Choosing book titles can be a tricky business. When the Irish Labour Party celebrated its centenary in 2012, one of the projects to mark this landmark was a collection of essays, under the title Making the Difference? The Irish Labour Party 1912-2012, to which historians (myself included), journalists, political scientists and party stalwarts contributed essays on aspects of the party's experience.
The inclusion of the question mark in the title was significant. Although the project was conceived within the Labour Party, it was not, in the words of the editors, an “official” history, “bland and sanitised as they inevitably come.” The contributors highlighted achievements but pulled few punches in documenting the party’s failures, insecurities and sensitivities.
It was to the editors’ credit that whether or not the party has made a difference was left open to debate.
Ruairí Quinn, on the basis of the robust contribution he made to the Labour Party’s “think-in” during the week, would see no reason for the inclusion of the question mark.
The party has, he maintains, defeated the other political parties and “the nationalists”, and dragged the country into the 21st century, a “lonely tribe of adventurers, of pioneers and visionaries” who can manage capitalism because they don’t believe in it. He said he saw himself as an “unreconstructed socialist”.
After nearly 40 years in politics, Quinn is more than entitled to his final war cry and at least he has not indulged in the kind of pirouetting on the plinth to deliver the condescending if poetic putdowns beloved of some of his fellow Labour Party grandees who see no reason for introspection and brook no criticism.
Given that Quinn was rallying the troops, hyperbole and exaggeration were hardly surprising, but he has, at various stages, including in his 2005 memoir Straight Left, teased out the assertions he made this week. He has also highlighted the perennial difficulty of a party that seems unsure how to "go forward with confidence". But at least, unlike most other parties, it engages in self-analysis.
The claim to have defeated “the Free Staters” and the “Fianna Fáilers”, was perhaps a clumsy way of seeking legitimate credit for the party’s history of bravely advocating what were initially seen as radical policies that were ultimately adopted by others.
Quinn’s claim to be an “unreconstructed socialist” can be taken with a grain of salt; at the time Seán Healy headed the Conference of Religious in Ireland, he calculated that in each of the budgets for which Quinn was responsible, as Minister for Finance from 1994 to 1997, the rich benefited most. As Quinn has said himself, his overriding aim on assuming this ministry was “to prove that the Labour Party could manage the economy”; that was certainly not the same as socialist management of the economy.
The third way
Quinn was essentially a champion of the “third way”, what some refer to as “progressive capitalism”, involving rhetorical reminders of the imperfections of capitalism, maintaining limited state regulation of the economy, while, by and large, accepting free market principles.
One justification for this was that, in Quinn’s words, as a junior coalition party, you have to tailor your views “according to the landscape you find yourself in. You have to adapt.”
There were things that were vetoed; Quinn highlighted the proposed privatisation of the ESB, favoured by some in Fine Gael but prevented by Labour. But all that hardly amounts to managing capitalism while not believing in it.
Quinn is correct however, about the contribution the Labour Party has made to greater tolerance and pluralism in Ireland in recent decades; most recently, there would not have been any referendum on marriage equality were it not for its participation in government.
Those who celebrated that referendum result this year may have felt, at least briefly, they were finally living in what Quinn prematurely declared on a visit to Chicago in 1996 was a “post-Catholic pluralist republic”.
Those with non-Catholic children who are struggling with a primary system of education that blatantly discriminates against them still feel this has yet to materialise, but at least some start was made to a critical questioning of the system of school patronage in recent times, which would not have happened without the Labour Party.
As it looks towards 2016, the Labour Party needs to continue to debate how to define a pluralist republic. In recent times there has been little challenging of the pious declarations of Sinn Féin, reflected in Gerry Adams’s insistence earlier this month that his party is “the only republican organisation involved in the republican struggle and in republican activism”.
The Labour Party, despite Quinn’s swansong, is unlikely to embrace socialism a la Jeremy Corbyn any time soon, but given its often-constructive striving to give meaning to the label “Irish republic”, it is entitled to challenge the narrow Adams definition of the “republican struggle.”