Labour puts the boot in to show they’re on the ball

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

Former Irish soccer international and manager Mick McCarthy was once challenged on why he cleared the ball over the touchline so often while defending.

“Well, I’ve never seen anybody score from Row G,” was his laconic reply.

McCarthy’s method for keeping the opposition at bay wasn’t pretty. But it was effective.

At their party convention at the weekend, Labour went big on the velvet when it came to presentation and even bigger on the bludgeon when dealing with their opponents.

Alan Kelly, unsurprisingly, led the charge, with a couple of energetic “put ‘em under pressure” speeches that would have done Big Mick and Jack Charlton proud.

Leader Joan Burton might have acquired a new soft voice but she is still a hard chaw – she baited Fianna Fáil all weekend with a slightly mischievous suggestion that the party now favours increased taxes for everybody earning over €35,000. And her keynote speech left no hostages to fortune.

It was left to the rather less dramatic Brendan Howlin to spell out the detail of how Labour will frame its main messages.

Howlin outlined plans for a forum that will consider pay, tax and overall spending. It’s part of the new “national economic dialogue”, which is not social partnership. Erm, how so? It sounds very much like it but this time around it will all be held in open, and not behind closed doors as social partnership was.

Back in 2007, Enda Kenny said that year’s election would be a referendum on the health services.

It wasn’t. It was about the economy. So will next year’s.

Or to be more accurate, there are many reasons why people vote how they do. They include social issues like same sex marriage, or child care costs, or climate change, or their vestigial republicanism (1916 and all that).

Still, the economy trumps all. Howlin’s promise of a forum and pay increases will appeal to the party’s base in the public sector. As will Fine Gael’s promises of lower taxes appeal to theirs.

It’s strange that the British general election is only a few months away, yet there seems to be a greater urgency among the political parties here.

In opposition, the watchword of every politician is reform. But as we have seen so often, the MiWadi effect occurs as soon as they get into power, everything becomes “dilute to taste”.

It’s not to say it will not be different this time. The old certainties of the two party hegemony are a thing of the past.

In reality the support for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil has slowly been eroded over 30 years but that was partly masked by support for Fianna Fáil during the good years, when it was see as the natural party of government.

All of that changed in 2011 when the political certainties was turned on its head. Is that change permanent. Yes and No. I think that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will probably re-establish themselves as the two big parties after the next election but not with the big gap between them and everybody else.

Sinn Féin is a big player now and is here to stay, with a long-term aim of displacing Fianna Fáil as the leading republican party. At that stage its present left-wing leanings will have dissipated.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.