Why is the Irish Labour party such a failure ?

Loafing Oaf

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671556#Comment_118671556

I don't think they had much room for maneuver once they entered that government; we were in a bailout programme and obliged to follow austerity measures. Their real misstep was making a load of promises before the 2011 election they must have known they would be unable to honour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE_-Fp7lGSk

IMO those broken promises and their failure to do a proper mea culpa for them along these lines

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUDjRZ30SNo

are responsible for Labour's failure to regain the trust of left-leaning voters. And as others have pointed out those voters have plenty of other options.

El_Duderino 09

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118669710#Comment_118669710

Ok, so my mrs wouldnt know any of this stuff, she would have to assume it. And this is precisely the kind of purity test that's applied to anyone who purposes policies to actually make things better. But isn't applied to a politician who will propose any policy thst sounds popular with the general outline regardless of of how it affects to the service users.

You demonstrat that in how you've set up the scenario that the labour candidate has moved constituency so take a place from a more deserving candidate, and bamboozle people with buzzwords and bluff. But you don't know that. It's just an assumption. It's an additional purity test that only applies to politicians who act on behalf of people less well off then themselves - and the assumption is that they fail the test. Lazily summed up in the phrase "champagne/smoked salmon socialist".

iffandonlyif

As said before, they lack the calibre of previous generations - Gilmore, Rabbitte, Quinn, De Rossa and others had strong personalities and trade union / student union backgrounds, as well as being capable ministers. Alan Kelly has a strong personality but little else, and O Riordain has nothing.

They are also, like all left wing parties in Ireland at the moment, being deprived of oxygen by an ascendent SF, whose populist anger and policies are enticing depressingly many people. Many of Labour’s working class voters would have been instinctively nationalist, so a party that prioritises Irish unification and extensive wealth redistribution was always going to undercut Labour.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671809#Comment_118671809

People who vote for minority parties surely need to have the cop on to know that at best they will get a few promises passed in government.

SF don't get everything they promise out of Stormont and FF, Greens and FG don't get everything they want from the coalition and generally if your metric is broken promises then no party anywhere in a democracy passes.

How you conduct yourself in a coalition is the issue. The Greens backed crooked Bertie and Labour spent more time backing up FG than pushing what they got out of the coalition and both rightly paid.

El_Duderino 09

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118670150#Comment_118670150

Why should someone stick only to their local area? She probably sees herself as doing even more good by shaping the parties national policy.

Look, it's easy to see why you might prefer someone you don't like stay in a harmless area whee they can never realistically get elected.

Do you apply the same standard to other politicians? What's MM doing above in Dublin, running the whole government? Shut he's from Cork. Maybe everyone should stay in their constituency and never aspire for more. Maybe they shouldn't try to represent a whole constituency. Maybe they should stick to local councils. Or maybe whole councils are too big, maybe they should just represent their townsland or maybe just their street.

This is a purity test only applied to left wing candidates (with the built in assumption thst theyre playing the voters. MM and LV can run the national government and that's fine, but a left wing candidate moves from a constituency they can't realistically win so they can lead their party and that's seen as wrong? Better to run a tiny, probably part-time SF office in Rathgar, than lead the national party?

Bannasidhe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118667854#Comment_118667854

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118668071#Comment_118668071

Indeed.

Dev's Fianna Fail positioned it's as the party of the working man, Bertie made a fetish of being a 'man of the people' - i.e populist.

Leo's FG promised to look after those who get up early - i.e. populist.

Honestly - the term gets flung around like snuff at a wake when people want to have a dig at (usually ) Left(ish) parties but is strangely absent when populist promises like abolishing rates or the USC are bandied about

No party in a democracy will gain power by appealing only to the elite - they all need populist polices (i.e. those the non-elite find attractive) to gain enough votes.

Dyr

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671854#Comment_118671854

All Stickies (bar Quinn). Once their Russian paymasters went out of business, they took over the Labour party and used it to feather their own nests.

