The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Accompanying post to Left Archive: Labour Party Bulletin – Tallaght Branch, Nov/Dec, 1969 October 3, 2011

Many thanks to Damian O’Broin for writing this post which accompanies the document here.

“We believe that under the present social system housing needs can never be adequately catered for until housing has been removed from the realm of Private Profiteering and Land Speculation and put in the hands of the National Building Agency.

As a first step in the easing of the housing problem all building land in the urban areas should be brought under public control. This measure will end land speculation, reduce site costs and knock at least £500 off the price of the average home”

We can only imagine what Tallaght – and all of Dublin – would look like today if such a measure had actually come to pass. Or, indeed, if Labour had spent more time talking about nationalising “all building land”.

In 1969, the great ‘Private Profiteering and Land Speculation’ craze that would do so much to define the next 40 years was only warming up, and the development of Tallaght would be an integral part of that story.

I was born in Tallaght in March 1970, four months after this Bulletin was produced. I discovered it last year, buried away in a wardrobe in my parents’ house. To the best of my knowledge it was written by my father, Sean O’Broin, who was then the Chairman of the Tallaght branch of the Labour Party. He was 41 at the time, the age I am now, and his own political journey to this point – and beyond – is worth recounting.

He’d grown up beside St Stephen’s Green, the eldest of 10, and left school at 14 to train as a cobbler. His own father had had some peripheral involvement in 1916, but refused to talk about it, and was scornful of those who in later years emerged from the woodwork to claim credit and pensions. His maternal grandfather had been the last person to visit Commandant Michael Mallin before his execution, and reportedly helped smuggle a message out of Kilmainham. Apparently my grandmother – who was just a teenager at the time, stood outside the prison and held Mallin’s infant son during the visit, so that he could catch a glimpse of him through his cell window.

Given this background it was probably no surprise that he joined Fianna Eireann in his teens, eventually becoming Quartermaster General. There are loads of half told and half remembered family stories from this time (the mid to late 1940s) involving guns, explosives and exciting escapades. There is an innocence to the stories, that probably reflects the general view of republicanism in the years before the Border Campaign – a minority, but largely harmless pastime.

During this period Sean met Billy McMillen, who would later become a leading figure in Belfast republicanism. The two shared a love of the Irish language, and broadly similar, urban, working class backgrounds. And despite different political trajectories, the two would become, and remain, close friends. In 1962, not long after having been released from internment, Billy would be best man at my parents’ wedding.

In addition to his republican activities, Sean was an avid Irish language activist (he had been born Byrne, but always used O’Broin) and an active trade unionist. After serving his time and working for a while as a cobbler, he joined CIE as a bus conductor where he became a shop steward with the Workers’ Union of Ireland.

I’m not sure at what point he began to part ways with the Republican movement. By 1956 when the Border Campaign commenced he was no longer involved, his Irish langauge and trade union activities taking precedence. Several of his friends – including Billy – were interned during the 1956-62 campaign.

But there was another influence in his life, which I presume had an impact on his relationship with republicanism. His faith. To the best of my knowledge, his Catholic faith was always important, but during the 1950s he clearly began to delve deeper. He studied ethics and social justice at the Jesuit Workers College (now the National College of Ireland) and for a period, came very close to joining the Cistercians. Luckily for me, that never happened.

Whether his turn towards the faith was the reason he distanced himself from Republicanism, or whether it was his experiences of Republicanism that drove him deeper into Catholicism, I’ll probably never know.

By 1969 he was married, living in Tallaght, and expecting his first child. He had left much of his more radical activism behind him. He had also moved from worker to employer. Together with his brother, he was running a small television shop and repair business – Lamberts – in Crumlin village. Which may explain his move from Trade Unionism to Labour Party involvement. As far as I know, he was asked to set-up a Labour Party organisation in Tallaght in the late 1960s

His close friend Billy, on the other hand, was in the eye of a storm. He had been a republican candidate in the 1964 election and, soon after, succeeded Billy McKee as O/C of the Belfast IRA. In 1967 he helped found NICRA, and when the North exploded in 1968/9 Billy was in middle of it.

