Head of SIPTU, Jack O’Connor, is notorious for his support for the establishment of Irish Water and for refusing to withdraw SIPTU members from its structures. O’Connor opposed the anti water charges movement but he is not alone in taking that position. The broader trade union leadership represented by David Begg took an outrageously anti working class position by washing their hands of the anti household and water charge campaign only one day after a major anti austerity demonstration. Begg went on national television to assert that the charges were “a matter for government” and had nothing to do with the trade union movement. 
  
O’Connor followed this attack with a demand for the “abolition” of the Universal Social Charge (USC). O’Connor’s call is designed to appear as a turn away from opposing the fight against austerity but is in fact a cynical manoeuvre. What lies at the bottom of his proposals is an attempt to appear radical while rehashing the same reactionary policies. This is demonstrated by his self conscious efforts to demobilise the protest movement by advising the coalition government that granting tax concessions could have “defused widespread anger”. 
 
Abolition! When?

Jack O’Connor is acutely aware that there is no end in sight for austerity, he knows the detail of the Fiscal Pact and is determined that, in his own words, he should limit workers’ demands to “within the narrow parameters of the Troika programme”. As a result he shrewdly gives no timescale for his proposed removal of this ‘unfair’ charge, which, we are reassured should be replaced by a tax on the wealthier layers of Irish society. 
   
Almost immediately the mist descends around his headline proposal. It is unclear who precisely this ‘wealthier layer’ are, but to give a semblance of plausibility to his new found ‘radicalism’ he would at least need to nominate the target of his proposed new tax. As he speaks of generating “revenue from wealth” it seems logical that he could have nominated the transnational corporations as a lucrative source of funds, but that would clash with the low tax strategy of Irish capitalism and his Keynesian inspired theory that a ‘strong’ capitalism is the best guarantor of a well paid working class. O’Connor’s proposed tax take is likely to come from the people that are suffering the impact of the USC in the first place, the “low to middle income earners”. His vague and imprecise   request to the government, and therefore to the Troika, gels perfectly with the centrist left’s vacuous ‘tax the rich’ slogan itself, and disguises the ‘Better, Fairer Way’ exercise in sleight of hand, which suggests slightly easier ways to pay a bill that working    people did not incur in the first place.
 
Raising expectations?

O’Connor is much more precise when facing the prospect of raising workers’ expectations however and he treads very carefully. His proposed ending of the USC is to be an excruciatingly slow affair. The change cannot be brought in with “one fell swoop” but is to be introduced only “gradually” and “on a phased basis over a period of time” as, he argues, it is unfair to the poor and vulnerable because the revenue raised by the charge helps them. Of course Jack could simply demand the outright and immediate abolition of the charge and call for a repudiation of the bankers’ debt but he seeks to repair the crisis ridden capitalist system and that, he agrees, involves workers paying off the debt incurred by the banks while we wait for an economic recovery and the deployment of “a portion of the benefits of economic growth each year.” 
 
Again this is the logic of the reformist politics of the bureaucracy which produces a theory of working class resistance that depends on the recovery of the economic system that oppresses us and consciously promotes  working class sacrifice to save that system so we can gain crumbs from a hypothetically resurgent capitalist table. 
 
As leaders of a labour movement long accustomed to collecting those crumbs ICTU knows that in the midst of a crisis of capitalism when the world’s bourgeoisie are transferring wealth from the poorest to the richest at historic rates even petty reforms are almost impossible to extract. O’Connor is very much aware of this and it is the knowledge that significant reforms are all but impossible without coming into conflict with imperialism that informs his gradualism. 
 
Mediators

The labour bureaucracy play a role as ‘mediators’ between capital and labour but this role, always conditioned by Ireland’s subservience to imperialism, is being squeezed further by the intensity of the crisis. The Labour movement has lost credibility among the broader masses of working people and the protest movement. This led to a division. The left bureaucracy led a lobbying exercise on charging that mobilized many more than they expected. The bureaucracy seeks to control the independence of this movement and the campaign on the streets by appearing to move to the left. They do this by emulating the trade union left bureaucrats who seek to mobilise ‘People power’ but commit the same offence as the right bureaucrats and abrogate their responsibility to mobilise Union power against austerity and the privatisation agenda. O’Connor opposed the campaign and then set out to divert it. This explains his shallow pretence at resistance.
 
