Former Táiniste and Labour leader Joan Burton TD will take the witness stand this week in the Jobstown protester trials where defendants including Paul Murphy TD are facing charges of her ‘false imprisonment’.
Last weekend saw her party’s annual conference in Wexford where an amount of sham reflection on their electoral decimation of just over a year ago took place. Their strategy for their party’s recovery “#labourrebuild” amounts to saying some of the right things in this Dáil about issues such as workers’ rights and repeal of the eighth amendment and hoping that the passage of time will help people who supported them in the past forget their betrayals on both these issues while in government and many more besides.
The reality, despite Brendan Howlin’s admission over the weekend of unspecified ‘mistakes’ in government, is that he, Joan Burton and the Labour Party are fundamentally unrepentant for their coalition with Fine Gael and frankly feel aggrieved with the hundreds of thousands of former Labour voters who refuse to accept that the savage austerity visited on working people and working class communities like Jobstown was somehow unavoidable. This sense of grievance still manifests itself as we saw recently during the wrangle over the water charges where their representatives still clung to the position harder than even Fine Gael that charges in some form remain.
Unfortunately for Labour their recovery strategy has not translated into the opinion polls and is being hindered by inconvenient reminders about their past role in government. Their tantrum over the water is a case in point but when Burton takes the stand and tells the court of the inconvenience she suffered for two hours in November 2014 our response has to begin with cataloguing the daily ‘inconveniences’ that were experienced by people who suffered at her hands and those of her fellow Labour Ministers.
When Joan Burton visited Jobstown in November 2014 we were more than three and a half years into that government. Under her watch we had cuts in Special Needs Assistants, carers allowance and benefit, the household benefits package for our elderly and disabled and a decimation of traveller education supports. We had the imposition of the property tax and the imposition of the USC by revenue. We had jobbridge (scambridge!). Furthermore there was a reduction in rent supplement caps which as early as 2013 directly contributed to a spike of homelessness cases.
That a Labour Minister and her party could stand over all of this and the imposition of water charges in flagrant disregard for their 2011 election promises which saw them record their highest ever Dáil representation caused undeniable widespread anger. The hammering taken by Labour in the May 2014 local and European elections did not cause them to alter their course one jot.
The logic of the prosecution case against the Jobstown defendants is that working class people and the real representatives like Paul Murphy should have swallowed Labour’s betrayals and bided time until the 2016 elections. The reality is that there was and is a struggle for economic survival for hundreds of thousands of people taking place and effective, militant but peaceful protest became not merely an option but a necessity in the face of Fine Gael/Labour policy.
Therefore it is entirely appropriate that a Labour Minister responsible for the above mentioned should not be permitted to go about their day to day work relatively undisturbed by the people who in large number voted for her party only to be stabbed in the back.
Connolly and Larkin in whose tradition the Labour Party still claims to stand understood that the boundaries of protest and strike action had to be pushed when the economic survival of working people was at stake. They ended up in the dock on more than one occasion precisely for this reason which is why it is the Jobstown protesters who really stand in their tradition not the Labour Party which a long time ago integrated themselves fully into the capitalist establishment.
Jobstown -v- Joan: Which side are you on? 