Paul Daly, Rónán O’Brien & Paul Rouse Making the Difference: The Irish Labour Party, 1912-2012 (Collins Press, 2012, 256 pps, €15.99 PB)
Europe supported the First World War as a means of elevating themselves into a position whereby they could gain power, and thus realise their programme of social remediation (pp. 64, 66). Irish politics, it has been said, comprised a ‘two and a half party system’ for much of its history since independence in 1921. This collection of essays, published to commemorate the Labour Party’s centenary as a formal political party, traces the history of this ‘half party’. Labour as a political force, of course, predates the formal foundation of the Irish Trades Union Congress and Labour Party (ITUCLP), as it was initially – and clumsily – titled. The eclectic nature of these essays, from a varied set of contributors, is in some ways a testament to the eclectic nature of the labour movement in Ireland over the last century. Although a survey of the events and trends in 1912 by William Murphy opens the collection, this to my mind hardly suffices as a suitable introduction. The pervasiveness of labour as a sectional force in Irish nationalist (and unionist) history prior to 1912 surely deserved an exploratory survey. While such excellent surveys exist, including John W Boyle’s The Irish Labour Movement in the Nineteenth Century, an essay bringing together the most recent research on labour pre 1912 would surely have added to this collection. By starting in 1912, however, this allows the contributors to examine the sometimes wayward relationship between Labour and nationalist Ireland (as the remaining essays deal very much with the 26-county state post-1920) during the crucible fifteen years following the ITUCLP’s foundation. In their contributions Michael Laffan, Ciara Meehan and William Mulligan demonstrate in their own way the unity among the labour cadre not just in Ireland, but throughout Europe. Mulligan pithily sums this up by declaring that many socialists in 30
Many previous historians have seen Labour’s decision not to contest the December 1918 general election as a watershed, allowing the broader-based Sinn Féin movement to gather working class support. This is rejected to some degree, and Meehan argues that it was crucial decisions made in the aftermath of the foundation of Fianna Fáil in 1926 that allowed support garnered by Labour in 1922 to leak to De Valera’s new party. Kieran Allen, in a study published in 1997, has argued that Fianna Fáil can be seen as the de facto Labour Party among the working classes. There is little in this collection to challenge this view explicitly. Neither is there much to challenge Labour’s perception as the party of ‘smoked salmon socialists’, though Niamh Puirséil chronicles (very entertainingly) the various and varied attacks on Labour by the splintered ‘hard left’ of Irish politics. In many ways, Labour has treated left-wing radical groups in a similar way to how the Irish Parliamentary Party feasted on social movements in the nineteenth century: vampirism. The most recent example being Democratic Left, whose leadership now controls the Labour Party. William Norton’s famous aphorism rings clearly true here: ‘The political party which can’t manoeuvre is dead’. (p. 71) Subsuming radical parties, and attuning them in the Labour ‘way’, has allowed the party to remain fresh – perhaps making up for the organisational paucity outside major urban centres. Fluctuations within the Irish Party system have also contributed to the ebbing and flowing of Labour’s support throughout the last century. Scoláire Staire APRIL 2013