Five years ago tomorrow, I was in Rowlagh Community Centre in north Clondalkin listening to the then leader of the Labour Party, Mr Dick Spring. The occasion was the unveiling of a plan by the communities of north Clondalkin for the development of their area.
Mr Spring, who was campaigning in the 1992 general election, was late in arriving, and it was clear when he did that his view of the importance of the occasion centred more on the exigencies of communicating his party's electoral case than on the needs of north Clondalkin.
The meeting was told in graphic detail of the crisis facing this and other similar parts of Dublin: high unemployment, no infrastructure, high dependence on social welfare, alienation, addiction, depression and despair. When the cameras had stopped clicking, Mr Spring made a speech in which he acknowledged that one of the most gla ring of our social problems was being raised and should be one of the prime priorities of government.
Mr Spring spent 4 1/2 of the intervening five years in cabinet, but north Clondalkin is still there, pretty much as it was. One might have imagined that having in power a left-wing party whose leader had seen the situation on the ground and said what he said would be good news for places like this, but Mr Spring in government showed few signs he regarded the urban wastelands of this society as a priority.
It is not unreasonable to observe that, in the logic of our political culture, the role of places like north Clondalkin is to allow left-wing politicians to signal interest in issues of social marginalisation and to provide backdrops for photo opportunities.
It might also be observed that if any remote credence could be lent to what left-wing politicians say about deprivation and social decay, such places would never have been allowed to exist in the first place. It is worth noting that the Labour Party has been in power for approximately three-fifths of the period in which north Clondalkin has existed in its present form.
There are, I believe, more complex reasons why, in the face of such an irrefutable social catastrophe, a left-wing politician can sit in cabinet for nearly five years and not remain unable to sleep until he has put it to rights. It is not, after all, that dealing with this matter is impossible: it requires money, resources, determination and imagination, but it can be done.
What the Labour Party's record on issues like this has revealed is that the political system here may be utterly incapable to taking such matters on board.
Added to the challenges mounted to socialist ideas by the collapse of communism in eastern Europe is the highly idiosyncratic role of the left in Irish politics. In most urbanised, industrialised economies, left-wing politics is a clear-cut matter: the working classes versus the industrial bosses.
However, because Ireland was primarily an agricultural economy, Fianna Fail absorbed much of the leftish sentiment in the non-urban areas, while the Labour Party tended to be confined to the towns and cities. This was further complicated by the fact that Labour had a significant number of personal fiefdoms in non-urban areas, predicated more on the personality of the local representative than on a radical left agenda.
In several instances, these were less socialist than their opponents in the so-called right-wing or centre parties. This resulted in two conflicting ideological dichotomies criss-crossing one another to the ultimate detriment of left-wing ideas.
The standard left-wing divide between, crudely speaking, rich and poor, was accompanied by a sundering of the bond between the urban and rural dispossessed. To be a party of "modernisation", left-wingers had to set their cloth caps against the rural poor, so it has long been an article of faith among Irish left-wingers that rurality is synonymous with backwardness and conservatism.
Left-wing logic had it that the farming classes were the ideological enemies of socialism, while country people thought Karl Marx was some class of a comedian. In these circumstances, the only way for the Labour Party to expand its electoral base was by retreating from left-wing ideas, and the party was consolidated in this approach by two remarkable trends in voting behaviour.
One was that the rural poor continued, by and large, to vote according to a tribal pattern, in which loyalty to party transcended personal advantage. The other was that the urban poor tended to vote in much fewer numbers than other sections of society. (The average turnout in north Clondalkin is only about half that in the more affluent Dublin suburbs.)
Thus, the options open to the Labour Party were confined to the courting of that volatile sector of the electorate which is urban-based, well-to-do, non-tribal (at least in the "traditional" sense) and assiduous in voting in accordance with its own immediate self-interest.
Apart from selfishness, the important consideration for such voters is keeping Fianna Fail out of power, which explains why Labour did well in 1992 and also why it did badly in 1997. On neither occasion did what might be called the "contented" vote get what it wanted at the polls, but there are other ways, as November 1994 demonstrated.
The only remaining relevance of issues of exclusion to the Labour Party is as a means of branding. The party requires some unique point of definition to distinguish it in the marketplace.
In this regard, "Labour" is just a word, a label, a retro-chic throwback to an arcane and mysterious heritage, with no implications for or connection to the impulses or loyalties of the party. If the word "Labour" had any meaning at all, it would be deeply threatening to the people the party is now seeking to woo, so it is necessary for it to maintain a facade of left-wing concern while all the while cleansing the meaning of its own name by signalling it means nothing. That is essentially what Dick Spring's leadership achieved.
With the election of Ruairi Quinn, however, the party has moved into a new phase. Mr Quinn is a politician entirely unencumbered with leftwing ideas, who has not for a long time uttered a single word to worry even the most comfortable interests in society, who himself belongs to a family boasting several fabulously wealthy businessmen and whose electoral base is in the heartland of the constituency from which the Labour Party has latterly sought to gain support.
You will search long and laboriously through the many newspaper articles written about Mr Quinn on his election and not find a single word of belly-aching about poverty or social deprivation. In electing him, the Labour Party has thrown off all previous inhibitions, freed itself from responsibility to speak for the poor and has finally found itself.