Eddie Hobbs, back in business!

All of a sudden while watching Mary Lou MacDonald on RTE’s Frontline last night, I started to wonder where Eddie Hobbs is these days? Mary Lou has raided the Hobbs library and is now reheating some of the classic Hobbs line. In 2009 Hobbs called for public service pay cuts and protection for those public sector workers earning incomes of €30,000 or less. Up north Sinn Fein has frozen public service pay for those on over €27K and is setting about public service pension reform in a manner that has Eddie smiling from ear to ear! To that effect there is a public service strike there tomorrow in protest against the DUP/Sinn Fein medicine. With extraordinary hard necks, Sinn Fein are looking their own striking public servants in the eye and saying we back you!

Sinn Fein is proposing a cap on all salaries in the public sector of €100,000 while it has little to say about salaries in the private sector. I’ve no problem with an incomes policy provided it includes all citizens and all incomes. So why shouldn’t investments, property, earnings on property be included? But there aren’t too many public servants earning over €100,000. I don’t for one minute think that the amount of money SF believe is there to be saved can be found, (€265M) Last spring Sinn Fein had an interesting footnote in their manifesto, they opposed the introduction of tax on the family farm. They’ve gone 1 step further in their 2012 pre-budget submission; excluding farmland, business assets and the first 205 of primary value of residences over €1m, retain state funding for minority faith private schools while not forgetting the old Milton Friedman line of making tax credits refundable. Sinn Fein used to stand for an Ireland of Equals, so how can they justify subsidising private minor faith boarding schools while Catholic ones are cut? Earlier this year there was the off the wall suggestion to deal with the cuts all in one go and to return to the bond market in 2012. This would have destroyed the social economy while being extremely attractive to speculators hoping to drive costs rock bottom. Tucked away in the SF 2011 GE manifesto was a nod to this logic with a pledge to return to the bond markets in 2012 providing a bank resolution mechanism was in place.

What scares the hell out of me and most people who rely on the public purse for an income is that most SF TD’s have never worked in the public service and do not seem to understand the ethos of a public service. It’s their type of logic that panders to the anti-public sector feeling that is growing in the country, fanned by right wing economists and opportunist TD’s. Up north while Sinn Fein support this week’s strike the reality is that in the words of their Education minister last September when he announced his plan to rationalise schools “Education is changing from this moment on”. The words and their meaning on the ground are moving in opposite economic tectonic plates in Sinn Fein up north. In the Ireland of equals it won’t be long till the thoughts and actions here match the northern mood music.

I don’t want to work in a public service that resembles New Zealand where less than 2% of the countries workforce are paid by the state. It wasn’t always that way in the country where their first Labour Prime Minister (2^nd generation Irishman) devised the world’s first national health service but right wing governments have dominated New Zealand politics for 40 out of 50 years from 1949 onward with the resulting impact on public servants.

The flip side of what Eddie Hobbs said last year was that he felt confrontation had to happen and that industrial action on a par with the 1984 miners dispute by public sector workers would result. That’s one vision of where the intellectual analysis that is shared by Sinn Fein may well bring workers south of the border. In the meantime in the words of Ed Milliband I understand where the strikers are coming from in the North and in Britain.

Don't mention the war

So Martin McGuinness is the latest candidate to get a nomination for the Presidential Election. Martin is not the first republican to run in such an election. I haven’t met anyone yet who thinks he will win. Most people think that his candidacy is about Sinn Fein replacing Fianna Fail as the main opposition party. The hype behind McGuinness is about creating the impression that only Sinn Fein has an alternative to the government. At one fell swoop the ULA have been marginalised by SF as they set about the task of peddling the myth of Martin the man from Damascus, while his namesake Micéal watches from the sidelines. McGuinness will add Fianna Fail and some independent support to his own and will probably get about 25% of the vote.

Martin is not one for deep thoughts. Derry is not the hotbed of left wing radicalism that West Belfast likes to portray itself as. McGuinness’ Ard Fheis speech was a folksy, Uncle Martin ramble, the last remaining Chuckle Brother still managing to smile back. Derry is fundamentally a place of established socially conservative nationalists, McAteer, Hume (who genuinely did the state some service and has been deliberately marginalised by SF & FF) and now the teetotaller McGuinness. The journalist Suzanne Breen tells a story of how McGuinness attacked her publicly for writing about the sexuality of Pearse and Roger Casement. When the past is mentioned Sinn Fein now are only looking forward and want to talk about the future deal. Expect the SF campaign to adopt the Basil Fawlty defence of don’t mention the war.

