“This weekend the Irish Labour Party holds special Conference…”

This weekend the Irish Labour Party holds a special Conference in Cork. The Conference will debate - and pass - a motion supporting coalition with Fine Gael. The motion is proposed by the party's Administrative Council and backed by all but one of the party's T.D.'s. Anticipating the result a little, both Labour candidates in the recent Dublin County and Donegal-Leitrim by-elections called on their supporters to give their second preference to Fine Gael.

What is the Fine Gael Party that Labour want to form a coalition with? Fine Gael is the party of the Treaty and the Free State, the party of Collins and O'Higgins. It is the party which first abandoned the struggle against imperialism and persecuted, hounded and murdered those who didn't. It is the party which reduced the old-age pension and the dole below the level under the British in order to line the pockets of the new grasping middle class for whom it built up the Free State.

Fine Gael is the party which formed its own gang of Fascist stormtroopers, the Blueshirts, when it was put out of office in 1932. Many of the Blueshirts later went off to fight for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Even today Fine Gael is still run by a small clique of very wealthy families, the Cosgraves, O'Higgins, Costelloes etc. and represents the largest farmers, the wealthiest shop-keepers, and the lawyers and other sections of the professional middle class.

It is not two years since Brendan Corish announced that he would retire rather than lead Labour into another coalition. It is not five years since the Labour Party declared itself to be firmly and irrevocably a socialist party dedicat' ed to the establishment of a Workers' Republic.

And this same Labour Party is now proposing to enter into coalition with a party which represents the most reactionary capitalist elements inlreland. Yet this is hardly surprising on reflection. Twice before the Irish Labour Party has been in a coalition government. Each time with Fine Gael. In the first inter-party government under the combined attack of the Catholic heirarchy and the wealthy doctors of the Irish Medical Association, the Labour Party ratted on Dr. Noel Browne as shamelessly as their coalition partners. The second coalition government's economic policies led to an astronomical increase in unemployment and emigration. The Labour-Fine Gael response was a drastic credit squeeze and a cut in unemployment benefit. Meanwhile Jim Everett, the Labour Minister for Justice was busily interning Republicans in the Curragh Concentration camp.

With such a record it is hardly surprising that at the chance of a Cabinet seat or a Ministeral Mercedes the new 'Socialist Labour' Party has turned into the old gang of cynical political charlatans. The Irish Labour Party was never socialist. It shirked its part in the anti-imperialist struggle from 1919 -23 for fear of splitting the Trade | Unions. Since then it has sneered at what it termed ''civil-war" politics and represented itself - accuratgly enough - as politically somewhere between Fianna Fail and-Fine Gael.

Any genuine socialist organisation must always be in the fore-front of the struggle against imperial| ism. The Labour Party's dismal record in this field is only matched by its equally shameful record on | more straightforward "economic"

issues.

The massive vote in favour of coalition in Cork should prove more clearly than ever the basically capitalist nature of the Labour Party.

The crisis situation all about it, with Fianna Fail threatening internment, a wage freeze, anti-union laws and entry to the E.E.C.

should prove the crying need for ' a revoluntionary socialist party in Ireland. The P.D. have laid the | foundations for it in the North. It's more than time the socialists in the South took up the task as well. It , may soon be too late.