The Sunday Independent carried several articles in its October 10th
edition leaving absolutely no room for doubt that the knives are being
sharpened and the target is the Croke Park Agreement. Such is the venom
for the trade unions and the working class that even James Connolly was
dragged into the argument – on the side of the bosses! Here we outline
some of the arguments from the Sunday Independent and we also let James Connolly speak for himself.
We explained as long ago as July 1st that the Croke Park
Deal would come under pressure from both the working class and the
bosses. The reason for this is that on the one hand the government was
going to have to try to impose the “reforms” and reorganisations, cuts
in services and redeployments and on the other hand the shifting sands
in the world economy meant that the bosses could soon come back for
more. Here’s what we said:
“This agreement is built on sand, and more the case shifting sands.
The background internationally to events in Ireland is the deep crisis
in the eurozone, the general strikes in Greece, Italy and Spain and the
rest of the continent are a reflection of the political conclusions
being drawn by the working class. There have been huge demonstrations
and massive shifts of opinion in Ireland, huge votes in favour of strike
action and even what was essentially a public sector general strike.
The whole of the last two years has been dominated by huge instability.“As we explained recently:
“‘As such the goal posts could be moved at any stage and it is quite
likely that the Coalition will be back for more. The gloves are off, the
FF and Green Party ministers know that they are going to be ditched at
the next election. They have a job to do on behalf of the bourgeois;
make the workers pay for the crisis. This is a one sided Civil war
against the trade union movement and the working class. In these
circumstances the role of the trade union leadership has to be to put
forward an intransigent class position. This crisis is of the bosses
making, The government will no doubt claim as will their counterparts in
Greece, Spain, Portugal and Britain, that there is no alternative. But
any policy that attacks working people has to be opposed, and more
effectively than the trade union leaders have done so far.’ Croke Park
Deal: Weakness invites aggression 8/6/2010“The experience of the policy of ‘social partnership’ has been that
sooner or later the illusions of the trade union leaders have been
wrecked either on the basis that the government have shown Begg and
McLoone the door as they did with the two week unpaid leave proposal in
December, or the pressure has built up from below and forced the trade
union leaders to organise demonstrations and actions, and in many cases
against their better judgement.“Trotsky pointed out in the Transitional Programme written in 1938
that the trade union and labour leaders represented the most
conservative layer in society. Again in 1940 he explained that no matter
what, they would try and reach an agreement – any agreement – with even
the most reactionary government. He explained further that under
conditions of crisis these agreements will always fall down on the basis
of pressure from the bosses or the workers. Those words ring very true
today.” (The Croke Park “Deal” agreed: Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile…)
It is less than six months ago that the bourgeois press in Ireland
were placing huge pressure on the Public Sector workers, and in
particular on the leaders of the unions, to accept the proposal. So what
has changed? The truth is that the crisis at AIB and the knock on
effect on the speculators in the financial markets is threatening the
Irish economy. The only answer that the Irish ruling class can come up
with is to make the workers pay. Eamon Delaney in the Sunday Independent argued that the “Government has to grasp the public service nettle”.
“Think of it. No wage cuts for public servants for two years, but
absolutely no job cuts and, as a consequence of some curious procedure
of self-administered ‘reforms’ in the public service, those pay cuts
might be reversed anyway. Unbelievable. This is the great Croke Park
fudge and it’s going to cost us a fortune.“Meanwhile, the public purse is being bled dry, and the Government is
taking in way less than it is spending. The public-sector wage bill is
now a whopping one-third of the Government’s spending, but nothing
meaningful has been done to curb this spend.“In the UK, and in Northern Ireland, wholesale cuts are being made
across the same sector to try and restore order to their public
finances, and there is so far a grudging acceptance by the unions about
this.“But in Ireland, there is no such political bravery — or fairness.
The Croke Park deal is ringfenced against financial realism, despite the
recommendations of the McCarthy Report.“In the wider public sector with its quangos and commissions, money
is still being frittered away, and the overall bill for public-sector
salaries and index-linked pensions is crippling the exchequer. And
incidentally, whatever happened to the recommendations of McCarthy,
launched with fanfare?”
