Radical or Redundant?

Minor Parties in Irish Politics

Liam Weeks

• Publisher: THP Ireland
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780752480831
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While the type of small political party In Ireland has varied, their fate, it seems, has not. Although some enjoy a brief time in the sun, termination is the long-term prospects for all minor parties. The usual pattern is a speedy ascent, an impact on the political system including a time in government, followed by a prolonged termination. This book examines this pattern of evolution for minor, or small, parties in Irish politics. As the Irish state has changed, so too have the types of parties that have emerged. With the first-time entry of the Greens into government in 2007, their wipeout in 2011, the termination of the Progressive Democrats in 2009, and the failure of a new party to emerge despite the on-going financial crisis, the time is ripe for this analysis.

1

The Dog that Failed to Bark: Why Did No New Party Emerge in 2011?

Liam Weeks

Prologue

As the Irish state has changed, so too have the types of minor, or small, parties that have emerged in the political arena. Where once were the farmers of Clann na Talmhan, the liberals of the Progressive Democrats (PDs) and the environmentalists of the Greens, there now sits in the Dáil a range of former left-wing revolutionaries in the guise of Sinn Féin and within the broad unmbrella group, the United Left Alliance. This book looks at this evolution of minor parties in Ireland, in particular their rise and fall and their lasting political impact. Drawing on a range of sources, including interviews with many of the leading protagonists, we detail the fortunes of minor parties, examine the consequences of participation in government and look at why they fail to persist. We assess the reasons for minor parties emerging, their impact on the political system and why voters fall in and out of love so easily with them. One over-riding theme is the reasons for such parties remaining minor, about which this book offers a fresh insight.

Bringing together some of the leading academic authorities on Irish politics, this volume is a combination of comparative and case studies, which also places the Irish experience of minor parties in the international context. With the first-time entry of the Greens into government in 2007, their wipeout in 2011, the termination of the Progressive Democrats in 2009, and the failure of a new party to emerge despite the ongoing financial crisis, the time is ripe for an analysis of minor parties. For anyone interested in Irish politics and political parties, whether it is those looking to form a new party, to vote for such a party, or just to read about them, this work should be of significance. Readers will be able to evaluate the merits of the claim of Michael McDowell, one of the original founders and later leader of the Progressive Democrats, that minor parties need to be radical to avoid redundancy.

Introduction

For some, the 2011 general election was Ireland’s ‘earthquake’ election.1 However, although the dominant party of Irish politics, Fianna Fáil, experienced losses of seismic proportions, when the dust settled the three pillars of Irish party politics remained standing. No new party emerged to take their place, and between them Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil won 133 of the Dáil’s 166 seats, the same total won by these parties at the 2002 election.

One to two years before the 2011 election such an outcome might have come as a surprise to some. An increasing level of disillusionment with the political establishment’s failure to deal with the economic crisis, and the apparent lack of an alternative choice had motivated talk of a new political party. In many ways the circumstances were similar to that of the mid-1980s, when the Progressive Democrats had emerged in a recession, offering a new political platform and threatening to ‘break the mould’ of Irish politics. Indeed, an opinion poll in the Sunday Independent in June 2010 detected a desire for a new mould-breaker, with a majority of voters agreeing that a new political party was needed.2 A new political movement, ‘Democracy Now’, was resultantly established to tap into this sentiment. Its intention was to run a list of high-profile non-political candidates, including media commentators such as soccer pundit and journalist Eamon Dunphy, The Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, and economist David McWilliams. With as much as €400,000 pledged to the group in one day and a significant number of voluntary staff and even free campaign offices provided,3 it seemed as if the group’s aim of twenty seats in the new Dáil might not be unrealistic. In the end, however, the aspirations of this movement came to naught, as it decided not to contest the election in the absence of one resource it could not acquire: time.

There were other attempts to create parties in 2010 and 2011, some via the letters column of The Irish Times,4 but most of these did not come to fruition. The new movements that did emerge were more akin to loose umbrella groups than political parties,5 and in any case none had a notable electoral impact in the 2011 general election. What adds to the puzzle of new party failure is the relative success achieved by independents. Although Ireland has always been exceptional for its number of independent parliamentarians,6 in 2011 one in three candidates was independent and their combined vote, at 12 per cent, was the highest achieved since June 1927. Including the loose group United Left Alliance, there were nineteen independents and ‘others’ elected, just one fewer than Fianna Fáil’s total. This group of parliamentarians is quite a diverse collection, ranging from building developers-cum-soccer coaches to Harvard-educated management consultants and from former campaigners for the legalisation of cannabis to a range of left-wing TDs, including former members of Militant Labour, the Socialist Workers’ Party, Sinn Féin and Democratic Left. The wide spectrum of ideological flavours (which did not stop a majority of them from banding together to form a post-election technical group in parliament) provided by these independents is suggestive of a mood for change amongst a broad section of society. It also suggests that had a new party with a proper organisational structure in place evolved in time for the election, it might have had a successful breakthrough.

