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THE LABOUR PARTY members must wonder which of them is to blame: who amongst their ranks accidentally ran over and flattened a whole family of black cats, or shattered a gigantic mirror or left all their shoes atop a table.
For the Labour lads – and lads they all are now in the 33rd Dáil – just can’t seem to catch a lucky break at all. Having plummeted from 37 seats to a mere seven in the electoral massacre of 2016, the survivors had harboured modest hopes that the party might be permitted by a less vengeful electorate to exit the dog-house and climb back into double digits in last month’s plebiscite.
But it was not to be. The Shinner Surge engulfed Labour as well as Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, and the party eventually scrambled home with half a dozen seats. And to add to the members’ chagrin, an organisation which has assiduously campaigned on gender and equality issues returned with six male TDs, having lost stalwarts Joan Burton and Jan O’Sullivan to the Sinn Féin flood.
Leadership contest heats up
Leader Brendan Howlin bowed gracefully to the inevitable and fell on his bodkin days after the result, sparking a leadership contest between Alan Kelly and Aodhán Ó Ríordáin.
Surely now, the party must’ve reasoned, this contest would give Labour a much-needed spell in the spotlight after it had spent most of the previous Dáil languishing in the wings. After all, political journalists love a good auld leadership rumble. And god knows there was little enough news afoot during February, given that the government formation talks were proceeding with all the brisk efficiency of a spliff-smoking sloth.
Once again, it rained soup upon the party armed with forks. Whatever admittedly slim chance its two leadership contenders had of hogging headlines during this parliamentary lacuna, it promptly dropped to zero when the coronavirus came knocking.
So the battle for the Labour leadership is underway, but the media’s – and the public’s – collective gaze is riveted elsewhere, locked onto the fog of the escalating coronavirus war.
But the show must go on. And it’s a long-drawn-out process which began last Monday in Cork with the first of a series of five countrywide hustings and which will culminate with a count of postal ballots on 3 April.
Thursday’s hustings
Last night, the two candidates made their pitches to around 100 party members in a conference room in Clayton Hotel, close to Dublin Airport.
It made a stark contrast to the recent triumphant rallies hosted by a celebratory Sinn Féin which have been packed to the chandeliers with starry-eyed new recruits wooed by the party’s pledges to fix the broken housing and health systems.
At the Labour gathering; most of the attendees knew each other – die-hard veterans who have stuck with the party through all its travails. Nor was there any triumphalism from either Kelly or Ó’Ríordáin. The would-be leaders know all-too-well that this could be Labour’s Last Stand, a final push to prevent the once-proud party of Connolly from sliding irrevocably into irrelevance.
Both men made their opening statements, laying out their different visions on how to rebuild the party – but both underlined the uphill task awaiting the new leader. “People have fallen out of love with us,” said Ó’Ríordáin. ”Labour must bring back a sense of solidarity and compassion to the Irish public,” he added, pledging a “fit-for-purpose organisation with a ‘win-back’ strategy for every constituency.”
Kelly was equally frank. “We lost our way considerably,” he said. “We haven’t been relevant to the national conversation, we haven’t connected with people outside our own circle and we assumed that opposition alone would give us a natural bounce after government.” The Tipperary TD also called for a root-and-branch reform of the party. “Printing off a few leaflets isn’t going to cut it anymore”.
Style over substance?
In many ways, the Labour contest is a battle of style over substance – a straight choice between two substantial candidates with very different styles. The Tipperary TD prides himself on his ‘AK-47’ image of a plain-speaking brawler from rural Ireland, while Ó Ríordáin, a former school principal of an inner-city school, is less a combative, more polished urbanite.
There were many questions from the floor. One member wondered if the party should re-examine its recent decision to opt-out of the current government formation talks. “Nobody wants to talk to Labour because of the position we’ve taken,” he reminded the two candidates.
“if there is a dance we should be dancing, but it would want to be a hell of a deal for us to enter government,” said Ó Riordáin. Kelly was of a similar view. “We were probably too quick to move ourselves out of certain negotiations,” he said. But both men reckoned the party would be better served supporting specific policies from the opposition benches rather than joining whatever class of coalition is eventually cobbled together.
There were a couple of digs thrown by the candidates – but not at each other. When the subject of taxation was raised, the Dublin TD stuck a boot into Limerick-born businessman JP McManus. “Who should pay tax? I have a difficulty with a tax exile flying into the country on a jet, throwing money at every GAA club in the country, fluting off again and everyone thinking this guy is a hero. I have a difficulty with that,” O Riordáin said to applause.
Kelly told the crowd he was “passionate” about housing. “We need very simply to build more houses on public land – CPO [compulsory purchase orders] ‘em across the country if needs be,” he said. “As long as you have a right-wing party owning the housing portfolio, you are never going to get the scale you require.”
