I heard the outgoing Labour Party leader on radio last week still fulminating after all these years about the inequity of Irish society. Despite being the second-wealthiest state in the EU, he lamented, Ireland now had even deeper divisions between rich and poor, writes John Waters.
So impressive was his indignation that it was several minutes before I recalled that Mr Quinn's party had shared power for nearly half the span of the last three decades and that during the most dazzling years of the recent boom, Mr Quinn was himself Minister for Finance.
Often we tend to go on seeing political forces in the way we have always done, even though the landscape around them has changed out of all recognition. Thus, the Labour Party remains a repository of radical values, of left-field vision, of socialist promise, retaining the moral authority associated with the beleaguered voice of opposition. One day, a Labour leader will be forced to admit one of two things: either that his or her party's traditional values are incapable, even during prolonged periods in office, of effecting structural change in Irish society, or that the party no longer subscribes to these values.
The election of the leadership team of Pat Rabitte and Liz McManus is perhaps the most radical thing the Labour Party has done since agreeing to coalesce with Fianna Fáil, the promotion of two effective outsiders displaying a humility verging on desperation. Both are substantial politicians. However, Pat Rabitte's major drawback is a tendency to sideline his analytical apparatus in favour of sticking the boot into Fianna Fáil, a tactic which has in the past short-circuited Labour's potential, preventing it from rising above the rabble of fraction-factions now scrabbling for an opportunity to share power with the Devil. If FF is even half as bad as its detractors would have us believe, surely there can be little virtue in looking good by comparison?
A strange paradox of the Labour Party is that its little box of ideological and public relations trickery has been moderately successful in maintaining it as an important presence in political life, but also limiting of its efforts to break into the big league on its own. Its vague suggestiveness of the possibility of some radical alternative brings occasional fillips to its core vote. And yet its laziness or ineptitude in the task of imagining or articulating what such a radical alternative might entail ensures that this possibility remains an ideological will-o'-the-wisp.
The support-base of left-wing politics has traditionally derived from two sources: working-class consciousness and middle-class condescension. Left-wingers have either been genuine proletarians possessed of an anger at the rottenness of society, or bourgeois dilettantes seeking an outlet for adolescent rebelliousness.Labour here has been blessed with a surfeit of the latter, which explains why nobody laughed when Ruairí Quinn paid tribute recently to the "radical Maoists" who helped out in the 1990 presidential election campaign. Like many leftists, Mr Quinn cannot distinguish between radicalism and student politics. After the revolutions of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, smart left-wing thinking replaced the ambition to achieve a structural alternative to capitalism with a kind of enlightened sympathy for those "less fortunate". At most, it sought to provide a voice on behalf of the marginalised and the excluded, together with an analysis based on the broader self-interest of the society in achieving some form of relative prosperity for the greatest number.
HOWEVER, taking advantage of the ideological confusion in the wake of the collapse of actually-existing socialism, some Western left-wing parties, including the Irish Labour Party, continued to effect the same old posturing in opposition and yet, on gaining office, contrived to take advantage of the public's reduced expectations concerning what radicalism might achieve. We thought we elected radicals and got instead good reactionary managers, which would have been fine except they thought they could revert to foaming radicalism on losing office.
The Irish working-class has always suspected that left-wing politics was a dead loss and so mostly voted Fianna Fáil. In constantly attacking it, Labour is biting its own tail. The poor hardly ever want the overthrow of the system or to gain control over the means of production; they just want to be less poor or even slightly rich. In any event, the word "Labour" in the title of the Labour Party is like the word "Waterford" in the brand name of Waterford Glass: an endearing reminder that the product originated in a different world.
Modern government is all about management, about implementing the enlightened self-interest of the majority, which includes providing decently for the minorities left behind. The best kind of radicalism seeks the fairest and most efficient way of achieving these objectives. Perhaps before long, left-wingers will admit there is no promised land; that the failure to imagine or articulate a radical vision for Irish society does not derive from the frustrations of a system dominated by parties which deny the people freedom by dint of conservatism or corruption; and that the role of alternative politics is not to peddle fantasy in opposition and excuses in office but to offer better answers to the old existing problems. Oddly, the Labour Party seems better placed to do this than for a long time.