Louth TD talks Labour leadership and government formation on return from 'the political wilderness'

Ged Nash would be kidding if he denied his eyes were on the Labour Party’s leadership earlier this year. Highly rated by his outfit’s membership, he was tempted to hurl his lot into the race to succeed Brendan Howlin.

But he thought better of it. He was, after all, only returning from “the political wilderness” - which stemmed from the 45-year-old’s failed re-election bid of 2016 - by taking a seat on behalf of the Louth and East Meath constituency, confirming himself as one of just six successful Labour candidates countrywide.

Alan Kelly would subsequently assume the party’s reins, though Nash remains a key player within the organisation and is presently part of their delegation charged with responding to the proposed Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil programme for government.

Labour will make recommendations on foot of what they’ve read and Nash has strong feelings on a variety of social issues, though it’s fanciful, in the UCD-alumnus’ view, to suggest that they will be an active power-sharer when the Dáil resumes. Support for him may have been clawed back domestically, yet Labour, having received 4.4 percent of the vote, clearly has work to do on the public mandate front.

“In the last election we didn’t exactly receive a ringing endorsement from the Irish people,” says Nash, who received just shy of 6,000 first preference votes.

“We, in fact, lost a seat and there’s an argument to suggest that the party doesn’t have a mandate to go into government.

“But that being said, we have always, throughout our history as the oldest political party in the state, taken our responsibilities very, very seriously. While that may not involve actively going into government at this point in time, there are other ways that we could support more positive initiatives that the next government may take to refloat our economy and to develop our public services.

“We are not by nature a party of public protest, we’re a party of doers. There are others on our extreme left who merely serve to protest and critique government policy; we critique government policy, we analyse government legislation and try to improve legislation when it’s tabled in the Dáil.

“Our whole raison d’etre is to improve the lives of working people and we’ll continue to do that. Whether that’s while in government or not is something that’s still being considered.”

Is it, though, becoming a minor government player equal to drinking from a poisoned chalice at this stage? The Green Party was wiped out in 2011, only to build their recovery in the decade since, and Labour have gone from holding 33 seats to six in the space of two general elections.

Nash thinks not and is not shy in declaring his pride at what both he and the party achieved during their five years in coalition with Fine Gael. He rhymes off “six successive increases to the national minimum wage, the creation of a national living wage and the effective abolition of zero-hour contracts” as being indicative of Labour Party values and fruits of their effort.

“Remember the circumstances we were in in 2011, living under the cosh of the Troika, the lender of the last resort,” he says.

“We managed to secure state industries, keeping the ESB under state ownership and protecting social welfare rates, something which I feel history will prove that we were correct in doing. I think history will look favourably on that period.

“If you look at the Fine Gael 2011 general election manifesto, it pointed towards mass redundancies for public service workers, mass privatisation of state companies and the contracting out of the work that public and civil servants were doing. We blocked all of that, but you don’t get any credit for blocking things and preventing things from happening.

“There is always huge potential to get really good things done when you’re in coalition and the document that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil presented to us has some potential, but I would say the kind of transformation that we need in our economic model now is, I think, absolutely beyond the ken of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil collectively.

“The demands that are going to be placed on this country are so deep and so challenging that business as usual is just not an option. The document that they produced insisted that the next government should not touch income tax.

“That means, for example, that proposals we might make to introduce modest increases in the Universal Social Charge for those with incomes of over €100,000 will not be entertained. That’s unconscionable at a time where we say that we need to improve our public services, resource our health service and build 80,000 social and affordable homes.

“Neither would I see a situation where proposals we would make to introduce new taxes on wealth would fly with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. We have a remarkable situation in this country where only about €500 million of our total tax table is actually from land.

“The top five percent of people in this country own over 40 percent of the wealth and practically every party bar the Labour Party doesn’t favour an increase on land property; that’s extraordinary.

“We’ve parties like Sinn Féin who are telling us that the USC will be abolished for practically everybody and property taxes would be abolished. That’s simply not feasible if we want to resource the public services that we all say we want to have.”

A self-professed “committed socialist”, who is very much in favour of the EU introducing the controversial corona bonds in a bid to share the inevitable debt burden, Nash is determined to grow the Labour Party locally.

“One of my ambitions is to make sure that the Labour Party can win a seat in north Louth in the next local elections because it is completely unacceptable to me that we’ve a situation where my party - the Labour Party: the oldest political party in the state, founded in 1912 - which has a proud and honorable track record of public service, hasn’t won a seat on the local authority in north Louth since 1974 - the year before I was born. That doesn’t sit well with me.

“We’ve an ambition to serve the people of all of County Louth and that requires winning a seat in Dundalk and in mid-Louth as well.”

Brexit and DkIT are also high on Nash’s lengthy political agenda.