But his rival was a warier man, more mindful perhaps of just how Labour had landed itself in the mire in the first place. “We cannot pretend that we can fix housing, fix health, fix disability, fix all the words that we’ve spoken about if at the same time we are proposing a tax cut agenda that other parties are proposing,” said Ó Riordáin. “I don’t feel it’s an honest message for the Labour Party.”
After a couple of hours, the meeting ended. It had been a thoughtful debate about the future path for the party, for everyone in the room knew there can be no more missteps if the party is to crawl back from the cliff-edge.
They and the Social Democrats – a party born from Left splits – are both the fourth-placed parties in the Dáil with six seats each. The Greens are on the rise with 12 TDs, and the chamber is now awash with vociferous technical groups clamouring for their place on the political centre-stage.
Many people took a dab of hand sanitiser on the way out the door. Cleaning one’s hands is easy. Persuading disillusioned Labour voters that the slate is now clean will be a harder task altogether for the new leader.
See more of Lise Hand’s columns for TheJournal.ie here.
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Fabulous, if not dystopian piece Simon. I have to say, the increasing grip private corporations have on everything from our newsfeeds, to our diets, to our medical data is truly frightening. What’s even more frightening though is people’s lack of interest; I give you Alexa, Google Home etc.
@Diarmaid Twomey: Corporations control governments when it’s supposed to be the other way around. Ireland was probably targeted for its light touch regulation.
I mean in the U.S. the corporations literally author the vast majority of bills passed in Washington and the people voting on them have little clue about their contents and it takes a couple of business days to get the 10,000 page document into law.
Welcome to late stage capitalism ladies and gentlemen.
We should all be concerned at such a proposal, your DNA is unique to you , why should a private company acquire your genetic code and use it for profit or God knows what purpose in the future. Be careful if you are asked to sign any documents in this regard and if you are not comfortable with this, just say no.
@Honeybee: Ní féidir sclábhaíocht ar Éire. But, yes, read and say Nó if you don’t comprehend..
Let the government make it illegal, is it not already??
@Mick McGuinness: “. . . The State has pumped approximately €73.5 million into GMI . . .”
@Mick McGuinness: I’d like to know whether the Taoiseach, Tánaiste, any Minister, or any other office-holder has a beneficial interest. Why else would the State be pumping money into a secretive private concern?
@Fachtna Roe: look it up. Not that difficult.
Whats the point of GDPR if things like this are happening???
@Lydia McLoughlin: GDPR is a smokescreen to prevent you finding out these things are happening. Data Protection is worthwhile, but GDPR seems to be used to tilt the scales in such way as to balance Freedom of Information.
@Fachtna Roe: this is a complex area of data protection , your ill informed comment about GDPR does not help as it is completely inaccurate and just plain wrong. GDPR is no smokescreen , it is a large global regulation that required a lot of work and is designed to deter organisations from misusing data collected with some very heavy financial penalties (eg 4% of global turnover is a lot of money just for abusing somebody email data ) – it is not a ‘smokescreen’ – as for the GMI issue in the piece – the author makes a very good case as to why we should not allow privatisation of our genetic data – I would go a step further and point out the risks that this genetic data can be used by private companies in the future ( especially insurance companies ) if they remain unregulated – to risk profile and refuse health cover and life cover or else more likely ‘charge more’ money for individuals they claim are riskier to cover due to their ‘genetic history’ – that level of data abuse really will need the governments to legislate and protect citizens from.
@Dave Hammond: Waffle. Plus, GDPR is an EU regulation.
Neither the author nor his employer are medical professionals. This is a medical project and yet the legal profession feel emboldened to make judgements in the collection of anonymous data that may prove beneficial for future medical research.
This is an ongoing issue, where the pursuit of narrow legal interests out ways the public good. This occurs regularly in medical negligence cases where impossible legal standards are imposed on imperfect medical practices and the outcome deemed negligent and therefore cash generating.
Not all areas of life should be subject to the whims of lawyers, their legal arguments or the interests that employ them to do so.
This incessant creep of legal interference in areas they are not qualified to make judgements in does a disservice to us all.
Any possible leak of data, possibly trivial, from this study should not be considered important enough to interfere with initiatives which may have beneficial outcomes for public health.
Not all data is created equal, and the current fetishisation of the protection of innocuous information is pointless and almost certainly negative for future research.
@Gerard Carthy: Well done for missing the entire point Gerard. In case you forgot the legal profession exist to protect citizens through the use of laws. Just cause you’re a medic doesn’t give you a licence to obtain and process people’s most private data because you say it will be of use for private ends.
@Diarmaid Twomey: Exactly right.
@Diarmaid Twomey: I feel so protected every time I have to answer stupid data protection questions to pay my own bills. Or try to interact with a bank. Or move electricity supplier. Or prove I’m the same person to my own bank. Or hear that the legal profession are going to make swings hazardous implements that need supervision at al times from now on in the pursuit of a narrow and depressingly idiotic argument.
