Against the Tide (41 page)

I was promptly condemned for my temerity in questioning the analysis of the Labour Party leadership. I was to find myself in trouble for making these somewhat obvious proposals as a counter to
their irresponsible claims for instant socialism. I was damned for my pessimism, yet such a re-grouping on ideological lines still remains to be achieved as an essential pre-condition to a genuine
ending to civil war politics in the Republic.

F
OLLOWING the general election in 1969 — Fianna Fáil were returned to power with 75 seats, Labour winning 18 and Fine
Gael 50 — the unjustified demoralisation and disillusionment of the Labour leadership was reminiscent of what had happened earlier in Clann na Poblachta. The leadership had anticipated being
swept to power in the new wave of socialism, just as Seán MacBride had hoped for success in an earlier wave of republicanism. Without a backward glance at their socialist Republic, their
oaths against coalition, or their threat to go to the backbenches, they prepared to seek office otherwise. Standing for Labour, I was re-elected in Dublin South-East, with 5,724 first preferences
to Garret FitzGerald’s 8,412 and Seán Moore’s 4,979. I continued to advocate a socialist solution to the economic problems of unemployment, poor housing, and neglect of the
aged.

From 1969 to the mid-seventies it became noticeable that our Labour Party policy statements were being carefully orientated to dovetail with the conservative thinking of the Fine Gael party. I
realised that I was wrong in my earlier assumption that the new leadership of the Labour party genuinely shared my political commitment to socialism. I had believed that it would be possible for
them even to enter coalition and survive with suitable safeguards. The almost total defection of the Labour Party from socialism between 1969 and 1975 soon cleared up that mistaken belief. For the
second time in twenty years a radically-minded generation of young Irishmen and women felt betrayed. Not surprisingly, they became sadly disenchanted with politics and the parliamentary system.

Isolated in a party which had only one objective, office at any price, I felt a hopeless sense of entrapment. There appeared to be no worthwhile political action open to me. I decided that I
should try to remind Irish society, the unions and the political parties, that parliament was not simply a sterile bureaucracy concerned solely with ward-heeling activities. Traditionally it was
the function of a Labour Party to articulate the needs of the underprivileged and down-trodden. Yet the Labour Party appeared to avoid such issues deliberately. It had set out to ingratiate itself
with the power institutions and the financial groups. Politically it appeared to wish to merge into Fine Gael. Connolly’s Labour Party had simply become a political trading stamp for use in
exchange for a handful of Cabinet seats in a coalition government.

At a public meeting of the Labour Party held in Tramore on 23 April 1971, I made a comprehensive statement calling for an alternative set of objectives and policies for the Labour Party. I dwelt
at some length on the powerful influence of the Catholic Church, which I described as being comparable to the influence of the Orange Order in the North of Ireland. If we were to change Irish
society in ways appropriate for Connolly’s socialist labour party, then this control of education by the church must be altered radically.

I numbered the most obvious ways in which the church interfered with political decisions — the powerful influence of the confessional, the use of the pulpit and the pastoral letter, and
finally, the perennial secret and undisclosed interference by the bishops in political matters. I put it to those present that the Labour Party must show that we in the south were free to debate,
discuss, and decide on all matters which concerned our people’s lives, issues such as coeducation, interdenominational education, inter-church marriages, homosexuality, abortion, capital
punishment, corporal punishment, contraception, divorce, socialism and Marxism.

‘It is time’, I concluded, ‘that our people got off their knees, and our people, both in the north and in the south, finally took on the responsibility of governing themselves,
uniting our unhappy divided nation, under the common name of Irishmen’.

This was the occasion on which I finally came to understand the remarkable poverty of spirit within the Labour Party. This fear of the church affected all classes in the parliamentary Labour
Party in an identical manner as it had affected my Cabinet colleagues in the coalition twenty years before. Consciously or not, it was the last serious move I was to make in what John Whyte
correctly described as my attempt in 1951 to ‘break the mould of Irish society’. Undoubtedly it failed. The meeting of the parliamentary Labour Party on the following day verged on the
hysterical. Indeed, the whole nation, to judge by its newspaper headlines, equally verged on the hysterical. With the single exception of deputy John O’Connell, all those present shared the
conviction that I must be disowned without delay.

