Compared to many other states southern lagged behind in the greer inspired rush to sell off the public utilities on the cheap. The public sector accounts for one tenth of Ireland's GDP, of the 20 state owned utilities, to date just four have been pushed into the private sector, Irish Sugar, Irish Life, Irish Steel and B&I Ferries. However this is all about to change big-time.
The Fianna Fail led government intends to sell off Telecom Eireann this summer and has also ordered the sale of Cable Link. A plan to merge Aer Lingus into one of the giant multi-national airlines is well under way, Aer Rianta the airports authority has been instructed to draw up a privatisation plan and Team Aer Lingus has just been sold to the Dutch company FLS.
The state run Irish Fertiliser Industries is up for sale as is the state owned bank ACC, the likelihood is that CIE the bus and rail company will follow suit. The national electricity suppler ESB is to face private competition.
The sale of the state sector is being justified on the basis of the usual ideological neo-liberal cant, to improve service, to enhance the performance of the state sector, to raise money for the exchequer and to widen share ownership.
In theory an Irish left should not find it too difficult to shoot down the arguments now being touted on behalf of privatisation. There exists, for example, a welter of evidence in relation to the British experience of privatisation to show that it has not been a thrilling economic success and certainly done little to improve services (Martin and Parker's recently published study of 1l privatisations).
The problem is that the official leadership of the Labour and Trade movement 1S SO enthralled by the hyperbolic talk of a Celtic Tiger and so wrapped Dragging Irish Labour further to the right? De Rossa up in the ideology of social partnership that left criticism of the privatisation programme has so far been minimal.
Proudly wearing their social partnership badges leading Trade Union officials from the CWU, CPSU and IMPACT have joined with the management and government in promoting the idea that the selling off of Telecom Eireann will be in the interest of • the common good. The company is to be sold in stages, stage one to be a 35 per cent or Elbillion floatation on the Dublin, London and New York stock exchanges.
Even though the privatisation programme includes a proposal to loose 2,500 jobs, a new six the day week and an 8am to 8pm working day the union officials are busy trying to find ways to persuade workers to go along with it.
To win over the work force they have negotiated a deal with management which involves the workers being offered an The Real Irish Peace Process available (£6 plus 70p p&p)
from Socialist Outlook, PO Box 1109 London N4 2UU Employee Share Option Plan ESOP). Workers are being advised to take up the offer of control over a 14 per cent per cent shares stake in return for their co-operation in the privatisation process. Telecom workers are being offered the bribe of a 5 per cent gift of free shares and the setting up of a union trust with a £60 million loan to buy a further nine per cent of share at a 20 per cent discount. Similar ESOP schemes are being negotiated in other privatisation deals.
For those workers not impressed with the union's dealmaking skills the top officials have been using two other ploys to bring them into line. Union officials have made it known that if the workforce votes against the deal at the end of February a 5.3 per cent pay rise for the Leading coming year will be Trade Union lost.
Another spin is officials have joined that the privatiwith the government in sation IS promoting the idea that inevitable selling off Telecom whether workers like it or Eireann will be for not as it 1s in common line with the good Irish government fulfilment of an EU directive which is legally binding.
Last week Minister Mary O'Rourke, in an effort to raise potential investor confidence in the privatisation, sacked the company board on the advice of investment bank Merrill Lynch.
The new chairman is to be none other than Ireland's foremost advocate of neo-liberal policies, Fianna Failer Ray MacSharry. In a laughable gesture to the feelings of the workforce, Dick Spring was appointed to the new board "to look after the best interests of Telecom's workers." Spring has lost no time in acquiring for himself a string of such boardroom positons.
Workers resistance to the privatisation of Telecom will probably follow the way of Team Aer Lingus.
On several occasions workers at Team voted against privatisation, in response the union officials just kept coming back and coming back with slightly altered proposals for a yes vote until Eyes A column from Socialist Democracy, Irish section of the Fourth International eventually they got what they wanted.
