Did Labour really make a hell of a difference?

Before he had ever met Dick Spring, Fergus Finlay knew Dick Spring's mind, what he wanted and how he wanted to say what he wanted. Finlay drafted most of Spring's speech to the Labour Party special conference in December 1982.

He did so without ever having spoken to Spring apart from a minute's conversation on the phone several months earlier on a matter unrelated to the content of the speech, and without knowing what Spring had agreed to with Fine Gael for a new Coalition government. Finlay just drafted the speech he thought he would like to hear Spring deliver and Spring thought the draft was just what he (Spring) needed.

Whether because of an extraordinary symbiosis with Spring or a mesmeric influence over the Labour leader, Finlay's mind became the mind of Labour, certainly from 1987 to 1997, the period of Labour's greatest revival and greatest power.

He was the best and the brightest of the cadre of able people drawn to Labour during that period and he exerted a powerful and telling influence over not just the party but the governments of which Labour was a part during that time.

Fergus Finlay has now written about his time close to power in a characteristically elegantly and cleverly written book, Snakes and Ladders, published by New Island Books.

There are intriguing insights into the events of the period he writes about (1983-1997): the pressure the Garret FitzGerald government came under from Independent Newspapers on the terms of oil exploration licences and curbs on cigarette advertising; how it was discovered that Fine Gael TDs were compromised on the oil licensing issue because they held shares in Atlantic Resources; the depth of antagonism between Spring and Emmet Stagg; evidence that Dick Spring's office at Leinster House was bugged in 1991; how Charlie Haughey was the Taoiseach to start the peace process.

At the end of the book he writes about his own political convictions. He says he always believed himself to be a socialist and that the equality of persons meant a lot to him. Unsurprisingly, he says that in his view Dick Spring was "simply the outstanding leader of his generation".

And summing up his and Dick Spring's contribution to political life in the last sentence of the book he writes: "I think I can honestly say that between us all, for 15 years, we made a hell of a difference." But did they?

The peace process would have happened anyway, as Fergus Finlay implicitly concedes and as we know anyway with the success of the Bertie Ahern government on that score.

It is true there were fewer people in poverty in June 1997 than there were in December 1992 when the Labour Party came to office with Albert Reynolds. But what was the distinctive Labour contribution to that? Every single budget of the period from 1993 to 1997 favoured the rich more than the poor. The alleviation of poverty came about almost incidentally from the improvement in economic circumstances: more jobs were created, more women brought into the labour force.

As the annual report of the Combat Poverty Agency, published last week, notes: "High levels of poverty continue, with up to one-third of the population at risk of poverty and 9 to 15 per cent in persistent poverty." It continues: "Ireland has the second highest national level of child poverty in the EU."

In government, along with the reputedly more socialist Democratic Left, Labour agreed to an anti-poverty strategy that aimed to reduce the proportion of people who are "persistently poor" from 9.5-15 per cent in 1994 to 5-10 per cent in 2007. In other words, Labour was satisfied that even after such spectacular economic success about one in 12 people will be persistently poor 10 years hence. It is hardly any wonder that the Progressive Democrats had no difficulty in adopting this same target on their assumption of office.

The criminal justice system remained a "justice" system to control the poor; Mountjoy remained the repository of delinquent poor. Meanwhile, Labour in government rewarded the criminal rich in a manner that was as spectacular as it was unjust through the tax amnesty of 1993.

The Labour ministers, according to Fergus Finlay, played dead while that controversy raged in cabinet in early 1993. The proponent of the tax amnesty was Albert Reynolds, the opponent was Bertie Ahern. Dick Spring decided, according to Finlay, "not to take sides". And when the issue finally came to cabinet "none of the Labour ministers insisted [on opposing it] on a point of principle".

On April 28th last, the then chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, Cathal Mac Domhnaill, told the Committee of Public Accounts: "The chief special collector's figure for the [tax] amnesty was just under £200m and grossed up that would represent undeclared income of over £1 billion, perhaps £1.25 billion."

Nowhere in his book does Fergus Finlay reflect on what difference Labour in government made for the constituency that Labour supposedly represents, the less-privileged section of society. And the omission is significant. For Labour in government did not see itself primarily as the agent of the poor in Irish society, did not see that its raison d'etre in government was to alter fundamentally the unfair structure of Irish society to create fairness in the distribution of resources, opportunities and power.

Labour's agenda had more clearly to do with what they saw as "standards", the exposing of corruption and malpractice in public office. And on that score they played their trump cards in November 1994 when they forced Albert Reynolds from office. But in fact, as Fergus Finlay tells it, Albert's fall came about finally and entirely by chance.

On November 16th, 1994, Labour had agreed to remain in office with Albert Reynolds. Dick Spring would have said as much in the Dail that morning had there not been an unexpected adjournment casually agreed to by Albert Reynolds on the urgings of Fine Gael. Had the adjournment not occurred Labour would have been back in their places, everything would have been hunky-dory, in spite of the appointment of Harry Whelehan as President of the High Court, in spite of the Brendan Smith extradition fiasco, in spite of the Beef Tribunal report, the passports for cash affair et al. (The unexpected adjournment allowed Dick Spring to find out about the Duggan case.)

And it would have been all hunky-dory simply because it had been agreed, in the words of Fergus Finlay (page 259): "Albert would crawl and we would have been seen to have been right [about Harry Whelehan] all along."

To be fair to Fergus Finlay, he would not have taken part in this, for he had gone to Stephen's Green and written his resignation in protest. A sequel to the book by Fergus Finlay would be intriguing, dealing with how Labour lost its way, how decent, capable, compassionate people forgot that the point of being in government was to create conditions of fairness and equality and that everything else was subsidiary.