A match well made 😂

My Father was LABOUR all his life & I guess I inherited that.......im ashamed of it now but for many elections I canvassed & voted LABOUR. They failed when they got into bed & became a mudgard for FF who, in hindsight, played them like a fiddle. The straw that eventually broke the camels back....that turned me totally against the Labour party was when the lovely Joan casually did away with the bereavement grant....no fanfare....no hullabaloo......just a " oh yeah the bereavement grant is gone too". It was basically a leg-up to help with funeral expenses ( I think it was €850 when she scrapped it) . Someone, having contributed to society all their life, paid taxes, on their passing their next of kin got a modest grant towards their bereavement & she scrapped that though the saving to the government was/is minimal. Obviously, there was a myriad of other reasons but that was the clincher for me.

Bass Reeves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671809#Comment_118671809

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671639#Comment_118671639

Problem for labour was they over promised in 2011 to get into power. Most of there promises were never going to be possible to uphold.

As FG were getting within a whisker of an overall majority Labour made promises to middle Ireland ( on college fees and taxation) that it could never uphold.

When FG were not close to an overall majority, Labour should have toned down there promises and left FG gain that overall majority. They would have been the main opposition and FF would have not recovered within one cycle.

Pulling the plug half way through was never an option. It's funny by Labour really protected the unemployed and those depending on SW during this period but these people never thank you as SF will find out.

Middle Ireland never forgave them because of the broken promises

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671913#Comment_118671913

That's not what the term means really. Populist and popular are not the same.

FG were always the party of the "get up early" people which is code for the middle class who believe they got where they are through graft and poorer people are just not getting up out of bed early enough to be rich.

FF have always had a fetish for big state building projects (although I agree on the man of the people Bertie shte)

Populist is things like SF banging on about the "unelected bureaucracts in Brussels" and then suddenly being massively pro EU when the tide turned after Brexit.

LePen is the same switching from anti EU to anti Euro and those ejits at M5S in Italy seem to have a new direction every week.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671953#Comment_118671953

Anyone from middle Ireland or any other Ireland should have known that all Labour promises come with the * of not getting most passed because you will be the minor coalition partner. Anyone who then "never forgives them" is naive.

Looking back now I agree going the opposition route was the better option but there is no guarantee it would work either. Labour could never get the rural foothold that FF or SF can so it might not have worked either. In hindsight though they should have tried.

Bannasidhe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118667880#Comment_118667880

Having been at some point in my life a member of both the Irish and UK LP's you are comparing chalk and cheese. They are very different parties.

UK's LP as envisaged by Kinnock/Blair/Starmer is more like the old Liberal (Whigs) - it presents it'self as more socially caring but still very much part of an establishment based on a Imperialist past (they still believe in the British Empire as a 'good' thing and can't accept it's dead).

Corbyn was a threat to that as he was part of the Socialist part of the LP - the one that brought in the NHS etc etc. Dithering on Brexit was their downfall. That and the whole anti-Semitic B.S media assassination. Israel is grateful a pro-Palestinian PM was avoided.

The Irish LP hasn't has a socialist leader since Connolly. They are utterly rudderless. I agree they appeal to the upper middle classes - but not that this is based on 'identity politics', it's because they are just another version of the Irish Greens - a red tinge rather than a green one but still exists only as a mudguard willing to throw their election promises in the bin at the first whiff of a TD's pension. Both allow smug well-heeled people to have a veneer of social conscience without any danger of real political change.

Loafing Oaf

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671864#Comment_118671864

Seems to me Labour went further than most parties do in their election campaigns; they made absolute line-in-the-sand pledges on specific issues like child benefit and student fees. I think people who voted for them in 2011 on the basis of those promises are fully entitled to feel betrayed and to be very reluctant to trust them again. Particularly in light of Pat Rabbite's open admission of the party's cynicism and contempt for its voters when it comes to such 'promises'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAS0c5AkiNg

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671913#Comment_118671913

Again, the issue is not that the term is overused but that you don't quite understand it. You are confusing "populist" with "trying to be popular".

Edit. Just noticed breazy1985 already covered it in the post above

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118672002#Comment_118672002

Labour have brought tons of real change to this country. For a very long time they were the only party brave enough to even talk of change.

Here is just one fun snipit from the early days of family planning.

In late 1975 the Galway Family Planning Association was set up,[5] which was at the centre of a highly publicised controversy involving the Fine Gael TD Fintan Coogan, Fianna Fáil mayor Mary Byrne and Deirdre Manifold, convenor of a public rosary crusade, on one side, and staff and medical students of what was then known as University College Galway (UCG) on the other.[6] Amongst those supporting the presence of a family-planning clinic were Michael D. Higgins, then a lecturer, and Eamon Gilmore, then a graduate student

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118672007#Comment_118672007

I think it seems to you because that's how you want it to seem to you.

