THE GENERAL election of February 18 in the Irish Republic has produced another hung Dail (Parliament).
Fianna Fail had 78 seats in the outgoing Dail to the Fine Gael/Labour block's 80. Now. after a gain of three seats for Fianna Fail, with Fine Gael having lost two while Labour has the some number at 15, Fianna Fail has a majority of three over the coalition government block (81-78).
The balance is held by a group of seven deputies, five of whom are men of the left.
The outgoing Taoiseach (prime minister), Garret Fitzgerald, has refused to concede defeat because he still hopes that a deal may be fixed up with some or all of the seven. But FF leader Charles Haughey has similar hopes and a better chance of success.
The outcome of the frantic huckstering now going on will be registered by the Dail's vote on March 9. Haughey can already count on the support of one of the independents, his ex-colleague on the nationalist wing of FF. Neil Blaney.
Whether the new government is FF or FG/Labour, it will be an insecure government, probably unstable. The contradiction that toppled Fitzgerald has been reproduced in the new Dail with only minor modifications: a government committed to social service cuts and economic austerity must depend for its parliamentary majority on the support of deputies of the Left who are likely to respond to pressure from those chosen by the ruling class to bear the brunt of Ireland's economic crisis.
Ireland's ruling class needs a government strong enough to carry through an unpopular austerity programme. The next decade is expected to be one of economic stagnation for the Republic and of rising unemployment (it is now 13%. The 26 County economy is, per head of the population, more steeply into foreign debt than Poland is. The IMF insists that there is no room for budgetary concessions.
One in five is below the official poverty line. Emigration has ceased to be the safety valve it has been for many decades. There is a powerful labour movement and a working class that has been massively augmented in the last two decades.
Even apart from the North, there is a lot of explosive material in Irish society.
An unstable and weak government, especially one dependent in the Dail on left wing votes, is therefore very bad news for the Republic's ruling class.
In fact, in a poll of 71%. neither of the main bourgeois parties lost votes. FF got 47%. a rise of 1.99%. FG got 37%. a rise of .84%.
The Labour Party lost one per cent, getting 9.13 percent. This is complicated, however, by the standing down of two Labour deputies, including former leader Brendan Corish in Wexford. Their seats were lost to the party but would probably have been kept by the incumbents. Personal factors are central in Irish politics. So Labour could have come out of the election with two extra seats. In fact it won two new ones. One went to the outspoken anti-coalitionist Michael Higgins, chairperson of the party.
The campaign was dominated by the economy, and Northern Ireland was a marginal issue. Polls showed the electorate concerned with unemployment and inflation.
All the major parties united to conduct a barrage of propaganda aimed to convince the electorate that cuts and austerity were necessary and could not be avoided. Their seeming success may affect the immediate prospects for the new government.
The coalition proposed to drop its outrageous proposal to add VAT of 18% on clothes and shoes, and instead to raise money by putting up the price of beer, cigarettes, and foreign holidays. FF promised to maintain food subsidies and not to tax short-term social security benefits, as well as scrapping VAT on kids' shoes and clothes, but endorsed the main thrust of the proposed coalition budget.
So whichever side sets up as the government on March 9 will claim a mandate for the basic budget which the outgoing government fell in proposing.
The five candidates of Provisional Sinn Fein did badly, averaging about half the vote for hunger strikers and their supporters last year. For example, Fra. Brown standing in Louth got 37.14 first preference votes from an electorate of 57,075. They got a total of 16,894 votes, 1.01% of votes cast.
Bernadette McAliskey, candidate of PD (Irish affiliates of the USFI). associated herself with the Provos and did not do badly, with 2085 first preference votes. (The constituency electorate was 54,726. and Charles Haughey. in the same constituency, got 16,143 first preference voles).
Despite being hounded for supporting the right to abortion. McAliskey improved on the 1481 first preference votes won by a H-Block candidate in the same constituency last year.
Mostly, the votes that went to the hunger strike candidates last year are reckoned to have gone back lo Fianna Fail, and in one area to Sinn Fein the Workers' Party.
The Irish Republican Socialist Party, with six candidates, made little impact. For example. J. Gilligan got 343 first preference votes in Limerick East, and Brigid Makowski 232 in Clare.
Anne Wilkinson, a supporter of Militant and chair of Letterkenny Trades Council, standing for the Labour Party, got 493 first preference votes (while the three winners in her constituency got from 8.000 to 9,000 each.
The biggest event of the election is the consolidation Sinn Fein the Workers' Party as a force in Irish parliamentary politics.
SFWP is the political descendant of the leftist and Stalinist-influenced Official IRA. from which the Provos split away in late 1969. It called off its own military campaign in the North a decade ago. and by now has broken with much of the Republican tradition.
It secured one deputy, Joe Sherlock (Cork East) in the 1981 election, and this time it won three seats, and 38,094 votes (2.29% of the poll) for 15 candidates.
Its gains came from FF and FG. 1950s ex-internee De Rossa won a seat in Dublin West, and Paddy Gallagher won in Waterford. with 6682 first preferences. (Curiously, a lot of votes which in the 1981 election went to a H-Block candidate are estimated lo have swung back to Gallagher this time. though his party is very hostile to the military campaign of the Provisional IRA and bitterly denounced the H -Block campaign as its extension). SFWP got 16,748 voles to Labour's 49.721 in Dublin.
Of the left independents Tony Gregory, who won a seat in Dublin Central from Fianna Fail, is a nationalist-leaning leftist, formerly linked lo the IRSP. Jim Kemmy. who was returned again from Limerick, is extremely hostile to the whole nationalist tradition in Irish politics (he is associated with the so-named British & Irish Communist Organisation).
SFWP has called for the creation of a left opposition block ('Grand Alliance of the Left'} in the Dail. consisting of its 3 members. Labour's 15. and the left independents. It called on Labour in the election campaign to form a workers' opposition and break with FG and coalitionism. and it asked voters to treat Labour as their second choice.
No doubt designed to appeal to the anti-coalitionist rank and file of the Labour Party, the appeal may produce results. The Labour Party is badly divided, and the anti-coalitionists have been strengthened within the Parliamentary party.
Also, with perhaps the exception of Tony Gregory, the independent leftists, the Labour Party, and SFWP have a common antipathy to Republicanism, which would be n binding force.
SFWP has a curious notion of what a 'workers' opposition' should be. It considers it to be its democratic duty to vote for a Taoiseach on March 9. 'There is no question of abstaining', said SFWP president Tomas McGiolIa. 'It is our duty to help provide a government'.
SFWP 'will vote for the best offer made to meet its demands about the new government's budget. Then, it will go into opposition', McGiolla has sought a meeting with the Labour Party leaders and is willing to talk to FF and FG.
Its main demands arc:
• VAT to be held at its pre-budget level.
• A reduction in income tax tor the PAYE sector.
• Increases in property and capital taxation.
• Legislation allowing divorce.
• Dramatic improvement in family planning services.
• Meat and food industries to be expanded.
SO Feb 25. 1982