Ironically the campaign will attack all other candidates as establishment ignoring the realities of Catholic Derry politics where nationalism has been the established force and driver for the last 40 years. In Derry Eamon McCann was the anti-establishment candidate at the 2011 Assembly elections. However SF won’t let facts get in the way of presidential spin! The disastrous underpinning of clapped out banks through the bank guarantee scheme which SF so enthusiastically supported in 2008 didn’t happen. When the party could have done Ireland some service by staring at the political spot on the wall in Leinster House, they jumped in with 2 feet first to wave the green flag defending the banks.

In northern politics election time means 2 elections, a green one and an orange one. This election will be a double election also. There will be one for heading the poll between Michael D and Gay Mitchell and the other one for dominating the opposition. SF are in a one horse race in that. I expect the 3 party candidates to pull away from the independents. Second preferences will mean that Sinn Fein will have to appeal to the business types who back Sean Gallagher if he wants to remain in the race. This reality has yet to strike home with Sinn Fein. It is a sobering reality as it will mean that Sinn Fein will have to appeal to voters who are well beyond their core. That’s why there’ll be no mention of the war. The more that Martin’s past is raised the less likely it is that his candidacy will be successful.

Never ask a question unless you know the answer first!

I would have loved to have gone to Arbour Hill today to mark the 95th anniversary of the execution of James Connolly but for family reasons I was otherwise detained. I wonder what Connolly would have made of Ireland (well this part of it!) almost a century after his death. Connolly believed strongly in strength and unity. I’m sure he’d weep if he knew that the successor to his ITGWU was being picketed in Wexford by the self-proclaimed successors to Pearse. Many of James Connolly’s family were there at Arbour Hill to see his direct successor as leader of the Irish Left Eamon Gilmore speak today. A century on a lot has changed but a lot remains the same.

Connolly was an able man who showed that it was always necessary to cut a deal so as to protect your interests. No better example than the Wexford lock Out, the centenary of which falls later this year. The object was that the workers would be represented by their own Irish Union in their case the ITGWU. Connolly visited here during the strike, I have a copy of a letter from him in Corporation St Belfast to Richard Corish in Wexford around that time. I showed Nessa Childers MEP the step from where he spoke almost a century ago. Connolly accepted compromise to end the lock out just as he did in Dublin in 1916 to prevent further suffering. He knew that eventually his objectives would be secured. The SF picketers posed the rhetoric question “What would Connolly say?”, Well here’s your likely answer

Wouldn’t it be great if some of those who organised the picket at SIPTU in Wexford actually joined a union and perhaps read up on Connolly’s life? In the re-conquest of Ireland Connolly said “If the old political parties must go so to should the divisions in Labour, we should work to for the obliteration of all divisions in the forces of Labour in the industrial field.” What may surprise some of those who proclaim Connolly as their inspiration is his belief in co-operation for the purpose of common regeneration! He talks about replacing suspicion and mistrust and difference in attitude between those who claim pity and those who are strong and self -reliant to enforce respect. Connolly was also critical of the gombeen men and their kind with their loud mouthed assertions of patriotism. The Re-conquest of Ireland was published over 100 years ago but is as relevant for the days we live in now as it was back then.

The logical follow on seems to me that perhaps its time to stop wallowing in misery and start uniting behind a policy? The backdrop to the lumpen detachment of Mayday are reports of children arriving hungry in school while parents cook by candle light in homes that are the subject of repossession cases at courts. Earlier this month the Master of the High Court criticised banks for pressurising some of their customers over repayments which in some cases were contributory factors in suicide.


Strikes me that James would have very little time for those in Wexford who used Mayday as a self seeking publicity stunt. Perhaps they would have been better off coming up with an alternative that would contribute to getting our country out of the mess it was left by the wealthy insiders, the sort of person who a century ago kept the country in penury. A century on a lot has changed but a lot stays the same.