The fall-out continues from the 2002 general election with yesterday's announcement by Mr Ruairi Quinn that he will retire shortly as leader of the Labour Party. He will not seek re-election when his current term expires on October 25th. So another leadership contest is set to get underway in the second biggest Opposition party in the new Dáil.
It will come as no great surprise to those who know Mr Quinn that he has decided to relinquish the leadership. Though he attempted to put a brave face on the outcome of the election, he was shattered by the result. The Labour Party went into the campaign last May expecting to increase its share of seats substantially and have more than a sporting chance of getting into government. These expectations did not materialise and the party returned with the same number of seats. The sum of the two parts of Labour and Democratic Left was not greater than the whole.
With Mr Quinn's decision to pass on the baton of leadership to the next generation, it is timely for members to conduct an open and honest assessment of why the party failed to ignite the public imagination during the recent campaign. Its poor performance was over-shadowed initially by the melt-down in Fine Gael. But it seems fair to ask where did its electoral strategy go so wrong?
The 21 per cent over-shoot on public spending was in the public domain during the campaign and the Labour Party, like Fine Gael, failed to communicate convincingly to voters the scale of the cutbacks that would be called for. The argument for better public services was drowned out by the selfish roar of the Celtic Tiger. The whole campaign, in retrospect, was rooted in too much consensus on centrist questions. The developments put the Labour Party under challenge from the Left on two flanks, the Green Party and Sinn Féin.
For all that, however, Mr Quinn has made a proud contribution to Left-wing politics in this State for a quarter of a century. He has been a committed socialist all his life. He distinguished himself as the first Labour Minister for Finance in the Rainbow Coalition Government. He served in many other Ministries. He negotiated the Growth and Stability Pact, the fiscal framework for the euro. He was a courageous advocate of change on all of the contentious social issues since the 1970s and an ardent supporter of a pluralist society. And throughout the good and bad years, he maintained a keen interest and involvement in the Social Democratic and Labour Party and democratic developments in Northern Ireland.
His shortcoming, perhaps, was the failure to articulate a clear vision of the Left-wing solution to current political, economic and social problems. The challenge to his successor is to make a distinct space for the oldest political party in Ireland.