Ireland is open for business - reflections on the election

So much has changed so that everything remains the same.

The historic collapse of the Fianna Fáil vote (and to a lesser extent the annihilation of the Green Party) has the appearance of a seismic change to the landscape of Irish politics: the party which has dominated Irish politics since the foundation of the Irish State, and which has been in government for the past 14 years has been all but wiped out. The Fianna Fáil "brand" has suddenly and dramatically transmuted into electoral kryptonite.

But, after our old-enemies have been banished to electoral oblivion, as the dust settles over the battlefield, the emerging Fine Gael/Labour behemoth is set to continue Fianna Fáil's work of imposing savage austerity on ordinary Irish people for the benefit of wealthy elites, now armed with two potent propaganda weapons: the psuedo-legitimacy of a massive electoral victory and the ability to excuse their austerity policy as cleaning up the mistakes of Fianna Fáil and the Greens.

Already, Labour are signalling that they are willing to sell out on their moderately progressive positions (such as "free fees") in negotiations with Fine Gael, with Education Spokesperson Ruairi Quinn telling RTÉ that "There have been no red lines drawn that I'm aware of."*

Predictably, then, the Fine Gael/Labour coalition will continue to make the Irish working class pay for the crisis in Irish capitalism, simultaneously using the crisis as an opportunity to speed up the neoliberalisation of the Irish economy: the undermining of workers wages and conditions, the normalisation of precarious and unpaid labour, and the privatisation of public services. This much was implicit in Enda Kenny's repeated claim that "Ireland is open for business".


* He also made similar intimations when he signed the USI pledge on fees, saying “I wouldn’t say anything is a deal-breaker as such." http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0221/breaking30.html