In part, this failure to launch a new political party was the motivation for this work. We wanted to examine this non-event in detail, consider what happened in previous crises, both home and abroad, and assess what a new party could hope to achieve. We wanted to look at the experience of other minor parties: when did they emerge; what are the ingredients for a successful new party? As the title suggests, this book is about minor parties in Irish politics. As well as drawing on the analysis of political scientists, this volume also has a number of contributions from TDs from minor parties, both past and present, who provide a unique insight into their lives within such parties. While such a book seems pressing in the absence of a new party on the contemporary political scene, from a historical perspective a study of this area enables a greater understanding of contemporary political events and might prove useful to those taking a keen interest in the evolution of the Irish party system. Such a study also places the events of 2009-12 in context, next to other economic crises. Do they always spawn new parties, or are the latter more likely to be the product of political circumstances? Are we right to link economic change to political change?

Another factor inspiring this volume is the limited scholarly activity on minor parties in the Irish context. This was not the outcome of an apartheid policy on the part of political scientists and historians, but reflected the dominance (and permanence) of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour, which together received on average almost nine out of every ten first preference votes cast at general elections between September 1927 and November 1982. However, the challenge to this dominance in recent decades, with minor party and independent candidates now attracting almost one in four votes and being a regular participant in government, demands greater attention. The purpose of this book is to tackle some of the questions about minor parties that have been raised, but gone unanswered, in the Irish context. The dismay of some commentators over the lack of new political parties through which to channel discontent in the economic downturn indicates the valuable, and sometimes underappreciated, role that minor parties can play in the political system. They can act as a safety-valve to release tension, enabling the bodypolitik to vent their frustration within the system, the best opportunity that exists of achieving change. It is in this context that the founder of the Progressive Democrats, Desmond O’Malley, says in his contribution to this book that the emergence of new (which by implication usually means minor) parties is a vital part of an effective political system; without them democracy will suffer and perhaps even die.

The aim of this introductory chapter is twofold: first, to resolve some definitional issues concerning minor parties, and second, to assess why no new party, whether minor or major, has successfully emerged in Ireland in recent years. The first issue concerns what we mean by minor, or perhaps why we call these parties minor. As Coakley notes in his chapter, this concerns identifying two boundaries: the upper boundary separates minor from major while the lower differentiates genuine minor parties from independent candidates. He provides a general discussion on the ambiguity concerning a definition of minor parties, although there is a broader discussion concerning size that is referred to by Clark and McDaid and Rekawek, namely whether minor necessarily implies small. A major party used to attracting a sizeable share of votes and seats might have a poor election, losing the majority of its representation, à la Fianna Fáil in 2011 or the Progressive Conservatives in Canada in 1993. Such a party is then small in composition, but is it necessarily a minor actor? In addition, how are we to differentiate between a party on the way up and one on the way down? At the same election in Canada, Bloc Québécois (BQ) won over 13 per cent of the national vote, Reform almost 19 per cent and the Progressive Conservatives (PC) 16 per cent. This was the first election for the BQ, but it constituted a gain of 17 per cent for Reform and a loss of 27 per cent for the Conservatives. Are we to consider all these parties equally? Both BQ and the PC (who won just two federal seats) were small parties, but do their rise and fall constitute the same phenomenon? To resolve this conundrum, both Weeks and Clark in their comparative chapters employ Mair’s definition of minor parties7 that includes those winning between 1.5 and 15 per cent of the national vote on average at more than three elections. For reasons of inclusivity, the lower boundary of this definition is loosened for cases of analysis within the Irish political system. Thus, Coakley, for example, includes all minor parties (and even some groups that have an ambiguous party status) that fall below the 1.5 per cent threshold. To warrant consideration for inclusion in this volume, Weeks ultimately defines the boundaries of interest as the non-permanent (or ‘ephemeral’) members of the Irish party system, or what Coakley more specifically labels the, ‘non-traditional, non-established, and non-mainstream’. This boundary is expanded to include non-party members of the non-establishment, that is, independent candidates. The latter’s inclusion reflects the significant role they play as part of the ‘others’ category outside of the three mainstream parties; it also reflects an ambiguity that can exist between some minor parties and independents.8

Of course, it might seem strange to label Labour a ‘major’ party, as it has only recently become the second largest party in the Dáil, and even then both Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin have been challenging this position in opinion polls. Consequently, McDaid and Rekawek explore this very issue for Labour, as they examine its fluctuations be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• 1 The Dog that Failed to Bark: Why Did No New Party Emerge in 2011?
• 2 From Cradle to Grave: The Impact and Evolution of Minor Parties
• 3 The Rise and Fall of Minor Parties in Ireland, 1922-2011
• 4 Life in a Minor Party
• 5 Wipeout! Does Governing Kill Small Parties in Ireland?
• 6 The Rise and Decline of the Green Party
• 7 The Party That Ran Out of Lives: The Progressive Democrats
• 8 Seeking the Fianna Fáil Vote: Why do Interest Groups Run for Office in Ireland?
• 9 Irish Farmers’ Parties, Nationalism and Class Politics in the Twentieth Century
• 10 To the Left of Labour: The Workers’ Party and Democratic Left, 1982-97
• 11 Major Breakthrough or ‘Temporary Little Arrangement’? The Labour Party’s 2011 Electoral Success in Historical Perspective
• 12 The Slow Growth of Sinn Féin: From Minor Player to Centre Stage?
• 13 Voting in Dáil Éireann: The Changing Roles of Minor Parties and Independents, 1937-2011
• 14 Radical, Redundant or Relevant? Minor Parties in Comparative and Systemic Perspective
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Copyright