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.
Visit the Green Left Weekly
home page.