Rabbitte is Labour’s Sticky Wicket
Apr 28th, 2007 by Conor McCabe
John Dwyer, the Sinn Féin candidate for Wexford, has an interesting election poster.
At the moment only Fine Gael and the PDs have put billboards up in the town, and both are calling for your no.1, reminding us how great they are as people and as public representatives. The Fine Gaelers all wear suits, while Colm O’Gorman for the PDs is, quite literally, having a laugh.
To date, Labour has not put up any posters or billboards for their sole candidate, Brendan Howlin, but they have started door-to-door canvassing.
The Sinn Fein poster, however, has none of the laughing suits or permatans of Fine Gael’s Kehoe, Twomey or D’Arcy, nor the tickle-tickle cuddly blokeness of O’Gorman.
At its top, before the name of the candidate or before any statement of how great they are as people, there are printed just three words.
Join Sinn Féin.
No number ones, no permatans, no suits and no giggles. Just join us.
It caught my eye a couple of days back, and reminded me that while the left-wing of Labour and Sinn Féin has a lot in common at a policy level, tactically they are worlds apart. Furthermore, the Irish mainstream media has absolutely no comprehension of this difference.
Stephen Collins in Friday’s Irish Times (sub req) attributed a significant part of Sinn Fein’s 10% showing in the latest opinion poll to recent developments at Stormont. “Sinn Féin†wrote Collins, “is clearly getting a real boost from the agreement with Ian Paisley to establish a power sharing executive in the North.†A strange analysis as the 10% in the opinion poll was based on core support.
But Collins’ article is full of sloppy analysis. Later on he states that “the Greens are also suffering from the rise of Sinn Féin. This is particularly noticeable in Dublin. Support for the Greens has halved in the capital while Sinn Féin has almost doubled.†What a crude conclusion! One goes up, one goes down. Ipso Facto dipshit mathematics. Yep. Sinn Féin taking votes from the sandal-slappers. Oh, and Sinn Féin is also taking votes from Fianna Fáil as well, the nationalist working-class vote that the soldiers have held onto for so long. Well keep your options open Steve.
With regard to Labour, Collins holds out that while Labour’s vote has dropped, the party should do well on transfers from Fine Gael. Again, there is no evidence to support this conclusion. In the last election only 8% of Fine Gael votes transferred to Labour, while 15% of Labour voters transferred to Fine Gael (see below).
Sinn Féin is gaining votes because, like Sunderland under Keane, it works bloody hard for them. It establishes branches and creates political activists. It campaigns, it gets things done – quite simply, it is doing all the things a political party should do if it wants to attain power.
For all intents and purposes, Gorey is a new town these days, with thousands of new voters. Labour doesn’t really canvass there, nor does it appear interested in doing so. Wexford County, it seems, is a one Labour town. Sinn Féin, on the other hand, is out there every night getting people not only to vote for them, but to join up as well. And Sinn Fein has been doing that across the island for at least twenty years, building up its party organisation.
Developments in the North are a bonus to Sinn Féin, but they have built up that Southern support through hard graft, and not through the recent appropriation of a nationalist working-class and environmental middle-class vote through the positive Stormont meetings, as Collins believes.
Going on the opinion polls, Rabbitte might have to resign come the results. Whoever replaces him needs to learn from Sinn Féin’s organisation and tactics, before the party is overtaken for good.
Very succint appraisal and, to my mind entirely correct. SF has learned from those that came, like John the Baptist to it’s Jesus, before it. There is no substitute for (as you say) the hard graft of constituency politics. End of story. Labour, sadly, seem to think otherwise, and then they wonder why PSF is the coming thing.
The most bizarre thing about it is that those who now are in charge of Labour came from precisely this background but, they appear to have forgotten the lessons they themselves gave.
I agree entirely. Though I would never vote for the Shinners (too many hoodlums in the mix for them to qualify as a genuine leftist party, and I’ve had this argument with life-long Shinner friends of mine) the pathetic response of the Labour party is best summed up in the last-gasp effort of Ruairi Quinn to garner votes at the last election. He said that a vote for Sinn Féin was equivalent to a vote for Le Pen (running high obviously on the French fascist’s then-recent popularity). No, Ruairi, Sinn Féin, however you might characterise them, are not le FN. And neither is that an appropriate explanation for why the Labour party did nothing whatsoever to win working-class votes in that period, and obviously nothing has changed under the Stickies.
It’s true about Labour’s current leadership. you couldn’t get a more hardworking party in its day than the Stickies. where the hell has that gone? Rabbitte was known by the starlarts of the workers’ party as the “student prince”, and never really trusted. Too much of a careerist. All well and good, but he’s lacking in balls as well. Too busy fondling Enda’s.
god. I HATE this bloody pact.