There is a photograph of Mary Lou and Michelle O’Neill meeting with newly elected British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that would put you in mind of two teenagers meeting someone they’d seen on Top of the Pops.
Mind you greeting any visitor from the centre of the Empire with joy has been a big thing with the Shinner Cargo Cult going back to when one of Starmer’s predecessor’s, Tony Blair, helped to put a leftie progressive triumphal gloss on their Submission to the Crown and its representatives in the 1990s. Starmer was part of the Blairite reinvention of the RUC in human rights mode.
Anyway, it was more the photograph and similar ones which put me in mind of a line from Brendan Behan’s brother Dominic: “Tom Moore made his waters meet fame and renown, a great lover of anything dressed in a crown.”
No one will have been more pleased at this turn of events than Senator Paul Gavan, whose political instincts and origins are on the “left” of the British Labour Party. That’s the party that sent in the soldiers in 1969, built the H Blocks in the 1970s and whose home secretary Roy Mason once boasted of squeezing the republicans “like toothpaste” – a euphemism for the Castlereagh RUC torture mills. “Great friends of Ireland, my proletarian arse,” as another northside Dub might have put it.
Gavan, who is 58, is one of those latecomers to Irish republicanism – I am loath to describe anything to do with Sinn Féin as nationalism any more – whose devotion to Sinn Féin appears not to have long predated some genius notion that he should be a Senator.
Thus he was jumped over lads who had been promised the nomination after years of service.
In the European election on June 7, Gavan took just 3.2% of the vote and was beaten by Derek Blighe – one of the For Roysh candidates whose “calling out,” and even more robust putting a stop to, must have been one of the apples of Comrade Gavan’s eye. It was a bit like his beloved Spurs getting beaten by Barnet in the FA Cup or whichever cultural reference is appropriate.
The great thing about the Seanad is that you do not have to be elected. Well, you do, unless you are a Taoiseach’s nominee, but not by the unwashed. It is a bit like a club where those already in can decide which of their chums they would like to join them – and which bad apples you can keep out. Having said that, there are a number of valuable voices in the current Seanad. Gavan is not one of them.
The attraction of great thinkers of the Left to being able to avoid popular electoral approval perhaps explains Senator Gavan’s recent call on fellow members of the Oireachtas to join him in forming a “parliamentary friendship group for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”
Why would anyone wish to publicly express their “friendship” for the Communist dictatorship of Vietnam? This is a regime that has never held a free election and which for generations has been under the unbroken control of the Communist Party, which is the only legal party. Estimates of the numbers killed by the regime over the course of that time range as high as 1.7 million. Years of colonial abuse and foreign intervention compounded by the red terror.
In common with China, even its claim to be socialist is spurious. Socialist collectivisation of the land was a disaster and the attack on small producers led to both widespread terror and the failure of the agricultural sector to adequately feed the population. That led in the 1980s to abandoning socialist agriculture and allowing small scale private ownership
The Doi Moi, or Renovation, economic policy also opened the country up to foreign capital which, from 1987, has been allowed to take over entire sectors without any threat of future renationalisation. Thus, in common with the Communist Party of China, the Vietnamese Communists are content to allow the return and subsequent dominance of foreign capital once the elite are allowed to wet its beak and the “liberalisation” brings no threat to their dictatorial power.
That also requires the backing of an entire state apparatus of the secret police, prison camps, censorship and all the other trappings of totalitarianism. Human Rights Watch provides a pretty succinct overview of where things stand in Senator Gavan’s pin up “Socialist Republic”: “Vietnam systematically suppresses citizens’ basic rights to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly, movement, and religion. Independent labor unions, human rights organizations, and political parties are prohibited.”
Even if he approves of all the other stuff, how can Gavan, as a former official of SIPTU, seriously propose that any Irish representative of the “left” be friendly towards a state in which independent trade unions are banned? Not only that, but in which much of the oppression against independent workers organisers is directed against those opposing the impact of overseas capital?
Human Rights Watch goes on to refer to the prohibition of independent media, the blocking of websites, and the pressures put on international companies to “remove or restrict content.” We can see where the latter might appeal to a party who were initially fully behind and voted for the “hate crime” legislation.
Indeed, on that note, Human Rights Watch refers to the relationship between the social media giants and the Communist Party. “Similarly, according to the government, in July, “Facebook blocked and removed more than 224 posts that spread wrong information and propagandize to oppose the Party and the States, brand name, individuals and organization (a 90% compliance rate with [government] requests)”; “Google removed 1,052 violating videos on YouTube, a 91% compliance rate with [government] requests”; and “TikTok removed 19 violating links that published wrong information and pessimistic contents, a 90% compliance rate with [government] requests.”
Human Rights Watch reached out to Google, Tik-Tok and Meta but they either failed to respond, in the case of Meta, or simply referred to their “transparency policy.” And you might have thought that the relationship between the Left and Big Tech corporations here was unhealthy. Imagine if any of the party’s which admire the “Socialist Republic of Vietnam” or Cuba were in power.
