While the Taoiseach may be embracing socialism, old lefties have been gradually letting go, having to settle for the notion of the 'social market', writes Patrick O'Dea.
The 1970s were socialist and so were we. Ours was a total immersion in the company of earnest socialists. That company was a broad church of angry young people intent on social justice, with a few add-on demands around every other felt oppression: Mass on Sunday, an absence of sex, no money and not enough fun!
Our socialism was of the left, now branded old and hard. We could sneer at the liberal reforms of Garret FitzGerald's Just Society or any contribution of Donagh O'Malley to our education.
Our endeavour was to bring down existing structures, not to reform them. Our Cold War sympathies belonged to the other side. We set to work from a credo of "I believe that class struggle is the motor of history", pickets, protests, occupations and posters. Our campaigns were many: we resisted shorter opening hours in the library of Trinity College, through its occupation. We boycotted Trinity's catering outlets and set up alternatives on account of their high prices.
We refused to pay an increase in bus fares, an issue judged to have potential for popular rebellion! We supported the Liffey Dockyard workers with our presence at their hearing in the courthouse.
One of the left groups was to protest at the opening of the first McDonald's restaurant, located on Dublin's Grafton Street. "Down with bunburger ideology", "end cultural imperialism".
That was before latte and panini had made any inroads on our staple diet of Guinness and Carrolls.
We had fun, made merry and were deadly serious!
Sociology, which I studied, was part of the echo chamber.
Its narrative and meta-narrative were of the left. False consciousness was a convenient mantra. Multinationals were bad. The left was good.
We read the sacred texts of the left: Althusser and Marx. Some refinement entered the debate in that we knew of the seeds of discontent within the Eastern Bloc countries. Our concession was to acknowledge these as flawed models of socialism, but to hold to the belief in socialism's moral superiority.
Class struggle, have and have nots, equity, justice and competing social systems - we debated these in the class room, students' union, Young Socialists' Society, Socialist Labour Party, whenever and wherever. The Buttery Bar, Bewley's Cafe, between drinking and kissing, but never the Pavilion.
The Hist' and Phil' were off limits too for the earnest world changers we considered ourselves to be.And then came 1989. Fukuyama had flagged the end of history. Liberal democracy would triumph, and so it came to pass. Tony Benn's diary entry suggests that he had underestimated the significance of the date when the Wall was pulled down.
A popular rising. Communism was rejected, the market economy embraced and individual liberty more highly prized than equality. But what of the political left?
Pity about me that I'm still recovering from 1989. Prague has a museum to communism.
The old lady of East Berlin in the film Goodbye Lenin, out of her coma, had to be protected from the shocking truth of communism's collapse and her society's endorsement of the market economy. Well I never!
Socialists tend to be more rooted in concept and theory than practice. As theorists we need rationale, framework and goals. This is what makes political circumstances of the Western world so painful.
The scaffold that we constructed in our minds during those formative years is no longer appropriate to current circumstances.
We've set our lives and mid-life find that our thinking has been passed by. We're rendered politically impotent, disempowered and marginalised.
Our framework and its residue hinder our ability for full-hearted and headed engagement with life as it now presents. Socialism and bling, bling can't manage a conversation.
The only show is an accommodation with capitalism, a comprise: "the Third Way", "the Social Market". Politically, it's diffuse and loose and indeed a crowded space, even without Bertie! However, attachment to it is hardly visceral.
I still struggle without a utopia. Was I that wrong, that naive, that blinkered, in my empathy for the political left? Are we idealists so dangerous?
And how does one let go of beliefs to which one has become so attached? Has there been a letting-go ritual?
A funeral, a burial, a cremation? If so I wasn't there and feel its lack.
Have other socialists felt likewise? Without the mourning, there's no renewal, no revitalisation, and it shows politically. Has the left said sorry? Is it sorry for personal culpability and gullibility Sorry for foolishness? Or a bigger sorry - sorry for a much greater historic and global wrong? History may not celebrate but implicate us.
Patrick O'Dea is a lecturer in social work, Department of Social Studies, Trinity College, Dublin.