So the answer is clear, at least in the mind of Eamon Delaney. What
Ireland needs is a dose of what’s on the cards in Britain. But, surely
only a few months ago, it was the British Tories who were arguing that
what Britain needed was a dose of what was being administered to the
Irish workers. More than anything, what this means is that the bosses
will try and drag in any argument and twist anything to justify placing
the burden on our shoulders. Another article claims that the Croke Park
Deal is going to affect Ireland’s recovery.
“Forget the bank bailout, the biggest obstacle to long-term recovery
is the Government’s commitment to the Croke Park deal. By keeping public
salaries so high, it will hinder wages across the economy from the
further fall of around eight per cent that needs to happen to recreate
the jobs we lost. It also burdens low-paid private-sector taxpayers in
riskier employment to bear the brunt of higher taxes. And that could
derail recovery.” (Commitment to Croke park deal will derail our
recovery, By Marc Coleman)
But surely, the Irish bosses were arguing last year that the big
problem was the cost base of the Irish economy? Ireland is hugely
dependent on trade and has been directly affected by the falling value
of sterling against the euro and the fall off in world trade. Ireland is
a long way from mainland Europe and the economy is small. It costs more
to export from Ireland to the rest of Europe than it does to export
from say France to Belgium. This is far more of an issue than Public
Sector wages. These have already been cut and to claim that further cuts
would help the economy is nonsense. Cutting wages would further cut the
market which would adversely affect the economy.
Once again the old attempt to divide the public and private sector
workers gets an airing. Low paid workers will be forced to pay higher
taxes and that will derail recovery. We would argue that there is no
reason at all for low paid workers to pay higher taxes. What about the
millions lost in tax avoidance? What about the tax breaks and the
thousands of rich people who get away with paying no tax at all?
Not content with attacking the public sector workers himself Coleman
calls upon a very unlikely supporter to back him up. Poor James Connolly
is dragged in to the argument:
“A good illustration of the madness in economic comment we are
suffering right now was given by Joe Duffy recently. On Monday, he was
on the telly extolling the virtues of his hero, James Connolly. ‘In his
day, capitalists treated workers as just another number on a balance
sheet,’ he said. Now with a salary of €408,000, Joe’s own balance sheet
is doing quite well from the capitalist culture that is (but isn’t
supposed to be) our national broadcaster.“But Joe has revealed something very important. As another of his
heroes, Karl Marx, once said, economics boils down to the question, ‘Who
rules whom?’ In Connolly’s day it was the capitalists ruling the
workers. But as Joe’s salary of €408,000 shows, the public sector is the
new oppressor of the workers. To sustain salaries like Joe’s, Lenihan
is now promising Joe’s comrades in Ictu that the lavish salaries at the
middle and top of the public service will be untouched.“Crazy rules that drove the incomes of public sector retirees up in
line with pay rises and promotions received by their successors — rules
that doubled and trebled pension entitlement will also be sacrosanct.
To pay for this, younger, lower-income workers in the private sector,
workers suffering negative equity and fear of unemployment, will be
taxed even more.“If he were alive today, I know whose side James Connolly would be
on.” (Commitment to Croke park deal will derail our recovery, By Marc
Coleman)
But what did James Connolly really say? This is what he said in 1897:
“The Socialist who would destroy, root and branch, the whole brutally
materialistic system of civilisation, which like the English language
we have adopted as our own, is, I hold, a far more deadly foe to English
rule and tutelage, than the superficial thinker who imagines it
possible to reconcile Irish freedom with those insidious but disastrous
forms of economic subjection – landlord tyranny, capitalist fraud and
unclean usury; baneful fruits of the Norman Conquest, the unholy
trinity, of which Strongbow and Diarmuid MacMurchadha – Norman thief and
Irish traitor – were the fitting precursors and apostles.“If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag
over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the
Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.“England would still rule you. She would rule you through her
capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the
whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted
in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood
of our martyrs.“England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips
offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause
you had betrayed.“Nationalism without Socialism – without a reorganisation of society
on the basis of a broader and more developed form of that common
property which underlay the social structure of Ancient Erin – is only
national recreancy.“It would be tantamount to a public declaration that our oppressors
had so far succeeded in inoculating us with their perverted conceptions
of justice and morality that we had finally decided to accept those
conceptions as our own, and no longer needed an alien army to force them
upon us.“As a Socialist I am prepared to do all one man can do to achieve for
our motherland her rightful heritage – independence; but if you ask me
to abate one jot or tittle of the claims of social justice, in order to
conciliate the privileged classes, then I must decline.”
