Holding back the SF tide

AS ALEX WHITE and Joan Burton battle it out for the heart and soul of Ireland’s oldest political party, they might ponder the results for the Labour Party from one polling station in Dublin – Virgin Mary School in Ballymun. I know this area quite well, as I used to run a summer project in this sprawling working-class suburb.

It always had a great community spirit, coupled with a fantastic mix of young people and great schools, against a backdrop of problems that afflict many young communities: unemployment and drugs in a massive council estate.

So, with this in mind, I looked at the voting tally for what should be a fertile heartland for the Labour Party.

The results are shocking beyond belief.

Lynn Boylan, the Sinn Féin candidate for a European seat, romped home, garnering 75% of the 300 votes cast in the Virgin Mary School. Emer Costello, who impressed everyone she met during the campaign with her dignity and genuine commitment, got a miserable nine votes, coming in fifth in what should be a Labour heartland.

After all, one of the great clarion calls of the Labour Party in government was how it had held ‘core’ social welfare rates and ensured that everyone on a social welfare payment would automati- cally have a medical card. So in many respects an area that suffers from high unemployment, with a lot of top quality council housing, should be the vote-catching heartland of the party founded by James Connolly more than 100 years ago.

But when a relatively unknown Sinn Féin candidate gets 25 times as many votes as an experienced Labour Party stalwart in a working-class area, you know the task for the new leader is gargantuan.

By the way, the success of Sinn Féin in such places as Ballymun can be seen from the fact that while Boylan got 220 votes in the Virgin Mary polling station, no other candidate had more than 19 first preferences.

So the new leader of the Labour Party will have to remind ordinary decent people how Labour differs from Sinn Féin, which also claims James Connolly as the father of its party. And it will have to convince them that Labour is a real champion of the working classes.

Sinn Féin has managed to connect with more people in the south than they ever imagined.

Whether it’s a long-term allegiance or a roaring protest vote remains to be seen.

The Labour Party cannot claim to have been taken aback by the public reaction to the cull in medical cards.

The only way that could have happened is if nobody in the party had read a newspaper or listened to a radio programme in the past 18 months.

So did the parties in power simply take the word of the mandarins in the HSE, who told them there wasn’t a problem with medical cards being removed over the testimony of ordinary decent people who were suffering?

Maybe that’s the biggest task for the new Labour Party leadership – start trusting the people who matter once again.