Labour with its new populism about water is fooling nobody
KEITH Barry is not the only one expecting a general election. When Ireland’s leading mentalist predicted last week that the Government’s increasingly hapless term of office was about to come to an end, he may have been responding to more than the ‘premonitions’ he says he’s been having about the state of Irish politics. He could just have been paying attention to the news. Because last week, nobody looked like they were in election mode more than the Labour Party politicians who, reacting to an apparently invisible cue, began to dump all over Irish Water as though they had nothing to do with its creation.
In truth, there were 150,000 cues, and they were stubbornly visible last weekend, marching proudly to register their objections to water charges and the quango in charge of them.
The subsequent washing of the hands began when Joan Burton announced that €200 would be the maximum bill for a family of four adults – a sum that would be many hundreds of euro less than we had been led to believe would be the case (and would, were it to materialise, raise further questions about the amount of money that Irish Water will actually raise, and whether the huge cost of setting it up, economically and politically, was worth it).
She and the Taoiseach were on the same page on this one, she said, although it subsequently turned out that they were reading from different books.
THEN the Economic Management Council, the slightly Stalinist sounding group on which she makes decisions with Enda Kenny, Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin, declared that water pressure wouldn’t be reduced in homes on which the charge hadn’t been paid. Labour politicians were quick to claim credit for that one, particularly as it had been a deeply held conviction of the much reviled Phil Hogan, before he began his European sinecure, that pressure reduction would happen.
Soon, Labour senators were getting in on the act, voting against their Government partners and for a Fianna Fáil proposal that there should be a referendum on the future ownership of Irish Water. Although it is FG policy that no referendum is necessary or desirable, Labour Environment Minister Alan Kelly thought it was an idea worth considering and said he’d bring it to Cabinet.
By Friday, Kelly was casting doubt on another of the Economic Council’s decisions – that those who didn’t pay their water charges would be forced by court order to cough up the charge from their salaries or dole payments.
The message from Labour was clear – on Irish Water, the party was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it any more.
Lest we be in any doubt about how cross Labour politicians were, Joan Burton had three chances to deny that the Irish Water shambles would collapse the Government. Three times she refused. It’s no wonder Keith Barry added ‘imminent election’ to a list of predictions that included the theft of the Book Of Kells and the heaviest snow in Irish history this Christmas.
Barry resisted the temptation to make any predictions about the result of the election but I have premonitions of my own about that one. If the Labour Party is seriously considering fighting an early election on the issue of its opposition to Irish Water in general, or water charges in particular, it will be wiped almost off the face of the political earth. Its sudden emergence as a friend of the people on this issue has been one of the great acts of political cynicism of recent times, the party’s acute fear of electoral extinction masquerading as after-the-stable-door-has-closed populism. No political party should expect to be taken seriously when it behaves in such a transparently opportunistic manner but Labour continued to act during the week as though its slide in the opinion polls could be halted by this sudden conversion to a cause that the Anti-Austerity Alliance, the Socialist Party and, to a lesser extent, Sinn Féin has been exploiting so expertly for many months.
The party is in a difficult posi- tion, of course, not least because it encouraged the positive mood music that has sound-tracked much of 2014, and that has emboldened the Irish people to protest in a way we would have been uncomfortable with when all we were hearing was that the country was banjaxed. Now Labour is faced with a near impossible choice – to go to the polls soon and be destroyed. Or wait 16 months and be devastated then.
CLEARLY some backroom bright spark has concluded that the carnage might be lessened if the party could find an issue that resonated with the people and go rapidly to the country on that. Sadly for the bright spark and those encouraging his madness (assuming it is a ‘he’ and not the Tánaiste, of course), water is not that issue.
The working class and much of the middle class have long ago abandoned the notion that they are represented by the Labour Party, which now relies on a core vote of soft left, comfortably off and liberal-minded voters to keep it afloat. Getting those people out to vote next time is what will make the difference between the four or five seats the polls suggest Labour would win now, and the 10 or 11 that would mean relative respectability.
Its behaviour last week suggests it is a long way from identifying that issue. An election any time soon is that last thing it needs.