In 2011 a conference was held in Dublin to launch a national campaign against the household charge, a special flat-rate tax designed to force workers to pay for the bank bailout.
 
The conference and its agenda was the outcome of private negotiations between the socialist groups, the anarchists and the republican group eirigi and was very highly structured. However in one session a  Socialist Democracy member asked about the overall policy and strategy of the new movement. 
 
The lively discussion that followed was brought to an end by Socialist party leader Joe Higgins. The tactic of the new movement, he said, was non-payment. The strategy was non-payment and the policy - it was non-payment too. 
 
The household charge movement fell apart in division and sectarian in-fighting. It was replaced by the water charges movement with the same mantra of non-payment.
 
However there are no non-political movements.   Politics are either an open and lively part of the life of the campaign, allowing it to adapt to new situations or they take place behind the scenes, feeding conspiracy and infighting.
 
Keeping politics off the table
 
Keeping politics off the table is a tradition that stretches back decades in the Irish socialist movement. Politics are reserved for themselves and the political character of the movement appears when we find that the local groups are organized on a constituency basis and help grow the electoral base of the parties. This conspiratorial approach comes out of years of working class retreat, where the  interests of the groups come to weigh more and more above the interests of the working class as a whole. The method of the left has been to concentrate on “people power” and limited civil disobedience. This enables them to avoid proposals to the organised working class and to maintain their slavish obedience to the wishes of the union bureaucracy. 
 
Civil disobedience is a tactic and not by itself a  strategy. By default the strategy becomes a struggle to win representation in the Dail. Again as a consequence the possibilities of advancing the interests of the working class through the Dail are wildly exaggerated.
 
There are some very toxic side effects. 
 
Without political discussion there are only the most minimal democratic structures. Ad-hoc steering   committees become the norm.
 
The movements are fragile and collapse when the campaigns come to an end.
 
The movements do not develop politically to take up wider issues of austerity.
 
The socialist groups don't develop or move closer. Their sectional interests trumped the need for a unified working class party.
 
We have reached the endpoint of this process. We have ten socialist TDs, six in an alliance. The issue of water charges has been pushed into the long grass. Positions in the Dail were to act as a platform for socialist policies and for broader mobilizations, yet the socialist groups co-operated with left union bosses in shutting down the Right2Water mobilizations in favour of a movement of electoral lobbying around the rebranded Right2Change.
 
Vacuum
 
Now they inhabit a vacuum. The political reformism that focuses on action in the Dail has produced      impotence. They can't join the scramble to sell their vote and are constrained by their insistence on a    single-issue protest around water charges that leaves them without a coherent political movement on the streets
 
Even though they have stepped back from the push by the left unions to sanctify Sinn Fein as a socialist party, they are finding that in practice inside the Dail and constrained around water, they are pushed back into the union sponsored alliance.  It is as the Right2Change that they are intervening, but the parliamentary arithmetic means that they simply provide cover for a Sinn Fein Left opposition. This means death for the socialist groups, if Sinn Fein are successful in wearing the mantle of protectors of the working class.
 
For Sinn Fein the task in the Dail is to outflank Fianna Fail on the left while remaining “responsible” within the confines of the Troika budget.  They do this by proclaiming the exceptionalism of water charges. People really need water, so the fiscal space free to the government should be used to ensure it stays under public control and is not a commodity. If this line of argument is accepted there is no possibility of resolving all the other needs of Irish workers – the privatisation agenda will race ahead.
 
The consequence is that there is no broad left around which a parliamentary reformist current can be built. In fact they have no strategy to build a party beyond one of building their own organisations. The alliance of the two groups is a purely administrative measure to gain more Dail resources. There is no joint organisation on the streets and the pretence of unity collapses at the border, with the Socialist party’s hostility to an all-Ireland movement and the Socialist Workers Party’s indifference on the issue leading to separate electoral fronts.
 
Intensifying class struggle 
 
Meanwhile the class struggle is intensifying. A government of speculators and landlords is totally unable to resolve a housing catastrophe. Any attempt at resolution will involve the seizure of property and independent action by workers outside the Dail. 
 
Many workers expect the restoration of pay and conditions with the proclamation of recovery. The employers and government show a steely determination to crush them while union leaders wash their hands and say how unfair it all is. The main dispute, with Luas tram drivers, involves a private company, and the government have already washed their hands of any responsibility.
 
The fall in the vote for government parties and the increased socialist vote in the Dail election was a sign of the increasing anger and desperation of the workers. The electoral experiment has failed and a Fine Gael government is back in power.  
 
Break out of the Dail!
 
Increasingly desperate struggles are breaking out in the workplaces and communities. These struggles will generate a new leadership. If the socialist groups are to be part of that movement they must abandon the path of parliamentary idiocy, especially as it led them to collaborate in the deliberate demobilisation represented by the Right2Change manoeuvre.
 
A starting point must be to recognise the grip of the Troika on the country and counterpose the alternative of a Workers Republic and a United Socialist States of Europe. Socialists should express unremitting   hostility to the betrayals of social partnership and to the colonialism and sectarianism of continuing partition. The needs of the workers must be asserted as having primacy over the interests of capital and private property. The wage struggle and the crisis in public service must be linked to the wholesale privatisation process that is ongoing. The battle for housing must hang around housing as a right rather than calls for mercy from the government of  speculators. 
 
We need to see an end to sectarian manoeuvring and sectional interest. A new movement must represent the working class as a whole. It must be based on a national democratic structures and it must advance the call for socialist revolution.
 
All else is confusion, chaos, defeat and despair.