Richard Boyd Barrett suggets a way forward.

national | politics / elections | other press Thursday June 07, 2007 19:00 by Red Wedge

Richard Boyd Barrett on coalition, Joe Higgins and the future of the Irish left. From the Irish Times of 7-6-2007.

Labour, the Greens and Sinn Féin had no real record of leading campaigns or protests on the issues that concerned the public. For the most part their opposition to the Government was limited to parliamentary rhetoric and point-scoring rather than active political campaigning on issues.

With little evidence of major policy difference or a campaigning track record, the failure of the three mainstream left parties to inspire the electorate was hardly surprising. Further to the left, while some Independents and Joe Higgins's Socialist Party had a considerably more consistent and active record of challenging the Government on real issues, the problem was fragmentation and division.

Despite a number of attempts to group together socialists and left Independents into an independent left alliance with a national profile, petty sectarianism prevented this from materialising. The socialist lefts' failure to ditch bad habits of ideological and organisational dogmatism also remain a major block to its advance.

Against the background of a very poor overall performance for the left, the shock caused by the People Before Profit Alliance in Dún Laoghaire in coming so close to taking a seat may be a small but significant pointer towards a possible way forward.

The result bucked the national trend and suggests the left's poor showing in the election was not inevitable. A number of factors contributed to this relative success in Dún Laoghaire: crucially, the campaign was based on the development of social movements on a variety of issues. The People Before Profit Alliance in Dún Laoghaire emerged from a coming together of activists from the Save Our Seafront campaign, the anti-bin tax campaign, agitations around housing, planning and local services, the anti-war movement and a number of other campaigns.