Times Change
A Quarterly Political and Cultural Review
Autumn 1998
Opportunities for the left
Ruairi Quinn
Speaking at his Parliamentary Party's reflection meeting in Cavan recently, the Taoiseach was reported as saying that never again should domestic politics interfere with Northern Ireland. The comments represent a thinly-veiled reference to the events of 1994 when Labour left Government with Fianna Fail to form the Rainbow Coalition with Fine Gael and Democratic Left. Bertie Ahern was, of course, repeating a commonly-held view in Fianna Fail: that they alone are responsible for the peace process and its ultimately successful culmination. As such the remarks were hardly surprising, but the fact that the Taoiseach chose to make them after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement struck me as strange.
Logically speaking the opposite is the case. The whole purpose of the Agreement is to hand power back to the people of Northern Ireland and to their political representatives in the particular form of an elected Assembly. In addition, the establishment of North-South bodies will lead to increased contact and involvement by Southern politicians and officials in aspects of policy in Northern Ireland and vice versa. However, if this process is successful, it will lead to a reduction in the amount of time the Irish Government and the Southern political establishment expend on issues related to Northern Ireland. The focus should shift increasingly to domestic policy and politics. In that sense the normalisation of politics will take place in the South as well as the North if the Good Friday Agreement can be implemented successfully.The question for the Left is whether we can use this process to our advantage. At an immediate level, the central issue which has divided the two civil war parties has come to an end. All that remains is the muddy consensus which has operated between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael on economic and other issues. The left, and the Labour Party in particular, has always argued that there was little or nothing differentiating the two main parties. Yet that position, true as it is, ignored the emotional significance to both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael of the National Question and the role that each party had played historically since 1921.
Clearly that divide was both real and still relatively recent. Given the bi-partisan approach which the Opposition and Government have taken to the Northern Ireland peace process in recent years, some political commentators have forgotten that it is only 13 years since Fianna Fail opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement. In fact the bi-partisan approach has only become possible because Fianna Fail have come to join the rest of us and not the other way round. In this sense, the position has changed.
The overwhelming endorsement by the Irish people of the Good Friday Agreement stands as a massive vindication of the positions adopted by each political party in the current process. A national cross-party consensus has been arrived at and the central issue that divided civil war politics in this Republic is at an end.
However, does it automatically follow that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael will wither away? Clearly it does not. The left knows, to its cost, the capacity of both parties to secure support to varying degrees from all sections of our community. While there has always been a few individuals within both parties who have been prepared to point out the irrelevance of the split between them, these people - most notably the late John Kelly - have been the exception which proved the rule. And the rule is that both Fianna F‡il and Fine Gael will fight vigorously to maintain their hold on Irish politics.
The task facing the left then is the same as it ever was: to attract broad-based support for a progressive and radical political platform and to ensure the left has ownership over that platform and the values that inform it. Too often in the past it is a task which the left has singularly failed to achieve, so we should not underestimate the difficulties that are involved in doing so now.
So what, therefore, can the left do to make the best of this historic opportunity, having regard to our experience in the past? It should be understood that the Agreement will also provide a new political infrastructure: not just for Northern Ireland, but for all the democratic Assemblies on these two islands. The British/Irish Council, as set out in Article 2 of Strand 3, will 'comprise representatives of the British and Irish Governments, devolved institutions in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales when established and, if appropriate, elsewhere in the United Kingdom, together with representatives of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.' There would be informal meetings at different levels and on different topics by the elected representatives of the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Scottish Assembly and the Welsh Assembly, as well as members of the Westminster parliament. It is not clear, at this stage, as to how both the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands Assemblies will participate; accordingly I am not automatically including them at this point. Nevertheless their inclusion would in no way invalidate the suggestions that I propose to make.
As is normal in all democratic Assemblies, the various parties represented in them have formed political groupings based on ideological positions. This is the case not only in the European Parliament, but also in the Committee of the Regions of the European Union and in the Council of Europe. Accordingly, Labour would propose to our sister parties in all of the above Assemblies, that a Labour Parliamentary Group should be formed among the representatives from the various Assemblies who are members of the Party of European Socialists. The objectives of this group should be, in my view, to advance the left agenda within the context of making the Agreement work to its full potential.
Let me give two examples that indicate the range which exists for co-operation. Firstly, the two jurisdictions of Ireland and the United Kingdom, with 64 million people, have at the present time the most integrated labour market within the European Union. That integration will deepen when Britain joins the single currency sometime in the year 2002. There is already a real need to ensure that the operation of the social welfare systems, including labour market measures, are harmonised as much as possible. I am referring more to the standards of eligibility and the criteria for entitlement rather than to the actual rates of payment: I presume that the levels of payment will continue to vary. However, there is a clear argument for harmonising the periods of qualification and other forms of qualifications for entitlement. The reason being that such harmonisation between all of the jurisdictions on both islands should reflect the integration of the labour market and so be in the interests of working people in our increasingly mobile society.
Secondly, the resolution of the antagonistic conflict, represented as 'The Irish Question' with the endorsement of the Good Friday Agreement by 95 per cent in the Republic and 73 per cent in Northern Ireland has implications for how we handle the teaching of history in our schools.
Conor Cruise OÕBrien and Professor John A Murphy were among the first intellectuals and politicians to challenge the negative aspects and consequences of the traditional nationalist analysis which dominated the teaching of history at secondary school level in the Republic. In Northern Ireland the teaching of history was even more divisive, with two separate and conflicting stories of historical events being presented at second-ary level. Within Britain itself there may also be a need to review the way the history of the relations of the two islands and the four nations is described and presented. Perhaps we are at a point where we could begin to explore the idea of a shared and common set of history textbooks and related educational material for all of our second-level students.
While the benefits in Northern Ireland are clearly manifest, the Republic's young students could, for example, compare and contrast the impact of the clearances in Scotland with that of the famine in Ireland. Within these islands, one nation's victories frequently represents another nation's set of defeats. Indeed the emphasis on the national aspect of historical experience ignores - probably deliberately - the class nature of the common experience of working people in all four nations.We have the opportunity within the framework of the Agreement to address these kinds of issues. It would, I believe, be the task of the Labour Parliamentary Group in such a combined Assembly as proposed under the British-Irish Council, to arrive at common positions on issues such as the two that I have used by way of example and to present coherent positions in favour of progressive change. Such positions could logically and properly be followed up in the domestic Assemblies from which the individual members came in the first place.
If we are successful, then not only will we consolidate the Agreement, we will also reinforce the centrality of the message of the left and its relevance to the progress of existing and future generations on these islands. By extension, such progress on the left will diminish the attractiveness and strength of nationalism in all of the five democratic Assemblies.
Maybe the Taoiseach should revisit his speech in Ballyconnell and think again. For ourselves, we have to make sure that, this time, we do not allow the narrow vision of nationalism to obscure the progressive horizons of our futures.
Ruairi Quinn is TD for Dublin South-East and Leader of the Labour Party