Open letter to Eamon Gilmore

Dear Eamon,

I suppose I should address you by your official title of Tánaiste but we go back a long way and I feel you will not be offended if I make this approach in a more informal manner.

I know that deep down you are – or you were when I knew you better – a caring person. I believe that when you entered politics all those years ago, you did so for the best of motives – not for any selfish reasons but in order to improve the lot of the most deprived sections of Irish society.

 

Somewhere along the way, you got lost and in this letter, I am trying to reach down into the depths of your psyche where I am sure there are still some vestiges of that caring person you were in the past.

I don’t know what happened to change you. I guess you didn’t change overnight but this was a gradual evolution over time. It happens to most politicians. You start out wanting to change the world but, over time, you come to realise you will never have the power to do that and, anyway, you come to accept that the world you know isn’t all that bad after all and just needs a few minor changes here and there.

Meanwhile, you come to love the life you have chosen. Perhaps you have been promoted within your own party. Perhaps you have become a minister in the Government. Now you have lavish salaries and expenses. You have a chauffeur-driven car and you have a pension that will ensure that never again will you have to think twice about buying anything. I am not talking here specifically about you, Eamon but about politicians, in general, who have made it.

You couldn’t possibly do so well if you had stayed out of politics or if you had stayed on the Opposition benches.

Now, Eamon, you have spent longer years on the Opposition benches than you have in Government and you know better than most how cold and frustrating those benches can be. You do not want to go back there. That is understandable.

You have pushed through the toughest Budget since the State was founded. The alternative for you is another long period in opposition. If your colleagues in the Labour Party do not like the Budget, you have to do your utmost to explain to them that there is no alternative. If the Budget is defeated, Enda Kenny will dissolve the Dáil and call a general election in January.

What happens then? Labour loses most of the seats you won at the last election. Fine Gael returns with the loss of some seats but still the biggest party around. You cannot go back in with them. So Enda takes a look around. Fianna Fáil are now the second-biggest party. They join forces with Fine Gael to form a new and unique coalition government, uniting for the first time the parties that fought the civil war 90 years before.

Meanwhile, all you can do is look on from the Opposition benches, where you are forced to play a very minor role because Sinn Féin is now the biggest party in Opposition. Even the Technical Group in the Dáil won more seats at the general election than Labour.

But this is all fantasy stuff, Eamon. Your party has no notion of voting against the Budget it helped to put together. You may lose an odd TD here and there but you are in for the long haul.

That’s a pity. You are going to lose seats anyway, whether you go now, wait another year or three years. But surely this is more than a question of whether Labour loses 10, 20 or 30 seats.

You can never, or you should never, play politics with people’s lives. This is all about looking after the people that the Labour Party was founded to look after. This should be all about the very basics, rather than about tactics. This should be all about the very soul of the Labour Party. You lose your soul and you lose everything.

Yours sincerely,
Máirtín