Ireland: United Left Alliance Confronts Big Challenges
Dick Nichols, Green Left Weekly/Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal’s correspondent in Europe, has a report on the recent ULA conference on the Links IJSR site, which was originally published on the 16th of July.
Ireland’s seven-month-old United Left Alliance is the “new kid on the block” of European anti-capitalist parties. Launched on November 27 last year, it emerged from the February Irish national elections—where its name didn’t even appear on the ballot paper—with five TDs (Teachta Dála, members of the Irish parliament, the Dail). To date the ULA has also won 20 positions in local councils and one seat in the European parliament.
In the Dail, the ULA TDs have already had successes, like forcing the government to back off from abolishing the Joint Labour Committees that set wages and conditions in some industries.
However, the party still has a great deal of building ahead of it—in program, party structures and decision-making processes, and in communication with its potential public and its own members.
At present the ULA is led by a committee representing the founding organisations—the Socialist Party (SP), Socialist Workers Party (SWP), People Before Profit Alliance (PBPA) and the Tipperary-based Workers and Unemployed Action Group (WUAG)—and decisions there are taken by consensus.
The challenges facing the ULA were discussed at its first national public forum, held on June 25, 2011, in Liberty Hall, Dublin.
The forum, which was not decision making, attracted attendance from well beyond the established Dublin left. At least 320 (the official registration figure) and probably 400 took part, including many young people and activists from the more distant counties—like Cork, Tipperary, Sligo and Donegal—as well as from Northern Ireland.
Background
The electoral success of the ULA has grown straight from the rage in Ireland at the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-European Union (EU) “bailout package”, negotiated last year by the former government of Fianna Fáil and the Greens.
That “rescue” has lined up workers, unemployed and young people to pay the gargantuan gambling debts of the cabal of bankers, financial engineers and real estate speculators who ruled the Irish economic roost before the 2008 property and banking crash.
By 2014, total public and private debt of Irish institutions will reach €200 billion, threatening massive business and even state bankruptcy. Under the EU-IMF program the Irish state will fork out €13.6 billion in interest payments alone to the EU, European member states and the IMF.
The potential impact on Irish politics is massive—the definitive break-up of the two-party system that arose out of the independence struggles of the 1920s.
In the February poll, Fianna Fail—the mainstream nationalist party which had been in government for 61 of the last 79 years—lost 58 of its 78 seats. Its traditional rival, Fine Gael, now in government with the Labour Party as junior partner, dutifully implements the IMF-EU package it rubbished while in opposition.
As many speakers at the ULA forum commented, this flip-flop opens the way for Fine Gael to repeat Fianna Fail’s fate.
It is also highly unlikely that economic revival will come to the Fine Gael-Labour government’s rescue. It presides over a depressed, shrunken economy choking on debt. In real terms, Irish income per capita (gross national product) was 14.7% lower in 2010 than in 2007 and personal consumption 8.6% lower. Investment (gross fixed capital formation) was down a massive 51.9%, yet public spending, which would normally have been boosted to offset the capitalists’ aversion to invest, also fell by 7.7%.
Why? The Irish state “couldn’t afford” to fund even a token anti-recession program because it had taken over the debts of the financial desperados and wasn’t going to fill its yawning budget deficit by taxing the rich. As a result, since 2007 official unemployment has climbed from 4.5% to 14.2%, and up to 50,000 families are reckoned to be in danger of losing their homes.
In the medium term, assuming some recovery from depression, the chances of repeating the “Celtic tiger” model of the 1990s and 2000s are evaporating, as multinational operators and a handful of Irish counterparts seek out lower-wage and -tax regimes in Eastern Europe and North Africa.
Orienting to mass outrage
At the forum two plenary sessions confronted the main challenges created by this crisis and the political radicalisation it is creating (also reflected in a sharply increased vote at the February election for Sinn Fein—for years a marginal force in the Irish Republic).
Workshop sessions covered areas of struggle (women’s rights, racism and against proposed water charges and home taxes), alternative policy (education, health, jobs, global warming) and strategic issues (how to relate to the left in Northern Ireland and how to make the retreating Irish union movement stand and fight). Other workshops covered lessons from the experience of new workers’ parties in Europe and the nature of socialism.
In the first plenary, “The left recsponse to the risis”, radical economist Terrence McDonough (National University of Ireland, Galway) outlined a five-point “big bang” strategy to kick-start the economy out of depression. His points, each leading to the next, were: to default on Irish public debt; to regain control over monetary policy by leaving the euro and creating a new Irish currency (punt); to launch a public bank to allow reorganisation of the banking system; to provide a jobs guarantee; and to nationalise the Corrib gas project (off the north-west coast).
People asked: wouldn’t a new Irish punt rapidly devalue against other currencies, simultaneously devaluing workers’ savings? Wouldn’t the bondholders and the international financial institutions look to punish Ireland for daring to default?
McDonough answered that once a national currency had been restored the Irish state could pursue polices to inflate the economy, with the likely fall in the value of the punt making it more competitive. As for holders of Irish debt, defaulting would strengthen Ireland’s hand in any subsequent negotiations—would holders of Irish bonds like something back or nothing?
The creation of a public bank would, when combined with a deposit guarantee, allow costly state support for private banks to be withdrawn and deposits to be transferred out of them. Some private banks might well go broke, but people’s savings would be safe. Nationalising Corrib would make Ireland energy self-sufficient and reduce its energy bill.
McDonough agreed that his proposal was “far from socialism” but insisted that its benefits easily outweighed costs: it would allow the curse of unemployment to be tackled and show that the Irish people were breaking with EU austerity and taking their fate into their own hands.
Socialist program?
McDonough’s presentation opened the lid, perhaps unintentionally, on the dominant debate of the forum—what program should the ULA have? Should it be explicitly socialist? Driven by the different perspectives of the SWP and SP, this discussion ran through the whole day, even surfacing in workshop sessions on other topics.
For SP leader Kevin McLoughlin, who analysed the “backward and incapable” state of the Irish capitalism and its failure to develop an indigenous manufacturing sector, the ULA had to propose public ownership as the alternative. Its program should have workers’ control of the economy at its centre and be explicitly socialist.
Kieran Allen (SWP) analysed the “investment strike” of Irish capitalism, placed the possibilities for resistance in the context of the Arab revolutions and the mass anti-austerity protests in southern Europe, and ended by saying that the ULA had to look to anti-capitalism for its program. Its socialism didn’t have to be explicit—it could be explained as the vision behind immediate demands.
In discussion there was some engagement with McDonough’s “big bang” proposal—mainly questioning whether a purely Irish solution to Ireland’s crisis was possible—but many contributions were directed at whether the ULA should present itself as explicitly socialist.
For one SP member “we have to talk about socialism to break people away from commitment to capitalism”. For SWPer Mary Smith, putting “socialism” on the ULA banner meant limiting its potential appeal to those who already identify as socialists. Yet the ULA’s main job is to get people of very different affiliations into action around the concrete issues that affect them.
In his summary Kieran Allen polemicised against “abstract” propaganda for socialism, drawing the comment from Kevin McLoughlin that the SP’s own election campaigns had successfully linked concrete proposals to the need to change society. This approach had been no impediment to getting two TDs elected as part of the ULA election campaign. McLoughlin called retreat from identification with socialism “an unnecessary concession” which “complicates our task”.
You can read the whole report here.
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