At the time Dad was writing Tallaght Labour News in the Autumn of 1969, Billy was at the centre of the split between the Officials and the Provisionals.

It’s interesting to consider how the different circumstances each man lived with brought them to very different places. If Dad had been grown up on the Falls Road rather than Mercer Street would he have been sitting beside McMillen in September 1969 when McKee and Co arrived to seize control of the Belfast IRA? Who knows? Very possibly.

Dad would eventually part ways with the Labour Party. He couldn’t square his Catholic beliefs with Labour’s support for divorce, contraception and the rest of the ‘Liberal Agenda’ (which already sounds so quaint – how times change).

He always maintained that he believed in social justice, not socialism. And that streak of social justice stayed with him, and underpinned everything he did. In my memory of him, his activism was rooted in the local community, and in particular the local parish, in which he remained deeply involved.

Rather than smuggling pistols or representing co-workers, he was ministering the eucharist and reading at mass. And instead of Tallaght Labour News, he was editing the Parish Newsletter. But if you’d asked him, I think he would have seen all of that activity as coming from the same place, the same commitment to social justice.

Returning to the Bulletin, what’s perhaps most striking – but not surprising – is how local it all is. The North was in flames, government Ministers were conspiring to import arms for the IRA, and yet all we have in bread and butter issues – ground rents and housing shortages.

Nor is there mention of the momentous general election of just six months earlier, although the introduction perhaps hints at the impact of Fianna Fáil’s red scare tactics during that campaign.

“There is a great deal of confusion to-day concerning the Social Policy of the Labour Party, and we hope by these bulletins to explain the principles by which we stand.”

Clear hints there of the scars of the recent campaign.

In fact, we had direct experience of the red scare in our house. My parents were subjected to a barrage of anonymous phone calls around this time, telling them to ‘get out of Tallaght’ that ‘Reds weren’t welcome here’. My mother, while never knowing for sure, always suspected a few of the more pious members of the local community.

It’s hard to imagine a red scare of this sort in Tallaght today, with two Labour Party TDs and one from Sinn Féin. But Tallaght in 1969 was far different.

Tallaght was still just a village of a couple of thousand people. The street lights were switched off at 11pm every night and I’ve lost count of the number of people who told me they picked blackberries along the road where the By-Pass now runs.

And it certainly wasn’t a fertile ground for the left. Dublin County South was the only Dublin constituency not to return a Labour TD in the ‘seventies will be socialist’ election of 1969. Sean Fitzpatrick, one of the councillors mentioned in the Bulletin, took 6.44% of the vote, and Labour took 17.56% in total.

But change was afoot. Two years earlier, in 1967, it had been proposed as one of four ‘New Towns’ in the Myles Wright masterplan for Greater Dublin and all was set to change. (I still remember the ‘Welcome to Tallaght, New Town’ sign on the Greenhills Road).

In the years that followed Tallaght grew at an extraordinary pace, as estate after estate was built and the population exploded during the 1970s. I still remember the fields where we wandered or played football being turned into building sites and then houses. In the space of ten years, 50,000 people would move to this sleepy south Dublin village.

But despite this, the seventies were most definitely not socialist in Tallaght. It would be 12 years before Labour would take a seat here – Mervyn Taylor in 1981

And all the while it seemed that houses was all that was being built. It took until the 1990s before anything approaching a proper community infrastructure would appear, delayed by bad planning, zoning scams and neglect. By then, a population the size of Limerick City had grown up, with no facilities and, in many cases, no jobs.

Little wonder that Dublin South West was the most left wing constituency in the country in 1992 with three of the five TDs coming from Labour and Democratic Left.

twitter.com/damianobroin

Irish Left Archive: TILT (The Irish Labour Tribune) from the Labour Party, 1997 September 28, 2009

TILTgo copy

Many thanks to Damian O’Broin for this guest post.

