By
Jordan Shilton
11 May 2013
Support for the Labour Party in Ireland has fallen to an historic low, as the party continues to play a leading role in the implementation of austerity measures in coalition with the right-wing Fine Gael.
The collapse in support has led to several high-profile resignations over recent months and growing concerns that Labour could be wiped out at the next elections in 2015.
The crisis escalated following a by-election held in Meath at the end of March, in which Labour finished fifth with just 5 percent of the vote. A series of newspaper polls have given the party similarly low numbers nationally.
Several parliamentarians expressed various tactical disagreements with the present leadership. On April 5, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Nessa Childers announced her resignation from the parliamentary party, citing Labour’s role in government as having led to the sharp decline in its support. “I was one of the ones that knew what would happen to the party. I felt they should’ve stayed in opposition and formed an alliance on the left,” she told the Irish Times .
Childers is the seventh member to have left the parliamentary Labour Party since the coalition took office in February 2011.
Phil Prendergast, a fellow MEP, warned that Labour was in danger of “writing its own obituary.”
Local councilor Sian O’Callaghan commented that the party had been given a “sharp wake-up call…. If the Labour Party does not pursue a broad progressive social democratic agenda in Government its days are without doubt numbered.”
On April 20, at a charity event in Dublin, Labour’s social affairs minister, Joan Burton, noted in a speech that she felt the population had reached the “limit” of tolerance of austerity measures. She added that such policies could only be continued for so long without generating opposition.
None of these remarks reflect any genuine opposition to the party’s present course, but are rather over how best to package Labour’s reactionary right-wing agenda. Since entering government with Fine Gael in 2011, after it had performed well in parliamentary elections with the promise to scale back on the previous government’s austerity measures, Labour has taken the lead in
This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site