As expected, the deputies from rural Ireland were mystified by much of the substance of my criticism and shocked by my suggestion of sexual ambivalence among celibate clergy, and its
consequences through clerical control of the schools. All of them favoured the commonly-held simplistic appreciation in the Republic: ‘If it were not for the Christian Brothers, I would never
have got an education’. They believed that my critique of the true dynamics of power in Irish society was unfair.

I was subjected to varying forms of abuse. Echoes from Clann na Poblachta recurred: ‘You can’t afford to fight the Church’. In twenty years, nothing had changed. What did
surprise me was that the intellectuals and academics competed with one another to dissociate themselves from me and all that I had said. Conor Cruise O’Brien joined with Keating and Thornley
in a mixture of shock and disbelief. Each in his own way hurried to dissociate himself from such sacrilegious and dangerous ideas. At the same time, each carefully signalled to the rural deputies
and to Corish that they need have no fear of a revolt by the intellectuals or academics in the submissive ‘battery hen’ conditions of what passed for politics in the Labour Party.

Brendan Corish was genuinely shocked; he was a devout practising Catholic. At the other extreme was Conor Cruise O’Brien, who in a short essay, ‘The suspecting glance,’ had
written, ‘we philosophers and free spirits feel consciously irradiated as by a new dawn, by the report that the old God is dead’. He was a declared agnostic, and in the US he had been
associated with a number of civil rights activities; he must have agreed with all I had said, yet under minimal pressure he succumbed to the most sordid kind of domestic politics.

Until I read Cruise O’Brien’s strange confession in the
New York Times
in 1985 about having been ‘liberated’ from the political process, ‘from having to
say things which I did not necessarily believe’, it was hard to understand his strange reaction. I was among those who had gladly and publicly welcomed him into the Labour Party. With his
liberal record in the United States, we had hoped he would help to broaden and rationalise our way out of the unthinking sectarianism of Irish public life. Instead, regrettably, O’Brien and
Keating, the two most polished and talented politicians I know, failed our society. Their behaviour well illustrated the phrase used by my wife in a comment on an optimistic claim made by Michael
McInerney, political correspondent of the
Irish Times
, following the formation of the disastrous 1973 coalition. ‘Now we have a government of all the talents’, wrote McInerney.
‘Yes’, was her comment, ‘Undoubtedly, but how will they use them?’

Thornley dismissed my intervention as a typical piece of blundering foolishness. What could they expect from me? His main concern, however, and much to her surprise, was for his wife, Petria. A
fine lady, respected by all of us, she was a teacher in a convent school. Now in a voice on the edge of tears that did not conceal a wickedly smiling eye, the artist Thornley drew us a picture to
melt a heart of teak. There was the hushed, silent, embarrassed Petria. Eyes downcast, properly penitential, swathed in sackcloth, near to tears, she stumbles her way into her classroom to face not
only her open-eyed, shocked young pupils but also her equally stunned teacher-nun colleagues, headed by the Reverend Mother, all of these ladies in voices of murmured horror reading the dread abuse
of them by the Labour Party spokesman, Dr. Noël Browne. Thornley pleaded, ‘What is she to say, what is her defence? What is our defence?’ Thornley chose to fasten on that subject
which, with socialism, causes the most anxiety in the Republic, that is sex. He said I had created in the public mind the idea that these good ladies, with their brother and priest colleagues, were
a band of homosexuals and lesbians who cavorted around their nunneries, convents and monasteries in wild orgies, not to mention what went on with their under-age pupils in the garden sheds of our
national schools. All this tirade was because I had dared to refer to the possibility of ambivalent and confused sexual attitudes among some of those who choose voluntary celibacy in religious
orders, and had asked whether there might not be undesirable repercussions for our children.

At this stage Conor Cruise O’Brien intervened with a crisp denunciation of the impropriety of the speech, and the political foolishness of the speaker. His theme echoed Cosgrave, de Valera
and MacBride before him: ‘You can’t afford to fight the Church’.