And you thin I’m missing the point and should be grateful to be treated like a child?
@Diarmaid Twomey: it’s the state that exists to protect citizens, not the legal profession per se.
@Gerard Carthy: Gerard if you feel private corporations being made tell you when and if they are processing your information is akin to you being treated like a child, fair enough. That’s your prerogative. However, don’t insinuate that a legal professional, or anyone else for that matter, who expresses concern about private corporations profiting from the processing of private medical data is being pedantic or some sort of pain in the *asre! Feel free to join MAGA rallies and eat chlorinated chicken, if the medical professional (who obviously are above us all) tell you to, but I’ll stick to wanting my data and rights protected and vindicated, thanks very much.
@Gerard Carthy: You absolutely do not have a clue.
@Gerard Carthy: ‘the protection of innocuous information is pointless’ – hmm this is very valuable data ( not innocuous information ) – one example is the risk profiling that a private company will be able to use this data to ‘monetise’ such as health insurance – life assurance – corporations and big pharma will be able to target profiles that are more vulnerable based on genetic data – the author is correct to point out the slippery slope that ‘privatising’ this field is going down – I think you are quite incorrect and missing the point to lump this in as potential innocuous data – it is not about a possible leak or the consequences of such a leak that it the concern – it is that the unique genetic data of individuals can be monetized by private companies – that is the risk that the author correctly identifies as very real and very wrong. There is nothing innocuous about the motivations of large private companies wanting to access important private data.
@Dave Hammond: The database in question has no personal identifiers, is accessible on a read only basis and the amount of information that can be accessed at a time is limited. It would be impossible for an insurance company for example to make any commercial use of it. Since we have a community rated private insurance and pre existing conditions are non exclusionary it’s not even an issue.
It amazes me how often access to fairly useless insurance is a reason why data projects should be cancelled. Weird.
@Gerard Carthy: Excellent comment. I would add that in this whole zone of research, a tremendous new vista is opening. The most popular gift now given in some countries, is an ancestry DNA test, which shows those participating, really interesting information on where one came from back the millennia. What it could also show is the presence of problem recessives. A simple App will then allow prospective parents to do a pre check. This will inform them of the chance of their potential offspring exhibiting some life effecting syndrome, hemophilia, CF or the like. This information will allow them to go for I.V. and pre implantation selection, thus leaving the horror story behind. Who could say no to that, but meddling lawyers could greatly obstruct it.
@Nicholas Grubb: That reads like an advert, or a paid comment.
Informative article
Like any economic or military advantage, genetic engeering is unstoppable. Sadly.
If we (the West) ban it others will get an advantage – and like how we destroyed aborigines in the Americas, Australia and Asia with more advanced technology – they will do unto us.
Humanity didn’t decide to move from hunting to farming 10,000 years ago; it had no choice.
Frightening
Isn’t this the second time in a couple of weeks this article (or a slightly different version of it) has been posted on the Journal?
@This Guy: Were you hoping it would be kept a secret?
I have a problem understanding this whole thing. I can understand How a company can profit from this, by selling the information or an old man I.e. me. A sixty year old man, three major health issues identify unknown but how does it affect me with regard to data protection
@Alan Dignam: A situation might arise where health insurance companies would be able to pick and choose who to insure based on risks associated with your genetic makeup. Not a good situation, essentially removing risk for them.
@Alan Dignam: Your DNA is the most unique and valuable thing you received from your parents, and the most unique and valuable thing you give to your children.
It is also the most complicated thing most of us know of, and printed would be a stack of paper 130m high.
You get that complexity free, and pass it on free for the natural purpose.
A corporation is legally a person, but non-living. Think “Corpse” and “Oration”. This is the type of entity that may end up ‘owning’ the code for living people.
The effect on our planet of these dead-people-speaking is hardly positive. Why trust them with the codes for life?
In that corporations are themselves non-living, but require us living people to survive and propagate, they are functionally the same as a virus.
They can sell mine their defective lol
@Aaron92utd: evidently!
@Aaron92utd: so you can pay higher health insurance premiums, or maybe be deprived of obtaining life insurance for that mortgage you applied for? And you won’t know why unless you pay for the results….
If think we should get a % every time our data is sold whether dna or online usage. We should have the right to have it deleted and to block further sales.
It’s our data about us we should have complete control, but also if someone is profiting from the sale of our data we show also profit.
@Davis Payne: Your DNA also contains information about your relatives, and theirs about you; that’s worth a lot more than the few cent you’d be lucky to get from a corporation.
Data is the new oil……
Very interesting series of documentaries about the oil industry.
Part 3 is called “Data is the new oil”
A fairly comprehensive explanation of how data has become a commodity.
have your say