Connolly’s views on the bankers, the capitalists and “perverted conceptions of justice and morality” are
crystal clear. In fact he would have been the first to condemn a
capitalist government attacking its own people on behalf of the
financial speculators, the IMF, the ECB and big business. He would have
had plenty more to say about their hired lackeys in the press. But he
would also have had something to say about the remarks made by Labour TD
Sean Sherlock, also published in the Sunday Independent:
“Labour frontbench spokesperson Sean Sherlock has warned public
sector workers, and the Government, that unless the pace of reform
intensifies there will have to be compulsory redundancies in the sector.“The Labour TD was commenting on the ongoing failure of the Croke
Park deal to deliver any real changes in how the public sector operates.“Speaking to the Sunday Independent, Mr Sherlock said: ‘Croke Park
was signed and sealed in April and we have not seen anything emerging
since then in terms of a reduction in numbers or changes in work
practices.’“The Labour TD added that ‘as a Labour Party politician, what you are
faced with is that if the Croke Park agreement does not live up to
people’s expectations, the political reality, given the state of the
national finances, is that unilateral action might have to be taken’’.“When asked if this could include job losses, Mr Sherlock said: ‘If
there is not progress on a voluntary basis, we will see a move towards
statutory redundancies’’.” (Labour warns of public jobs cuts, by John
Drennan)
Connolly took a very clear view on the question of workers’ representatives, particularly those who were feted by the press:
“…we question if there were a dozen present at Sligo who did not
feel that the president’s appeal to capitalists to come and exploit the
Irish workers – for that, stripped of all its tawdry rhetoric, is what
Mr Bowman’s address meant – an appeal coupled with the assurance that
Irish workers could make ‘Irish investments remunerative’, i.e. could
make good, fat profit for their master – was an appeal which was to the
last degree insulting and humiliating to the working class of this
country.“A Socialist in the position of Mr Bowman would have striven to
infuse into the minds of his hearers a spirit of revolt against the
system that holds them as its slaves, a system that tortures them with
want in the midst of locked-up storehouses of plenty; a Socialist would
have taught the workers to manfully take their destiny, politically and
socially, into their own hands; Mr Bowman taught them to whine for
capitalists to come and exploit them. The wage received by 87 per cent
of the wage workers of Ireland is less than £1 per week; Mr Bowman tells
them to achieve the industrial regeneration of Ireland by establishing
‘people’s banks’ out of their savings!!! Out of the savings of men who
support a family on less than £1 per week?? This is what the capitalist
Evening Herald termed a ‘splendid statement’.“We do not grudge Mr Bowman the praise of the capitalist newspapers;
he has fairly earned it, fairly earned the praise of the journalistic
champions of the master class. But there were some Socialists, we
believe, amongst the delegates to that Congress and we mean to have an
explanation of their silence on that occasion. Were they afraid that
they also might be accused of personal enmity to the president if they
dared to criticise him? If they were, it is not of such stuff
revolutionists are made.” (Irish Trade Union Congress: James Connolly
1901)
As we have explained on many occasions, Labour needs a socialist
programme. The party will come under a lot of pressure over the next
period to get involved in cross-party talks over the budget. The
Coalition parties are desperate to find some sort of consensus that they
can point towards. This is solely designed to spread the responsibility
for their actions. It would also be the focus for a potential national
government. The Labour leaders must not fall for this. Instead they
should offer a clear socialist alternative to the crisis. That would be
in the best traditions of Connolly and Larkin.
