Through Irish Eyes
A new left voice in the Dail
Ireland has a new left wing voice in the Dail after the election of Seamus Healy from the local Workers and Unemployed Action Group in the Tipperary South by-election.
Healy topped the poll after nearly doubling his share of the vote from the 1997 general election and after the ruling Fianna Fail vote underwent an unprecedented collapse. It was the worst by-election result for the party in the history of the state, and one of its leaders was forced to confess that the fall by over 14 per cent was 'huge'.
Corruption had been 'at the core of this by-election' Healy insisted, and the vote took place just after yet another scandal had rocked the southern establishment.
The latest affair is really the sting in the tail of events going back to 1996 when a working class woman was killed by a well connected architect, Phillip Sheedy, while the latter was drunk and driving at high speed, showing 'recklessness of an extraordinary degree.'
He was sentenced to four years in jail despite one judge, Cyril Kelly, attempting to get the trial judge to realise that Sheedy was a 'graduate' from 'a good family' and would be in a position to compensate the dead woman's family.
Review
A year later a solicitor unconnected to the case got a phone call from a senior court official telling him that judge Kelly was waiting to review the case (although only the original trial judge was supposed to be able to do this) and asking when an application for review going to be made.
This intervention was made after Sheedy's sister apparently bumped into a Supreme Court judge, Hugh O'Flaherty, in the street and asked him if anything could be done about the case. O'Flaherty told the court official to get the case relisted - and sure enough it came before judge Cyril Kelly, who freed Sheedy in proceedings lasting only a few moments, in which no submissions were made by any lawyer, and while the only state solicitor at the court was on a phone call.
As soon as Sheedy appeared in court the judge expressed concern for his mental health on the basis of a psychological report that didn't exist, and which Kelly subsequently tried to add to the file.
When the shit hit the fan, a judicial inquiry into the affair was set up - but not unexpectedly failed to get to the bottom of it ,and failed in particular to reveal collusion between Kelly and O'Flaherty. O'Flaherty refused to answer questions from the Dail about the affair and resigned rather than face the impeachment proceedings that were being forced on the government.
It might have joined the ranks of all the other scandals that have hit the headlines but for the fact that Fianna Fail, which 12 months earlier had threatened to impeach him, nominated O'Flaherty to the Eur147,000 a year post of vice-president of the European Investment Bank.
Having failed to explain his behaviour, his apologists among government ministers claimed his intervention was prompted by purely humanitarian motives. Unfortunately the tidal wave of public anger forced O'Flaherty into a radio interview where he explicitly rejected this but failed to explain himself.
Soon forgotten
Public anger was further inflamed when the Tanaiste, Mary Harney, from the supposedly squeaky clean Progressive Democrat coalition partner, claimed the public would forget about it all in a matter of months.
There had been some grounds for this confidence. Until very recently opinion polls had not shown dramatic falls in the government's popularity and even the most recent had not predicted the collapse that the by-election has produced. Commentators are now saying that this latest scandal is the last straw that will break the camel's back and that a general election is on the way in the autumn.
Unfortunately the choices that will be before Irish workers at that election will be dire. There is no state wide left alternative as existed in Tipperary South, and the left victory there is the culmination of hard local work going back over fifteen years.
The Workers and Unemployed Action Group has seven representatives on local authorities but is a purely local phenomenon. There is nowhere else where the left has this implantation and only a few other constituencies have a credible left candidate.
A strategy of simply copying this victory is therefore not on. Not that this is a search for short cuts. There will be no alternative to patient work at local level, but a simple concentration on this work would be a collapse into the worst sort of electoralism that would have severe effects on the politics of any left force attempting such an approach.
Lead
This puts more responsibility on the new TD and the Socialist Party's existing TD, Joe Higgins, to take the lead in posing a new way forward for the left.
The first task would be to build resistance to social partnership that has shackled the workers movement to the requirements of Ireland's Celtic Tiger economy.
So far The Socialist Party have simply used Higgins as a means to build their own organisation, with limited results, but this is an evasion of responsibility.
Whether the new TDs are up to the task of staking out a new way forward for the left is the question to be posed by all socialists in Ireland today.