Left, right – what do labels matter when a homeless man dies on a freezing night?

The urge to attach labels to people is human. It makes life simpler. But labels stick if left unchallenged, so when a member of Aosdána tweeted that last week’s column was an example of “the class war credentials – pro-establishment – of the Irish media”, I reread it to see how I had offended and perhaps to atone.

To recap: I wrote that in my experience the people whom Paul Murphy TD describes as “ordinary” and “afraid of the government” can be startlingly outspoken when senior politicians come to canvass. If the gentleman tweeter disputes this, he has never been on a canvass.

The column also described politicians’ routine self-abasement before a demanding electorate in the perpetual mission to mind the seat, while suggesting that the same electorate should examine the mote in its own eye, given its abrupt U-turn towards Fianna Fáil in 2007.

Would an alternative government have acted differently from the incorporeal FF/Green cabinet on the night of the bank guarantee in 2008? Who knows. We do know that the electorate voted for the party it believed would keep the property ball rolling, choosing in the process to overlook Bertie Ahern’s tribunal adventures. Who disputes any of this now?

The column was a call to remember past pitfalls, to inform ourselves about the bigger picture outside our own sectoral interests and to be alert to siren voices of all political hues. Basic common sense.

In any event, the old-fashioned language of class war seems profoundly inadequate to the current ferment. This paper for example has relentlessly pursued the issues around homelessness. The measured voice of Br Kevin Crowley describing unanswered phones as he sought shelter for a mother and children on Monday demands something more than name-calling or brazen politicking over where precisely a 43-year-old man died outdoors on a freezing night. Where are the solutions? In the name of decency, if an entrepreneur like Niall Mellon can organise a building blitz in South Africa to provide hundreds of homes in a week, why can it not be done in this country?

Tonight, among even those with roofs over their heads, there will be people of every class – whatever that means – too fearful to turn on the heating. Who are the “ordinary” people now? They are the scandalously low-paid and the unemployed. They are the manufacturer nearly crazed with stress; the suicidal retailer in a dying town; the prudent couple who lost their hard-won pension in the crash.

Amoral financiers

At a time in history when virtually everyone, including the governor of the Bank of England and the head of the International Monetary Fund, is questioning the wisdom of an economic system that leaves humanity dangling at the mercy of amoral financiers and their market bagmen, it seems self-defeating to reduce any individual to the strait jacket of a label. As a strategy, it’s hardly designed to win converts to a cause.

History is littered with individuals who defied pigeon-holing. Otto von Bismarck was an arch-conservative who also happened to introduce the world’s first welfare state policies (public industrial accident insurance in 1871 and public health insurance in 1883). Thomas Jefferson was “right-wing” in his support for free trade (including in slaves) but “left-wing” in his hostility to banking and belief in great devolution of power. It was the aristocratic Benjamin Disraeli – the British Conservative who served twice as prime minister – not William Gladstone, who was concerned with the “two nations” that the industrial revolution was creating.

The above examples come from Ha-Joon Chang – economist and author of 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism – who holds there is no single way to define right and left, either in parties or individuals: "There are many different dimensions along which we divide them and these criteria differ according to the time and the place."

This is why the language of the Taoiseach with his talk of "the divide in Irish society", in which the "choice will be a Fine Gael-led government or a group possibly led by Sinn Féin", is so dispiriting. For more than six miserable, frightening years, the citizenry has been asked to unite in sacrifice – and overlook blindingly obvious unfairness. Now we have a leadership entrenching national division. Michael Noonan's description of an emerging "clear left/right choice", must have Labour stalwarts scratching their heads. Where do they fit into these strait-jacket labels a year from an election?

Critical thinking

This is the problem with phoney wars. Labels polarise. They entrench people in their foxholes. Instead of promoting critical thinking, they reduce debate to poster slogans and facile one-liners.

Above all, they are a poisonous distraction from the important questions.

The words of Ireland rugby captain Ciaran Fitzgerald still resonate since 1985 – and a decade when 200,000 people emigrated, unemployment reached nearly 18 per cent and the national debt was more than 140 per cent of gross national product: “Where’s your f--king pride?”