Three items in yesterday's Irish Times fed straight into a left-wing agenda: the number of people living on below half the average income had increased from 17.4 per cent to 20 per cent in the period 1994 to 98; prejudice against the most vulnerable group in society, the Travelling community, had deepened and the number of official halting sites had declined; half a million people will not get welfare increases next January because of administrative incompetence.
Have one day's news items ever made the case for a left-wing programme more emphatically? How could it be that, at a time of such lavish opulence, one in five is living in such relative poverty? How could it be that, as our society becomes more tolerant and diverse, prejudice against our indigenous minority should be so intense?
Is it credible that a Government minister (Dermot Ahern) would survive in office if any other half a million citizens were treated by his Department with such disdain as the welfare recipients are being treated? (The sole reason there is not outrage over this is because the people affected are among the least politically powerful and least organised group in society.)
More generally, has the case for a fairer society ever been so obvious, given the affluence so many of us enjoy and the poverty and prejudice experienced by others?
And yet, has the condition of our main left-wing party, Labour, ever been so dismal?
The most recent illustration of the condition of the party was the outcome of the Tipperary South by-election. The party had held a seat there in the 1997 election but when its TD, Michael Ferris, died last year its performance in the ensuing by-election was woeful. It won just 5,133 first preference votes and was eclipsed by the Independent left-wing candidate, Seamus Healy, who won the seat.
That result was ascribed to the unique personality of Seamus Healy, who was well known throughout the constituency and had a strong electoral base there. But what could the explanation be for the performance of Labour in last month's by-election in Tipperary South? This time they got even fewer votes - 4,103 - and their candidate was first to be eliminated and was again eclipsed by an Independent left-wing candidate, this time a relative unknown, Philomena Prendergast.
If the evidence of two by-elections was all there was to go by one might conclude that South Tipperary is different and the scene nationally had to be more encouraging. Alas, there is ample evidence that this is not so.
An MRBI opinion poll published in this newspaper on January 26th last showed Labour at 15 per cent, down two percentage points from the previous poll in September 2000. An MRBI poll published on May 18th showed that Labour's support was down another two percentage points at 13 per cent. The core support for the party was shown at 9 per cent. Worse than that, the poll showed that the party was behind Sinn Fein in the Dublin region.
While the position was restored in Labour's favour at the next MRBI opinion poll, whatever recovery there may be between now and the next election, it is obvious the Labour Party has no hope of repeating the success it achieved in 1992 and will be lucky to hold on to the seats it and Democratic Left won in 1997. Remember the Labour and Democratic Left merger of 1998 that was to revolutionise the Irish left? As many predicted, the whole has been less than the sum of the parts, which is some achievement.
The distress of Labour cannot be explained by the popularity of the Government. The Nice referendum outcome was, in part, an indication of widespread alienation from the Government and established parties. Indeed, the success of the left-wing Independent candidates in South Tipperary shows that there is a constituency for radical left-wing politics. So why is Labour doing so badly?
A perusal of the speeches of Ruairi Quinn on the Labour Party website offers a clue. Ruairi Quinn is bland to a point beyond banality. He does say something worth reading or hearing now and again, but to get there one has to wade through mounds of blather, windbaggery and intellectual self-importance. He does talk about the unfairness of Irish society, about the levels of poverty and inequality, but the blather removes any passion from what he is saying and ends up unconvincing.
There is also the problem, of course, of his record as Minister for Finance, from late 1994 to 1997, when the three budgets he introduced all favoured the rich more than the poor. And, while the data revealed by the ESRI on Monday showed levels of poverty deepening among those with half the average income in the period 1994 to 1998, it relates primarily to the period during which he was the person with the power to do most about it. Given that record, what credibility could Ruairi Quinn have as the leader of a campaign for a fairer society?
More depressing still is the apparent lack of anxiety within the Labour Party about all this. The Democratic Left element seems so intent on proving its loyalty that it feels silenced on the leadership question and on the general strategy of the party. But are those who need a vibrant and credible left-wing party to guarantee them fairness and equity required to wait until these delicacies abate?
vbrowne@irish-times.ie