TILT, an acronym apreciation for the The Irish Labour Tribune, had a relatively brief existence over a few years in the late 1990s, either side of the 1997 election.

This issue was produced in the immediate aftermath of the 1997 election and is dominated by post-mortems of the 92-97 governments and the subsequent election defeat.

At a time when it seems likely that Labour will end 12+ years in opposition by entering a coalition after the next general election, it is instructive to look back at how the party viewed their last such experience.

But first a bit of background on TILT. It was very much driven by the party young guns at the time. The editors were Aidan Culhane, now a councillor and a defeated candidate at the last general election, and Ronan O’Brien, soon to be appointed Ruarí Quinn’s chef de cabinet.

But that’s not to say that the heavyweights of the party weren’t involved. This issue contains pieces by Quinn, Stagg and Kathleen O’Meara, as well as a lenghty piece by James Wrynn.

Some of the snippets are interesting. There’s a short piece on Sinn Féin:

“One of the least talked about performances in the General Election was that of Sinn Féin. The election of Caoimhín Ó Caoláin could have been accompanied by the election of Martin Ferris in Kerry North and Sean Crowe in Dublin South West. Ferris’s performance – he garnered 5,691 votes – in Kerry North was particularly impressive. Had Dick Spring not been the Labour candidate, it is not inconceivable that Ferris could have been elected. And all this before the second cease-fire was called. Sinn Féin now pose a considerable threat to the Left and Labour, not unlike that of the Workers’ Party in the 80s. And, they are ruthlessly organised, usually on a full time basis subvented by the state as Ó Caoláin’s own career testifies.”

Note the attitude that Sinn Féin (and the Workers’ Party) pose a threat not just to Labour, but to the ‘Left’. Elsewhere, the editorial talks about ‘our cohesiveness almost cosiness with Fine Gael and our other Government partner’ (my emphasis). An indicator, perhaps, of future tensions within the new, merged party, and continuing reluctance today among many in the party to engage with Sinn Féin.

Of course, what this also shows is just how different the political world was is 1997. And that’s a sense you get throughout the magazine. This was the time just after Bertie’s first election, before the drip, drip of tribunals had kicked in, with Ray Burke still in the cabinet. Several columnists anticipate an early election – a reminder that the decade of Fianna Fáil hegemony that was just starting had shaky foundations and required considerable skill and strategy to build and maintain.

It’s also worth rememebering that in 1997 Eamonn Gilmore wasn’t even a member of the Labour Party – the merger with Democratic Left was still a year away – and the Good Friday Agreement had yet to be signed.

So what do they say about their time in government and their failure in the 1997 election?

Emmet Stagg blames the media for a relentless campaign against Labour over the preceding 5 years, the decision to campaign as a government, rather than as the Labour Party, and the difficulty the former campaigning politicians who were swept into Leinster House in 1992 had adjusting to backbench or ministerial life.

Quinn points to being out-maneouvred on taxation by Fianna Fail, with the public being swayed by their focus on nominal tax rates rather than the tax band and allowance approach of Labour.

Interestingly, Quinn, talks aboiut the Celtic Tiger economy already delivering increased prosperity and 200,000 extra jobs. A useful reminder that the good years had already started before Fianna Fáil returned, despite what they’d have you believe.

Quinn’s most interesting point is that Fianna Fáil’s message really hit home with those already in work – so while 200,000 more people had found jobs, those who already were in work were frustrated that their incomes weren’t rising fast enough – hence the success of the ‘It’s payback time’ message.

Like Stagg, Quinn expects that the minority government won’t last and forsees an early election. How wrong they were!

Pat Montague contributes a realistic assessment of the state of the party, and calls for Labour to become a campaigning party – good advice, sadly not heeded.

But the most interesting and insightful piece is the one by James Wrynn.

