From top: Joan Burton and Eamon Gilmore during the 2011 General Election; Anne Marie McNally

If the best you can offer is ‘elect us to ensure the right-wing doesn’t get too carried away’ then you may as well be honest about your lack of political ideology

Anne Marie McNally writes

“What counts is what works” –Tony Blair 1998.

Irish politics has historically failed miserably to divide itself ideologically along traditional left/right lines. We’ve got some kind of blurry thing going on whereby despite protestations to the contrary, most traditional parties in this country are somewhat interchangeable.

In 2011 we witnessed a self-confessed left party enter coalition with a self-confessed right party with both apparently abandoning ideologies in favour of a more centrist pragmatic stance.

Roll on five years and we have Labour supposedly of the Left urging voters to transfer to Fine Gael on the Right.

I’m confused. So are most.

Eamon Gilmore in 2011 described the rationale for Labour cosying up to Fine Gael by saying that “the normal rules of politics changed when the IMF came in.”

Ok…so what’s the rationale in 2016?

I interviewed Eamon Gilmore for my thesis back in 2012 and he told me that they did not ‘have the luxury of ideologies’ as they were creating what he described as a National Government.

As part of the same interview process Labour TD Eric Byrne told me that he believed political ideologies were placed under the carpet for the 2011 General Election and would stay there until the Irish economy had been stabilised at which he point he said he ‘would be hopeful that Labour could revert to a true social democratic ideological stance.’

Here’s me being all confused again. Labour and Fine Gael would have you believe that the economy is in recovery now. If that’s the case then where are the signs of the ideology being taken out from under the carpet where it was shoved?

The people who defended Labour’s coalition decision in 2011 pointed to social democratic ideals such as Gilmore’s commitment to ‘Frankfurt’s way or Labour’s way’ and the commitment to fully funded free healthcare.

Yet neither has been delivered on and ultimately you cannot look beyond the words of the party leader at the time who was unequivocal in his belief that ideology was parked for #GE11.

Now I’m not judging Eamon Gilmore for that, in fact his honesty is to be commended and at least he understood that being straight about the pragmatic approach he was taking for his party was the best way to explain his marriage with the right-wing.

Now it’s 2016 and current labour leader Joan Burton has taken a different approach. She has decided that trying to maintain a vestige of democratic socialism whilst urging voters to elect a right-wing led Government is somehow not in any way disingenuous. It is.

If the best you can offer is ‘elect us to ensure the right-wing doesn’t get too carried away’ then you may as well be honest about your lack of political ideology. And that’s ok too.

In fairness, I’d much prefer to see a party who was proud to be honest about what its ambitions are rather than one who is trying to link onto a set of values that it long-since abandoned in the pursuit of power.

When you’ve a deputy leader of a party openly saying that power is a drug then you pretty much know you’ve got an ideological problem within the ranks!

In 2016 the electorate need, want and deserve honesty. If that position is to emulate Tony Blair and go with ‘what works’ for your party then own that and be honest enough to let your potential voters know that you are making a genuine and perfectly acceptable choice to be pragmatic rather than ideological.

I’m honestly not making a judgement here regarding how a party chooses to position itself for its own purposes. What I am saying is that for me it’s all pointless unless I’m doing it for reasons I believe in and not just political careerism.

I’ve had lots of pundits dismiss myself and some colleagues because we’re ‘ideologically driven’ – it’s thrown at us like a slur of sorts. Personally it’s one of the nicest compliments you can pay me.

Anne-Marie McNally is a political and media strategist working with Catherine Murphy TD and is a General Election candidate for the Social Democrats in the Dublin Mid-West constituency . Follow Anne-Marie on Twitter: @amomcnally