Shay Cody Deputy General Secretary of IMPACT, a key player in the negotiations is sounding confident. This wearing down of rank and file morale by the union bureaucracy in the interest of the plans of management is what social partnership is really all about.
Whilst it is difficult to fight the ethos of social partnership in today's conditions, a passive acquiescence in the face of the privatisation programme should not be encouraged or condoned. Socialists can use such occasions to relate to those workers who continue to vote against the advice of their union officials and to intensify the wider political campaign against another instalment of social partnership.
Although the Irish state sector 1s nol a bastion of socialism against capitalism it nevertheless came in to being because the Irish capitalist class was unwilling to risk their own capital in building up essential national public utilities, preferring to invest abroad.
The state sector was paid for by the Irish working class and so belongs to them, it has over many decades been a haven for tens of thousands of workers against the insecurity and anarchy of the market.
Today it is as essential as ever to defend the principle of common ownership from the attacks of possessive individualism.
When the leaders of the Labour Party and Democratic Left first floated the idea of fusion there were still a few newspaper columnists around who said it would probably never happen.
It was felt that the past record of the political leadership of the Democratic Left, ex-Republican and Euro-Communists was so littered with political corpses that the respectable middle class leaders of Labour would think twice about admitting them into 'their' party less they bring into being yet more sectarian turmoil.
No political faction in Ireland can match the extraordinary ideological circumvention that has been the life of Prionsas De Rossa and friends.
From IRA inmates in the 1950s (Sinn Fein) to ultra Provo opponents in the early seventies(Sinn Fein Workers Party) 10 loyal friends of Moscow in the eighties (the Workers Party) to left alternates of the Labour Party in the eighties, to breakers with the Workers Party the early nineties, to government coalition partners with the traditional right wing of Irish politics Fine Gael in the mid-nineties; and now into So the ideological gymnasts of Irish politics have pulled off yet another somersault. On Monday January 25 it was revealed that the four remaining DL deputies are to take up front bench positions within the Labour party, De Rossa himself is to be the opposition spokesperson on foreign affairs.
One of the biggest surprises must be the fact that 90 per cent of the Labour party membership voted in favour of taking them in, only two prominent members resigned in protest.
The DE's vote collapsed to 3 per cent in the last election and for them this looks like nothing more than a last ditch attempt at personal survival on behalf of a handful of career politicians.
What. really explains the willingness of the Labour Party to take DL under their wing is their own dismal record of political betrayals of their working class constituency.
Ten percent support In the 1997 election the vote of the Labour Party sank to a mere 10 per cent from an historic high of 19 per cent in 1992.
What happened in between was that the party, elected on a set of promises to stand up for the interests of the working class, betrayed the trust of those who believed in them by entering into an unprincipled government coalition not with just one right wing party but with two, first Fianna Fail and then with Fine Gael.
When the party leader Dick Spring was campaigning in the 1992 election he pledged his support to Aer Lingus workers fighting redundancy, the result was that his coalition government oversaw a thousand redundancies.
The Labour Party was in office at a time of unprecedented economic growth, but its reforms were non existent. Tax on company profits were cut by 4 per cent, tax amnesty for the wealthy was introduced as was the selling of passports to the rich.
After R. Quinn's first budget the Sunday business post ran a front passage with the headline 'Ruairi's bourgeois budget. In 1997 thousands paid Labour back by not voting for them.
The bigger Labour party is now saying it is aiming to get between 20 and 25 per cent of the vote at the next election. As things stand Ireland has the smallest labour vote in the EU(13%):
It is. obvious that Labour has learnt nothing from its previous electoral failures, staking a claim on the tiny 3 per cent vote still held by DL does not even begin to retrieve the working class votes the party lost in 1997 due to its right wing policies.
basic requirement should have been a Labour party that was preparing a modern left programme: instead we end up with the most right wing leadership the party has ever had.
United in betrayal: the Labour Party and Democratic Left