Enda O'Dohertyremembers Jim Kemmy, who died 10 years ago today
Ten years ago today, Jim Kemmy, chairman of the Labour Party and TD for Limerick East, died in St James's Hospital in Dublin after a short illness.
His funeral, four days later, was attended by the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, Labour leader Dick Spring, Catholic and Church of Ireland bishops, many TDs and senators and vast crowds of ordinary people from Limerick and well beyond. According to the Limerick Leader, an estimated 10,000 people had filed through Griffin's funeral home in the preceding days to pay their respects.
Who was this politician who was held in so much respect and affection, and does a consideration of his life and career afford any inspiration for a political tradition that is now seen to be, if not in actual decline, at least faced with something approaching an existential crisis?
Jim Kemmy was a man of many and excellent parts - in the words of historian Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh "a stone mason and socialist, trade unionist and political activist, writer and historian, parliamentarian and humanist" - indeed he might well have added humorist.
Yet if he is most widely remembered as a politician it must in fairness be said that he was not always an entirely successful one.
Jim Kemmy first came to politics through his readings in the history and literature of the labour movement when he worked on English building sites during the 1950s. Back in Limerick in the next decade he joined the Labour Party, though he was soon in conflict with its old guard over his anti-apartheid and pro-contraception stances, among other issues. In the early 1970s he left Labour and a decade later formed his own group, the Democratic Socialist Party.
The DSP, like most small political parties in Ireland or elsewhere, never really went anywhere, though it spent many years in doing so. As well as lacking sufficient organisational muscle it had the great misfortune to be in many respects ahead of its time.
During a period when the dominant view on the left was that the EC was a capitalist "rich man's club" which should be shunned the party was fervently pro-European. Its support for contraception, divorce and limited access to abortion was a hot potato no one else at the time was prepared to touch. Its unabashed feminism was widely regarded as eccentric, even risible ("Kemmy's femmies", the establishment sneered). Its strongly argued position that unionists in Northern Ireland had a perfect right to decline to be part of a united Ireland (now pretty much the consensus) was regarded as little short of treason.
Jim Kemmy had an avuncular relationship with his micro-party and its scores of serious young men and women fizzing with perilously unmarketable ideas. He also knew that its political prospects, despite all the enthusiasm, were not really bright.
Eventually the DSP ran out of steam and in 1990 its remnants entered the Labour Party, of which Jim was soon to become chairman. At the party conference following the huge electoral success of 1992 ("the Spring tide") he humorously chided the assembled ranks of newly-minted TDs: "Many of you probably think this politics is easy - but some of us came round by the scenic route."
The small reverse suffered by the Labour Party in this year's general election is a reminder that politics is never easy and that electoral advances, even with the benefit of a formidably intelligent and articulate leader, cannot be taken for granted. Many pundits, and indeed some insiders, have even suggested that there is something irredeemably dowdy and unattractive about the Labour "brand".
It might, on the face of it, seem strange to suggest that Jim Kemmy's life and political struggles could be a source of renewed inspiration for his party now, given that he was in many respects cut from very "Old Labour" cloth, a self-educated working class intellectual, a dedicated trade unionist and an uncompromising fighter for the underprivileged.
Yet it should also be remembered that he had little respect for settled dogma and that he placed himself in firm and often lonely opposition to those aspects of left-wing tradition he thought outmoded or intellectually indefensible. It is far from certain that he would have dismissed the idea of reconstructing Labour's image or "brand", but as a serious thinker he would have insisted that any change in perception must be based on a corresponding change in substance.
On the 10th anniversary of his death let his friends and admirers remember not just a warm, wise and witty man but one who, while incarnating the labour movement's long struggle for equality and decency, was always prepared to think deeply, range widely and welcome new ideas.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist