IRELAND: What's so radical about Sinn Fein?

BY JOE CRAIG

DUBLIN — In late March, Sinn Fein launched its campaign for the May
17 Irish general election with a rally in Dublin's Gresham Hotel, at the
same time as the Irish Labour Party was holding its conference.

While Sinn Fein was keen to present a radical image, its policies were
little different from those of the conservative Labour Party. Both promised
a new health service and Sinn Fein promised one free at the point of delivery
and funded from general taxation. The Irish Labour Party was rather more
specific in identifying the amounts of money required and funding mechanisms
— apparently raiding the national pension fund will do the trick.

Both made promises on housing a big feature of their plans and both
were keen to castigate the inequality created by Prime Minister Bertie
Ahern's coalition government.

While the Labour Party and Sinn Fein both promised to remove the lowest
paid from the tax net, and the Labour Party promised no new tax cuts for
the rich, Sinn Fein promised only a “full review of the income tax system,
to be completed and implemented within the lifetime of the next government”.
Since it also promised that “indigenous industries should receive the same
aid as foreign companies” it is quite clearly implied that corporate taxes
would not be increased.

Indeed, in the past Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has floated the idea
that the low corporate taxes in the south should be introduced in Northern
Ireland. How exactly a new health service is to be created without radical
increases in taxes on the rich was left unexplained. At least the Labour
Party acknowledged a problem and propose a once-off “creative accounting”
style solution that was used in the last budget to postpone public expenditure
cuts until after the election.

What both parties made clear, by omission rather than honest and open
declaration, is their attachment to the overarching policy of pursuit of
multinational investment as the dynamic for the economy and society. Sinn
Fein just made more noise about helping indigenous capitalists but since
these are more and more subordinated and dependent on multinationals, the
effect could not help but be much the same.

No mention was made by Sinn Fein of promoting the trade unions to break
from the disastrous social partnership deals that have hobbled workers'
organisations for the best part of the last 15 years. Indeed it promised,
like the Labour Party's, to focus public spending on health, education
and infrastructural development, within the context of a new “partnership”
with the trade unions and “other representatives of the wider society”.

Utopian vision

Sinn Fein's vision of social equality is a utopian one of maximum local
self-sufficiency — “a return to a sustainable practice of local quality
produce for local markets” — and of “equality” defined by each of the oppressed
having the opportunity to become the oppressor, e.g., “greater assistance
and funding for women in business”.

No mention at all was made of women's reproductive rights despite the
recent referendum. Even the Labour Party promised to legislate for the
X case. On the other hand, and despite the activities of the armed republicans
of the IRA, “more resources” are promised to the Garda Siochana — Ireland's
national police service.

In one sense it is unnecessary to look at what Sinn Fein promises for
the south because it already sits in “government” in the north. Indeed
the party's experience in the north is held up as reason for support in
the south. Attacking critics, Adams says: “Some of those who are saying
we can't be trusted are the same people who are commending our two ministers
in the north — Martin McGuinness, minister for education, and Bairbre de
Brun, minister for health.”

Just why right-wing politicians in the south would congratulate Sinn
Fein's performance in the north is not addressed. So let us do it instead.

Let's take health first. De Brun's first act as minister was to close
a maternity hospital and later to set up a review of acute facilities in
the rest of the north under Maurice Hayes, a former top civil servant under
British direct rule. As an aside, it is easy to pass over this without
noting the irony. Here is a movement that killed the most minor and junior
“collaborators” with the British state, including the most menial caretakers,
yet in government appoints to determine the future of hospital services
under its responsibility a top “collaborator”, and no-one in Sinn Fein
even notices!

The Sinn Fein record in government has been one of failure only postponed
by the now notorious tactic of delaying difficult decisions by farming
them out for review by “experts”.

At the beginning of March it was reported that hospital waiting lists
in the north, already the longest in the UK, had increased from under 48,000
in 2000 to 57,704 at the end of 2001, an increase of 14.5%. This was despite
a solemn promise from the Sinn Fein minister that they would actually be
reduced. One in 10 people waiting for cardiac surgery will die before they
reach the operating table, according to research carried out by a nursing
lecturer at the University of Ulster, as reported by the March 8 Irish
News.

The response of Sinn Fein spokespeople, including de Brun, is to blame
the British for insufficient funding while claiming credit for new developments
which are also the result of this funding.

All of a sudden Sinn Fein apologists write letters to the press explaining
how difficult a job health is and how no-one else wanted the job. Could
anyone else be expected to do better?

The crucial points to understand here are that inadequate funding from
the British state only cruelly exposes how Sinn Fein in government is merely
the mechanism for delivering a deteriorating service. The north of Ireland
is not even receiving the same increases in health service spending as
England with a shortfall of £83 million in 2001-02 and a forecast
shortfall of £214 million in 2003-04.

Sinn Fein thus becomes the instrument of a failed system where the natives
receive less than the “mother country” — doubly so since the new found
understanding among Sinn Fein supporters for the “difficulties” of the
job mean they are no longer a force campaigning against the poor service
but are the standard bearers of excuses for those in charge of it.

Education

The situation in education also exposes the radical rhetoric as a sham.
On March 21, Martin McGuinness announced spending of £107 million
on new school buildings, £53 million through Public Private Partnerships
(PPP), that is privatisation, where private firms design, build, maintain
and run “non-core” services in new schools.

Once again, this is an exercise in rationing, but with Sinn Fein making
itself responsible for it, since £500 million is needed (on one estimate)
to tackle the problem of schools waiting in the top priority bracket.

The obvious glee with which McGuinness sits behind his new ministerial
desk has blinded him to the real problems that PPP's are piling up and
which are the price for the photo-opportunities provided to him in opening
new privatised schools.

Union research show that the running costs of such projects, the cost
of paying the private sector for building and running the school, will
put severe pressure on education budgets.

Allyson Pollock, professor of public policy at University College London,
argues of similar schemes in England “that buy-now-pay-later PFI schemes
will make serious inroads into school revenue budgets, making it even harder
to tackle teacher shortages and over-sized classes.

“Education is a hugely labour-intensive service… The only way these
new buildings can be paid for, without significantly raising public spending,
is by taking funding away from existing services and distorting local school
budget priorities. This means lower not higher standards.”

These schemes are motivated by concerns to reduce government borrowing
that might arise from the state building the new schools. In fact, the
state is just as committed to paying back the costs of the new building

to the private sector as if it had taken out a loan, except that the cost
will be greater to allow the private companies to make a profit. This is
an attempt at what accountants call “off-balance sheet” accounting — if
the school is not financed by a loan the future cost does not appear in
the government's books.

Privatisation

On the day of the announcement of the school building program, the Irish
News reported that the Department of Education had spent £750,000
on consultancy fees for these PPP deals over the previous year.

The other major initiative of the Sinn Fein minister of education is
the Burns report on the 11-plus, the means of selecting young children
for either grammar school or secondary education. The effect of this initiative
so far has been to present the choice available as one between the existing
iniquitous system and a new one that fails to guarantee equality.

No wonder right-wing politicians in the south, not to mention the British,
have no reason to complain about Sinn Fein's performance in government.
Who said that it needed to be “house trained”?

With all this in mind it is simply laughable to hear Gerry Adams say
that “the real question is not, and never has been whether they (Fianna
Fail, etc) will go into government with us; the real question is whether
we would go into government with them”.

Having gone into coalition government with Ian Paisley's reactionary
Democratic Unionist Party, how could anyone believe that there would be
the slightest problem in Sinn Fein supporting a Fianna Fail government
in the south. Only the most blind of Sinn Fein members could possibly be
deceived.

Sinn Fein does not represent any sort of alternative to working people
in the south. It represents a dead end for anyone looking for a radical
alternative to the corrupt politics of the southern establishment.

[Abridged from <http://www.members.lycos.co.uk.socialistdemocracyie/News.htm>.]

From Green Left Weekly, June 5, 2002.

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From GLW issue 495