The bureaucracy’s ‘radical’ renaissance is also aimed at shoring up their political influence. In the limbering up stages of the run up to the next elections Kenny and Howlin have been tripping over each other with offers to slightly ameliorate the impact of the austerity measures they themselves have introduced. They desperately hope that by rowing back a little on their attacks on working people they can maintain their vote but O‘Connor, seeing the writing on the wall, responded warmly to Sinn Fein’s call for an alliance and a “Syriza style” government. At a fringe meeting during the Labour conference he heaped praise on Sinn Fein’s mildly reformist politics as a suitable replacement for the Labour Party’s variety.
 
The exercise is a cynical manoeuvre, again intended to maintain ICTU’s ability to deliver up the support of the organised working class to whatever reactionary government they choose, and to present the semblance of a move to the left without changing their political position one iota. It is an attempt to rejuvenate the bureaucracy’s image as in some way credibly pro worker, aided by the shedding of David Begg this month. This is also reflected in the trumpeting of the appointment of Patricia King as General Secretary of ICTU as ‘the only woman to hold the position in 121 years’. This in itself speaks volumes but the degree to which they have altered course can be gauged by the fact that King is one of the authors of both the disastrous Croke Park and the Haddington Road deals.
 
“Old Wine in New Bottles”!

O’Connor is aided in his attempts to appear radical by the pacific policy of the centrist left. They remain silent because they cannot see the weakness of his Keynesian reformism or of his vacuous demand that the, always weak, Irish capitalist state should act against its own interests and the Troika’s imperialism and “tax the rich”. 
 
In ‘The trade Unions in the epoch of Imperialist Decay’ Trotsky wrote that the trade unions; “…can no longer be reformist, because the objective conditions leave no room for any serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”
 
Without any struggle against their reactionary politics Jack    O’Connor and the ICTU leadership can retain ideological and organisational control of a union movement that remains motionless in the face of attack after attack on the working class, remaining subordinate to the needs of imperialism rather than becoming an “instrument of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat”. 
 
In the same article Trotsky argued for a struggle for the “complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state.” and spelled out that “This means a struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of a labour aristocracy.” Inseparable from this is the struggle for union democracy. 

Within the unions the reformist left are constantly courting the ever shifting left wing of the bureaucracy. Instead of being courted, the bureaucracy must be called to account. The way to do this is to mobilise and build rank and file opposition across all unions against austerity and most specifically against the degenerate reformist politics adhered to by the ‘gas and water’ epigones of William Walker that run our union movement. 
 
Tied to the requirements of imperialism and the state the ICTU bureaucracy are very far from leading independent unions that seek to organise the ‘broad exploited masses’. It is the task of left activists to defeat politically and organisationally that bureaucracy, but that does not mean ‘taking over’ the bureaucracy and changing its direction, it would still be a bureaucracy. It means building a profoundly different type of organisation as a democratic opposition within the unions and transforming them at rank and file level.  
 
We must mobilise independently of the leadership and against it. We must confront austerity and the politics that either consciously or subconsciously see it as necessary or unavoidable. We must, as the water charges campaign has shown us, act independently against the austerity and privatisation agenda and demand that the bureaucracy defend us. When they refuse to do so they are caught in the crossfire between workers and the state’s attacks. 
 
The only way our movement can be reinvigorated is from the bottom up but to do so requires a sharp critique of the leadership’s reactionary politics which unsurprisingly leaves the mass of union members uninspired and inactive. Failure to carry out that struggle means the bureaucracy can continue to recycle the same ‘old wine in new bottles’ and can get away with their pretence. 
 
And this is exactly what has happened. One wing of the bureaucracy has been locked in back rooms with the government haggling over the tiny percentage of an election budget will be allocated to winning their support. The other section has been staging street demonstrations, always careful that they do not organize independently. Now the back door haggling has led to the Lansdowne Road agreement (Croke Park 4). The deal has been struck. The Unions have withdrawn from mass demonstrations against water charges. Now they will engage in harmless lobbying of election candidates, continuing with Labour if they survive, cooking up a lash-up with Sinn Fein if they don’t. 
 
Many activists will weep salt tears at the union betrayal. Will they learn any lessons?