That was my last attempt to drag the reluctant Republic out of the nineteenth century. On 30 April 1971, speaking on TV, radio, and in the newspapers on behalf of all the members of the
parliamentary Labour Party, none dissenting, Corish gladly denounced and disowned my speech and its contents.

Happily I have lived to see many of the proposals which I made in the Tramore speech either accepted into the law of the land, or becoming subjects of mature deliberation and discussion
throughout the Republic. One of my most vituperative critics, Barry Desmond, no doubt for his own sound political reasons as a deputy in a predominantly Protestant liberal constituency, now freely
promotes and advocates ideas that he, with Cluskey and others, anathematised in 1971 as an ‘insult to the Church’ when I first expressed them. What if Labour had chosen to give that
radical leadership then?

It is important to distinguish office and power. They are by no means synonymous. From his earliest experience in the first coalition government, watching Norton’s helplessness in office
and without power in formulating a comprehensive social insurance scheme, Corish must have learnt this simple truth, as had I. Because the Labour Party was predominantly composed of conservative
rural deputies, it was a Labour Party as such in name only.

With other intellectuals such as Conor Cruise O’Brien and Keating, David Thornley worked tirelessly to assume leadership of what Keating behind their backs called ‘the
culchies’ of the Labour Party. These were the cute rural deputies, Spring, Coughlan, Michael Pat Murphy and others who could, with a practised ease, ‘build a nest in your ear, while
minding mice at a crossroads’. Whereas Cruise O’Brien simply concentrated on flattering and supporting Corish in his beliefs and policies, Keating and Thornley appeared to concentrate
more on assuming leadership of the rural deputies. Keating simply weighed in on their side, at the appropriate time, and with effect. But David set out to shed the impression he might have given
that at any time he shared our socialist beliefs. The ease with which the despised rural deputies survived to live on politically and prosper in Irish public life long after the disappearance of
the intellectuals tells its own tale of Irish politics.

Thornley was also involved in ingratiating himself with the inner cabal of Cluskey, Halligan, Keating, Cruise O’Brien and others to bring the parliamentary Labour Party and Fine Gael
together, in anticipation of yet another coalition with Fine Gael. Brendan Halligan was the puppet-master extraordinary who master-minded the 1973 coalition that ended sixteen years of Fianna
Fáil government. It became an essential condition, laid down, I understand, by Fine Gael, that before any coalition was entered into the Labour Party must ‘get rid of Noël
Browne’. In pursuit of this objective Thornley was to play his own eager part in bringing about my expulsion. The activities of that close-knit inner mafia contributed to the decline of the
Labour movement in the Republic to its position today — a fall of electoral support from between 18 per cent and 20 per cent to a mere 5 per cent.

Thornley was to do his most useful and valuable educative political work while involved with Muiris MacConghail in the popular RTE current affairs programme ‘Seven Days’. Thornley
made no attempt to invite me to take part in this programme, until I made a speech in Leinster House which they appear to have misunderstood, believing that I favoured a coalition government.
Knowing David somewhat better by now, I knew that it was to be my function in the programme discussion to which I was invited to promote his idea of a coalition. I agreed to take part.

I was happy to collaborate with the Thornley-MacConghail plan until just before the conclusion. It was then that I decided to call a halt, by the use of a seemingly spontaneous ‘political
blunt instrument’ remark. Asked about the true function of the minority in coalition, I replied, ‘Just as soon as we achieve our political objectives in any coalition with a
conservative party, it is the responsibility of a smaller radical party to “pull the trap” on the other parties.’ While no one was or is prepared to say that this is so,
inevitably it must be the objective of each party in the coalition to increase their representation, even at the expense of the coalition government. During my period as member of the first
coalition, I felt no sense of corporate loyalty to the other members of the government, with the possible exception of the Labour Party, nor they to me. Understandably, none of this inbuilt battle
for votes inseparable from a coalition relationship was contained in the Thornley script. For myself, I hoped that the effect of my candid exposure of the reality of coalition politics would help
at least to slow down the inevitable coalition which I saw ahead. I did not re-appear on ‘Seven Days’ thereafter.