Fianna Fail flounders

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CHARLES J Haughey, recently defeated prime minister and leader of Fianna Fail, survived a meeting of his Dail [Parliamentary] party last week - by promising that he would go, but in his own time.

That his time is now likely to be short is agreed by most of the professional Fianna Fail watchers.

A long series of scandals has shaken Fianna Fail and deepened the split that opened when Haughey shouldered Jack Lynch out of the leadership three rears ago. Some of the scandals are farcical.

A man since convicted for iwo especially nasty murders is on the run from the police and finds refuge in the home of. the Attore! General! A minister uses the powers of the sov. ereigo Irish Republic te interfere with the prosecu tion of a relative for a traffic offence. (The Northern Ireland police were asked to pick up a 'dangerous' witness and held him for a few days).

A prominent Fianna Fail supporter of Haughey is, in effect (though there is a thin disguise of words around it) offered £100,000 to ditch Haughey: he has taken the precaution to have cronies use police equipment to tape-record the conversation.

Haughey, on his way out as laoiseach iprime minister] rushes to make a political appointment to the police force. Leading political journalists, including one for the Fianna Fail püper Irish Press, have their phones tapped they are known to be on intimate terms with Garret Fitzgerald and with anti Haugheyites in Fianna Fail (thus the 'Haugheygate' tag).

All this is especially important because it is part of what may be a fundamental shift in southern Irish polities - the decline of Fianna Fail.

In the last few years Fine Gael, for 50 years the weaker bourgeois party which could only govern as part of coalitions, has increased its Dail strength, while Fianna Fail has weakened. They are not too far apart now, and the Fine Gael/Labour coalition has a stable majority.

More important, bowerer, Fianna Fail has been ruptured by savage powerstruggles which saw off Jack Lynch and now, it seems, Haughey. The discipline and cohesion of this party of one-time revolutionaries is shattered, and may never recover.

If the party goes into real decline it will open the road it has long blocked - the road to a powerful political party of the working class. (Whether that would be a development of the present Irish Labour Party is another question).

Fianna Fail has been a populist party of limited social reforms and the major party of the working class and the smail farmers. It has also had the powerful mystique (partly myth) of 'the Republican party' which was the unyielding defender of Irish rights against Britain.

Fianna Fail and its predecessor pushed the labour movement aside, and the leaders of the labour movement led themselves be pushed, during the Anglo-Irish war. Whereas ihe forces of the labour movement were central to the 1916 Rising led by James Connolly, Connolly's successors in the leadership of the labour movement, though they organised general strikes during the war of independence, did not contest the 1918 election. They left a clear field for the nationalists (Sinn Fein).

Labour never recoverer the initiative. The Fianna Fail splinter from Sinn Fein became the party of the poor and oppressed, and Labour a satellite first of Fianna Fail and then, for 35 years, of Fine Gael.

The fact that southern Ireland has changed into a mainly urban society in the last 25 years must be an added pressure to displace the Fianna Fail party of basically rural populism — once it begins to crack.

It seems to be cracking.

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Socialist Organiser no: 118 Februar 3

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