Kieran Allen assesses Monday night’s RTÉ leaders’ debate and argues for a fighting left that refuses to be a prop for the establishment parties.

RTÉ’s ten leader debate on Monday night was a slightly bizarre affair. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael leaders were placed just beside the compère, Katie Hannon, and allowed to interrupt at will. They got first spot on most questions and were then allowed the right to reply. Nevertheless, it threw a spotlight on those parties who defined themselves, however broadly, as left – in particular, their attitude to government formation.

Here the Labour Party stands out. Katie Hannon indicated that there had been off-the-record briefings that FF and FG wanted to jettison the Greens in favour of Labour. It was noticeable that the two right leaders never attacked the Labour leader, Ivana Bacik.

For their part, Labour appeared to adopt a more interventionist policy on the economy. They wanted a state construction company, rent controls and a ban on evictions. Yet this mild left rhetoric was accompanied by a singular vagueness about their attitude to joining FF and FG in government.

The vagueness is, of course, deliberate. Labour already has its mind set on entering government with the right-wing parties. Since last summer, it has joined FG-led ruling blocks in many local authorities. Most dramatically, it pulled out of efforts in Dublin City Council to form a ‘progressive alliance’ and joined a coalition with Fine Gael and the Greens. Its excuse was that it wanted to raise property taxes!

Labour is hoping that few people remember its record in previous coalition. But this will not work. In its last stint in coalition, Labour launched attacks on single parents, supported Fine Gael’s efforts to invite in vulture funds and raised the pension age for workers. Its former leader, Alan Kelly, who was Minister of the Environment, stated that rent controls were not warranted and that extra tax relief for landlords might be required to boost supply.

In other words, Labour has an astounding record of betrayal – and its current electoral manoeuvres indicate that it will do the same again.

Its problem, however, is that while it is the favoured prop for continued FF/FG rule it may not have the numbers. Which brings us to its second cousins, the Social Democrats.

The Social Democrats are a contradictory formation. The party was set up by Róisín Shortall, who originally stood on the right of the Labour Party and Catherine Murphy, who began her political life in the Workers’ Party. The party attracted those who stood on the left of Labour Party who departed because of its betrayals.

However, in recent months the party has decided that it too wants to be in government. As it has failed to specify which government one can only assume that it too it available as a coalition partner for FF and FG. Yet once again, the lack of clarity on the issue of coalition stores up problems for the future.

On one hand, party leader Holly Cairns endorsed a call to ‘vote left, transfer left’. But the party’s ‘red lines’ for entering government with FF and FG are moderate in the extreme. They want a senior Ministry for Disability and a target of 50,000 affordable home for each year. As FF and FG are past masters at sucking in more radical opponents, it is doubtful if these were real obstacles to coalition.

We, therefore, have a strange situation. FF and FG’s ire is directed at Sinn Féin, who despite their rapid moves to the centre and their continual flip flops, are seen as beyond the pale. While the right-wing parties vow they will never enter coalition with SF, they never make the same pledge about Labour or the Social Democrats.

This may partially be because they regard Sinn Féin as a bigger electoral threat, but there is more to it than that. The political establishment assumes that Labour and the Social Democrats are loyal to the institutions of the Southern state. They assume that they share the same political culture of opposition to the IRA and defence of the security apparatus that that the Southern state has built up.

No matter how Sinn Féin bend over to accommodate this consensus centre, FF and FG still demand that they wait a little longer until they are ‘house-trained’. The real puzzle is why Sinn Féin do not reciprocate and rule out coalition with these obnoxious parties? That, however, would put them on a different road than the one they wish to travel

The question of coalition with the right is of some importance. Ireland is unique in Western Europe in having two parties who, between them, have occupied government for one hundred years. For most of this period, they have also dominated the opposition. It has never had a social democratic government.

One explanation for this strange phenomenon lies in the legacy of colonisation. But while this may help to explain FF’s early dominance, it can hardly be a full explanation today. It can also become an alibi that prevents an examination of the strategies of their opponents.

Here we must look at how every single party that claimed to be radical has been destroyed by acting as a prop to a FF and FG government. The list includes Clann na Poblachta, the Labour Party, the National Labour Party, Democratic Left and now the Green Party.

In its most sharp and immediate form, the issue of coalition shines a light on the wider perspectives of any party.

Those who think that the only way to implement policies is by horse trading with FF and FG make two key assumptions. One is that there are no structural constraints on the type of reforms that Irish capitalism can grant. Yet the country functions as a tax haven for US multi-nationals. The trade-off for the local elite is that the Irish rich can focus on investing in and enjoying the fruits of property speculation. The obvious question is how this system can grant any substantial reforms in an era of global capitalist decay and crisis.

Second, the advocates of coalition assume that working people do not have the power to enforce changes on a right-wing government. Yet recent history demonstrates many instances of people power. Ireland must be the only country where a government was forced to hand back money to its citizens after its defeat on the water charges. Similarly, Ireland became the only country where marriage equality was won through popular suffrage. And contrary to its previous conservative image, Repeal was pushed through because of a mass movement from below.

People Before Profit-Solidarity is distinguished, therefore, not by the ‘extreme’ or ‘unrealistic’ nature of its demands. Rather by our understanding of capitalism and our project of change through workers’ power.