of the role that Labour has played in this. When we came to office, the economy was on the brink, thousands of jobs were being lost every month, and the large-scale sale of state resources was under consideration.
“Four years later, this has not come to pass. Instead, this government, with Labour at its heart, has turned the economy around. We are now creating 1,300 jobs a week, and we have created fiscal space of some €1.5b for Budget 2016.
“As a Party, we have also left our own imprint, with workers’ rights and the minimum wage being increased at a time they were being decreased in other States under bailouts. I don’t for one moment believe that this would have been achieved had we sat on the political side lines.”

Which all sits very oddly with some of his tweets as recently as a month before his return to the fold, as reported on the Journal here.

It would be wrong, of course, to ascribe any motivation in this particular instance. But more broadly we see contradictory impulses at work in terms to departure from and rejoining certain political formations. Eamonn Maloney decided to clamber across the railing in the other direction this last weekend. Presumably some fairly hard-headed calculations are made. Is being a member of the LP with some hint of organisation better than being alone or with few people around oneself? Or is it better to take the chance that the support for IND/OTHERS is so high that it will perhaps wash one safely ashore (work with me here).

Questions, questions.