Bannasidhe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671960#Comment_118671960

And I could find you equal examples of every political party running with the hares and hunting with the hounds as it suits.

FG were the party of the big farmers, educated upper middles class, and remnants of Unionism - under Fitzgerald they began to reposition themselves. "Welfare Cheats Cheat us all" plus "people who get up in the morning" are not aimed at the middle class - they are very much aimed at the people who bang on about "dole scroungers" and buy breakfast rolls - populist dog whistles.

You think big building projects aren't populist? Really? "we are going to create xxxx jobs" is an appeal to the elite?

We will abolish rates was aimed at the elite?

I am not saying SF aren't populist. I am in no way, shape, or form defending SF.

I am saying FF, FG, LP, GP also fling out populist promises when it suits their purpose.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671835#Comment_118671835

It is hard to tell what you are saying in these posts. I tried to give an analogy of a workplace and use social services as you said that your missus works there.

I'll try to keep it even more basic.

Would you think that it would ever be possible that somewhere along your missus' chain-of-command that there is someone who is in their job, not because of an inherent desire to help people, but instead because it was just a handy job that they could get by cynically pretending to have an interest in the area?

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118672063#Comment_118672063

Another misunderstanding of what populist is.

orecir

Joan Burton.

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671639#Comment_118671639

What would have replaced them if they had pulled the plug?

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118672169#Comment_118672169

I don't know but my hope would be that we would have still have a pretty strong labour party afterwards.

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118672195#Comment_118672195

And a country with no assets, as FG would have sold off anything not nailed down, and a decimated social welfare system.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671907#Comment_118671907

Do you think MLM is the only electable SF candidate? That wouldn't say a lot about the rest of the party. So that, when she arrived in the door on her way back from handing in her FF membership card, they said "oh, finally, we have someone who can be elected"?

Why couldn't she get elected by Rathgar voters? She couldn't get away with the same guff there but she could have still done the work and spread her message and got elected. It's not as if SF run no candidates there ever is it?

In one of the recent elections, SF parachuted in many candidates into local areas to "reward" those individuals with easy seats at the expense of local SF people. Here is a similar example. https://www.independent.ie/regionals/fingalindependent/news/sf-parachute-in-candidate-from-crumlin-31105227.html There was a local SF councillor who was topping the polls. It was going to be a fairly safe seat for SF but O'Reilly was happy to parachute in to take it off the local man.

Basically, there is a very strong suspicion that the individual just wants the role. It's not actually for any inbuilt belief or ethic. It was just whatever route was the handiest way for them to get into office. It could have been SF or it could have been The Irish Fredom Party or similar nutjobs. It wouldn't have really mattered.

MM is the leader of FF. I haven't heard of him running in Dublin.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118672210#Comment_118672210

That's why I was originally in agreement with Labour forming the coalition but I'm not sure they were all that effective in the second half of the term anyone.

All we can do now is make educated guesses on the roads not taken.

Goldengirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671587#Comment_118671587

Yes. Wasn't Shortall one of those that left then?

I think they should try to iron out their differences with the SDs.

They are the only credible poiticians who are somewhere in the realm of their politics ( eh, what are Labours policies, anyone know? )

They have some excellent young councillors coming up the ranks. It would be good to know what their agenda was for the future.

Every election it feels like you are voting for a party based on quicksand / or evolving as a politician would say :)

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118672313#Comment_118672313

It's crazy for 2 parties that are so similar and with limited resources to be split.

Goldengirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118671937#Comment_118671937

She was disgraceful and an embarassment in government.

Talked herself and her party out of a job.

Dyr

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118672313#Comment_118672313

Social Democrats are just Provisional Labour, They'll merge soon enough once their place at the trough is threatened

Goldengirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118672047#Comment_118672047

Nobody questioning the good work ethic and will of many of those you mention in the party.

Ivana Bacik has been exemplary also in battling for womens rights and equality all along and all that held her back from being elected was the difficult constituency she represents. That and leadership of the party who didn't think she was made of the right stuff!

Its the future of the party as opposed to individuals that is the issue really.