With the presentation of the latest budget the capitalist class has put the best face on its programme for the continuation of austerity. The launch was accompanied by an almost euphoric government statement; Ireland, Europe’s fastest growing economy is on “a new path" which Noonan says will “keep recovery growing”. All the jobs lost during the “bust years” are to be recovered with more people working by the end of the decade “than ever before”  and “boom and bust”, he assures us, has been conquered while the Labour party makes vague noises about the ‘orderly’ deconstruction of FEMPI, the financial  emergency legislation that facilitated their theft of workers’ wages. Heady claims indeed, given the background of one of the biggest, and ongoing, “busts” in capitalist history.

This “modest giveaway budget” is an undisguised attempt to ‘buy’ key layers of voters in the run up to the election. While the working class struggle with the consequences of the last seven years’ worth of cuts to health, benefits, housing and wages the economy that they inhabit bumps along the bottom while, at the same time, the ruling and upper middle classes are enjoying the benefits of an ‘encouraging’ transfer of wealth. Low paid workers benefit little or nothing as austerity continues for the poor and wealth continues to be transferred to the richest through a reduction in capital gains tax and the raising of the threshold at which inheritance tax is paid, but the icing on the cake for imperialism is the introduction of a "knowledge box" corporation tax rate. This means that corporate profits on patents and software copyrights will be taxed at 6.25% giving a clue as to where the figures for economic growth emanate from and acknowledges Ireland’s semi colonial status. 

While they hope to achieve a political edge by a slight amelioration of the biting austerity and rowing back on the broad swathe of cuts which they previously applied to the wages of public sector workers there is, however, no intention to relax their drive towards privatisation and the central issue of Irish water is described as "on balance sheet and it is fully accounted for on the balance sheet.” 

Yet Irish capitalism faces a major strategic problem. Labour has proved to be the sacrificial goat in delivering austerity. While the Fine Gael base has benefited from the growing disparity between rich and poor, Labour voters are out to wreak revenge and decimate their electoral representation. The giveaway budget is meant to help save the Labour party, although even this strategic goal has strict limits. As Labour promises to ease the FEMPI emergency control of wages, the coalition threatens to use it against unions who refuse to sign up to the Lansdowne Road sellout.  A housing crisis is about to intensify, housing minister Alan Kelly is unable to win any concessions that would restrict the grasping landlordism at the base of government partners Fine Gail.

Troika control

The government strategy is also the policy of the Troika. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council recently found this out when chair Professor McHale’s warning that making these minimal concessions was ‘economically risky’ and was outside the rules was backhanded by the government. The Coalition went straight to Brussels to seek clearance to spend massively outside the austerity constraints. Spain has recently been ordered by the Troika to rewrite their latest budget, so it is evident that they allowed “flexibility” under the stability pact in order to throw a lifeline to the government. We see yet again that economic strategy continues to be decided outside Ireland and the Coalition are essentially Quislings rubberstamping Troika decisions.

The Troika is playing the long game and making minimal concessions in order to convince the lower middle class that the burden of austerity is beginning to be lifted from their shoulders. The aim within Ireland is to try to ensure stable government. In Europe as a whole there is a need to convince workers that the Irish strategy of total submission is a viable one and that there is no need to look towards a revolutionary alternative,

The trade union bureaucracy’s role

The struggle to stabilise austerity extends to embrace the trade union bureaucracy.

The various currents in the bureaucracy shared a common nationalist strategy of partnership with Irish capitalism.  This expressed itself in public dismay and protest at levels of austerity alongside private deals that saw the bureaucracy agree both the details of austerity and also in its implementation at all levels. Jack O’Connor, leader of the largest union, SIPTU,  explained that the interests of the workers could only be advanced by working within “the narrow confines” set by the Troika.

This strategy had begun to decay. Workers who had mobilised behind the ICTU leadership were now so hostile that leading figures in the bureaucracy were no longer willing to organise demonstrations or appear in public at them.

The need to increase the level of popular support saw the left bureaucracy under the leadership of UNITE launch a campaign against the imposition of water charges. Balancing on the head of a pin (all the unions had agreed the privatisation of water and had transferred their members to the new company), they were taken aback by the mobilisation of over 100,000 behind their banner. This led to internal disputes, as the right wanted to force through the charges in order to help defuse opposition and back up the Labour party. However all disputes ended with the Lansdowne Road agreement.  The deal was trumpeted at the time as a ‘restoration’ of pay but the planned increases were in reality a fraction of what had been seized by the state in 2010. All the unions signed up to continuing austerity and the opponents agreed a twin-track policy. The right would continue to hold up the Labour party and the left would construct a lifeboat from Sinn Fein and smaller socialist groups and independents.

Following Lansdowne Road the R2W leadership began to impose its bureaucratic ‘will’ on the campaign. Their laughable excuse that they could not afford a larger venue to house a more representative national meeting of activists covered their desire to control and limit any real democratic representation of the forces on the ground – the meeting eventually had an attendance of 200, all invited, and rubberstamped the Programme for a  Progressive Government drawn up by the bureaucrats.  Consultation exercises covered a lack of any real democracy as Right2Water was mothballed and replaced by Right2Change and a programme that, dressed in the language of human rights, was plea for capitalism to deliver a better, fairer way for imposing austerity. The approaching election and the construction of an electoral pact became the sole focus of the left unions while the implications of the ICTU deal with the government were studiously ignored, even though it specifically included a commitment from ICTU to work to ‘resolve difficulties’ surrounding the establishment of Irish Water, the first step towards privatisation.

No programmatic clash

Despite their posturing, the R2W leaders’ strategy does not clash with the programme of ICTU, their references to the Irish Constitution to defend workers is either an unforgivable level of ignorance or a conscious fraud. The Constitution has been altered following the Fiscal Treaty to state that;

 “No provision of this Constitution invalidates laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the State that are necessitated by the obligations of the State under that Treaty or prevents laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by bodies competent under that Treaty from having the force of law in the State.” 

The Troika imperialists have had their way with the Irish Constitution and ICTU has committed to work within their   programme’s parameters.  Jack O’Connor of SIPTU and the entire bureaucracy act as facilitators of a deal with imperialism. They, along with the Labour party, are the “right reformist wing” which Trotsky described as becoming;

 “anti-reformist in the sense that it helps the bourgeoisie directly or indirectly to smash the old conquests of the working class.”

A working class programme of action

The working class needs its own programme and that begins with an ability to mobilise against the enemy. It needs to confront the utterly reactionary leadership of ICTU and the parliamentary cretinism that suggests that a stew of independents or a handful of left TDs can make a difference in a body that was designed to serve the interests of capitalism and imperialism,

The coming election will help bring to the surface the limitations of this ‘parliamentary cretinism’ and will eventually raise the possibility of a remobilisation of the anti-austerity movement, this time it must have at its core the refusal to accept the narrow parameters laid down by the Troika; an unequivocal repudiation of the debt; a demand for unions to withdraw from all deals with the state and with the mechanics of austerity as in Irish Water; a national delegate congress of the anti-austerity movement and an open democratic election of a leadership based on activist cadres. Most importantly it must bring its demands in to the heart of the organised working class. It must demand the rejuvenation of Irish trade unionism by the building of a democratic trade union rank and file movement directly opposed to the reactionary bureaucracy that presides over defeat after defeat for the working class and that can bring the working class fight out of the side streets and housing estates and in to the workplaces, production centres and distributive arteries of capitalism itself.