Labour’s ditching of Alan Kelly might be genius, but it reeks of political panic
WE STILL await the appointment of a new Labour leader to conclude the curious case of the political assassination of Alan Kelly. I say curious because when a political act as brutal as the ousting of Kelly occurs, logic usually – not always – presents itself. There are several possible reasons for his savage removal: cold political calculation; personal hostilities or oldfashioned political panic.
While the first two motives contributed, dispassionate consideration says it was, indeed, panic.
Labour is the oldest political party in the State but it also has the longest history of injudicious political decision-making.
Less than two years ago Labour, against all its own deeply ingrained prejudices, elected a leader most unlike the stereotype of a Labour leader. He was, many believed, the only figure available who would attract a broad section of the electorate.
I have repeatedly asked this question of Labour people: if you appointed a leader two years ago with a certain skillset, why remove him at the very point he was most at advantage to put those skills into play? I have not received an adequate reply.
The advance of Sinn Féin has thrown the accepted mores of Irish politics out the window and Labour is the most traumatised by it. When you look at the party’s recent election results you can hardly blame them.
The narrative most enthusiastically pursued is that Civil War parties have been utterly recast by the rise of Sinn Féin. But Labour’s story has been one of extraordinary fluctuation.
FOR the big three, the pivotal election was 2020. Yet Labour is defined by the 2016 result. The party fell from a record high of 37 seats (19.4%) in 2011 to seven seats (6.6%). Fundamentally, after 2011, Labour suffered because it had promised to stand up to slash-andburn, capitalist system-saving austerity. Instead, it enthusiastically participated in it.
The plan back in 2016 had been to replace Joan Burton with one of the young, intensely liberal TDs Aodhán Ó Ríordáin or Ged Nash.
But they lost their seats and the party turned to veteran former minister Brendan Howlin. Back then, I asked a party powerbroker why the party hadn’t considered Tipperary TD Alan Kelly. It was almost as though I had suggested Attila the Hun.
He was too rural, too much of loose cannon too, well, un-Labour I was told. Labour was never really a working man’s party. Yes, the party had a close, but fractious, relationship with labour unions. But there was no mass of an industrial proletariat which had, in other countries, adhered to a genuinely left-wing party.
Most of our working men and women worked on the land, and they generally divided up along Civil War loyalties, gravitating towards Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. And whatever working class there was Seán Lemass claimed they voted for Fianna Fáil.
Nevertheless, Labour carved a niche for itself, but it was primarily as a campaigner for liberal views on social issues, issues that wracked the Irish political system for decades.
When, finally, Labour went for a leader who seemed to tick many populist boxes, those of us who wanted to see an important democratic party survive, were pleased.
For if you look at the list of Labour leaders over the last quarter of a century, four of the last six leaders represented Dublin constituencies. And even then, the four Dublin leaders were bookended by suave, educated, liberal leaders in Dick Spring and Brendan Howlin.
In Spring, a former rugby international, and Howlin, who has served in many high offices since he was first appointed health minister in 1994, you had identikit establishment figures.
When Kelly became Labour leader in April 2020, for the first time the party had swallowed its pride, and appointed a leader who the regular working person could identify with. Kelly is a political bruiser, a family man who likes a pint, who gets genuinely emotional when Tipperary wins an All-Ireland and who works hard at the unglamorous stuff. Around the time that one of his fellow TDs sneered at my suggestion that Kelly would be leader, he and I sat down for an unsophisticated carvery lunch in the Leinster House self-service restaurant.
Two other high-profile Labour people joined us by chance and long after we’d finished our carvery we stayed in a darkening and emptying canteen.
Armed with nothing more than coffee and tea we shared off-colour political stories about characters we knew in politics. I’ll always remember Kelly, tearfully laughing, saying, ‘Jasus, lads, do you know what? If we’d four big creamy pints of stout here, we’d never go home’. It cut to the heart of the man, the ordinary country lad done well, who most people would like to enjoy a drink with. But he was appointed leader at the start of the pandemic.
And all those oldtime, hand-clasping political skills could not come into play. We were socially distanced, secluded and for public health reasons forbidden from the substantial person-to-person contact that would be the lifeblood to a political operator like Kelly.
Then, on the cusp of returning to the fray, at the starting line of what would have been a marathon tour of the country, comparable to Charlie Haughey’s chicken-and-chips tour of Ireland in the 1970s, Kelly was removed.
Just as Covid restrictions lifted, at the moment his skills could be brought into play and the long slog of building a bulwark against farleft socialist advancement, he was tapped on the shoulder.
Yes, the party’s popularity had scarcely moved from around 4%, but there had been a period utterly unsuited to Kelly’s style.
WHEN he posted a family picture from home on social media recently, you could see the fridge. Upon closer examination, a fridge magnet with a photo of the Pope could be seen. I joked to a friend that this wouldn’t go down well with the Dublin Labour people. He was gone the next day. I’m not – even facetiously – suggesting that a photo of the Pope cost him his job – but the tableau just adds to the sense of chaos.
Ivana Bacik is the chosen replacement. There may be a political genius at work here, but I can’t see it. Yes, in many ways it makes cold hard sense. She is a high-profile woman and with the major player in left-wing politics, Sinn Féin, being led by a woman it looks like an intelligent move.
She won a by-election in one of the toughest, most competitive constituencies (Dublin Bay South) in the country last summer. Ms Bacik has been a respected, important figure in the social campaigns of the last two decades.
But still, what does the replacement say to rural Ireland, where many don’t share her values? Labour made a move, which for it, was unprecedented, and appointed a rural-based political street fighter only two years ago. And now it has performed a total volte-face, returned to type and selected an uber-liberal intellectual.
But Labour will find that the social causes it campaigned so long for are now the causes championed by all parties. The majority of the population agree on abortion and divorce.
And even the narrow liberal, urban, soft-left micro-group Ms Bacik would appear to target is already occupied by a party called the Social Democrats.
Labour would have been better off keeping Kelly and performing a truly radical move for the left: forget the splits and reunify with Social Democrats.
It could have then pursued the long, tedious, unglamourous, march back to the moderate left ground that could be available when the hard left alienates the electorate. As it always does.