Wrynn is adamant that entering coalition with Fianna Fáil was not the problem, and was not the reason for defeat in 1997. Amid references to Fine Gael’s ‘superior demeanour’ in 1992, their insistence on including the PDs and refusal to countenance coalition with Democratic Left, Wrynn argues that the 1992 Programme for Government was a remarkable document in the extent of its inclusion of Labour Party policy. Faced with a choice between an arrogant Fine Gael and a supine Fianna Fáil who rolled over and agreed to everything, it was an obvious decision to make.

He doesn’t deny that there were problems with the FF coalition, and biggest amongst these was the tax amnesty which he recognises as Labour’s biggest mistake from this period. His account of it is interesting:

“It is important to understand the context of the tax amnesty, although this is only a slightly ameliorating argument. The budgetary position was extremely tight unlike the situation in recent years. The prospect of a windfall income for the exchequer couple with a greater flow of taxes in subsequent years from newly captured miscreant taxpayers who would not escape their tax liabilities any longer seemed a worthwhile trade-off against some tax evasion by the about to be captured culprits. We were wrong and I was wrong in supporting it. The electorate were not interested ina scheme to give high income tax evaders a greatly reduced tax bill, even if we were guaranteeing they would pay their way from then on. But they were most grieviously upset that the Labour Party were supporting this measure. This was a breach of trust. The ‘passports for sale’ controversy was less damaging but added to the loss of trust.”

But even with this, Wrynn argues that Labour still carried the expectations of the public to a higher standard.

“The silence which descended in pubs, places of work and anywhere with a screen as Dick Spring stood up in the Dáil to articulate where the Labour Party stood in relation to the Brendan Smyth / Harry Whelehan affair was a measure of what the public expected of us and of the regard in which they hold us when we are true to our values.”

I distinctly remember that silence myself, watching the speech on a TV in the office with me colleagues gathered round. It was an electric moment. And, Wrynn argues, at this point “our stock was at a new high, 22% just two and half years before June ‘97”. More evidence that it was not entering coalition with Fianna Fáil which the electorate disliked, but something that happened later.

And Wrynn believes that something was the ‘lacklustre’ programme with FG and DL, the budgetary conservatism of the 1994-97 years, and two and half years of gradual decline.

On top of this was an extraordinary failure in organisation. Wrynn calls it ‘neglect on a grand scale’:

“a party with 19% of the vote in 1992 continued to behave organisationally as if it were a 6-8% party. Constituencies with newly elected TDs or Senators were left to flounder to their own devices in building a constituency organisation and electoral machine. It is ironic that a party which believes in active intervention in the market place where the market place fails to provide appropriate necessary services to a society, should leave the building of its organisational capacity to the laws of chance and luck.”

Like the other writers, he also takes aim at the media, and Independent Newspapers in particular, for an anti-Labour bias. He also points out, as does Montague in his piece, that Labour had come out of government in a far stronger postion than ever before – which was true. However, his critical faculties desert him when describes the election as:

“a complete failure for FF.They stalled at 39%, after almost 3 years in opposition and the majority of their gains were achieved by sucking reluctant PD No. 2s into their net – an unlikely repeat prospect. The new government is lacklustre in the extreme and semi-paralysed by the fall-out of Haughey and what may follow.”

So what lessons for today?

Let’s leave aside the questions of whether Labour should enter coalition and whether they should consider FF as potential partners and instead look at how they should approach things if they do.

Well, Fine Gael’s ‘superior demeanour’ has definitely returned and there seems to be an expectation that Labour will inevitably support them in coalition. Labour’s first task therefore is to ensure that they don’t allow themselves to be bounced into a bad deal, in the way the Greens were in 2007. The situation cannot be allowed to develop that coalition with Fine Geal is the only option. Strategies should be prepared to handle an alternative coalition with Fianna Fáil or indeed a refusal to enter coalition with either. Ultimately is should be about the programme. If it’s not Labour-hued then it shouldn’t be agreed to.

And clearly the second task is organisational. Others are probably better positioned to say how the current organisation compares with that in 1997, but it seems clear that if Labour are to enter government, as much talent and energy needs to be devoted to maintaining and buidling the organisation, as there is to running the country.