Labour leader Ivana Bacik TD outlines her vision

Ivana Bacik TD: The mission to rebuild Labour

Named as the 14th leader of the Labour Party after an unopposed campaign to succeed Alan Kelly TD, Ivana Bacik TD speaks to Odrán Waldron about the challenge facing the party, her victory in the 2021 Dublin Bay South byelection, and her vision of positive politics.

“We’ve certainly been through challenging times,” Bacik says, reflecting on where both she and her party find themselves. “I first joined about 30 years ago and I’ve been around long enough to know that we’ve had a number of ebbs and flows, rises and falls in the fortunes of the party.”

That Bacik finds herself here at all may come as a surprise to both observers and the new Labour leader herself; having served as a Senator from 2007 to 2021, she has been a TD for less than a year, winning in the Dublin Bay South byelection in July 2021 to replace erstwhile Fine Gael TD, Eoghan Murphy, the only election to take place since the outbreak of Covid-19. Bacik claimed what would have been considered a surprise victory when campaigning had begun; her vote share of 30.2 per cent, in a constituency where the party had claimed just 7.9 per cent of the vote in the 2020 general election, showed the progress the party had made in the constituency covering parts of Kimmage, Rathmines, Terenure, and Rathfarnham.

“I am heartened by the response that we got in that byelection,” she says. “Now is the time for us to build and grow our voice, because there’s a need for Labour messages of equality, solidarity, and fairness, the need for the State to step up and invest in public services, more teachers, doctors, and nurses, and indeed in ensuring that people’s basic needs are met and that the effects of the cost of living crisis are addressed and those who are most in need do not suffer as a result.”

While her own election result gives her cause for optimism, the situation she inherits as Labour leader is not so positive. In the 2020 election, the party recorded alltime lows in first preference vote share (4.4 per cent), seat numbers (six, now seven with the addition of Bacik) and position among the parties (fifth). Following the deposition of Brendan Howlin TD as party leader, Alan Kelly TD ascended to leadership but did not survive to contest an election as leader. Following his resignation, Bacik took up the mantle unopposed but is undaunted by the task before her and believes that a focus on material issues will benefit the party.

“We’ve gained a real understanding into the concerns of our communities across the country,” she says. “There’s nothing like being on doors, canvassing and meeting people daily to ensure that you become fully aware of the real extent to which people are feeling the pinch. We in

“What I said was we wouldn’t contemplate going into government unless we had a critical mass of TDs and senators to be able to ensure that we could deliver on our policy priorities.”

Labour Party leader, Ivana Bacik TD

Labour put down a cost-of-living motion in January before the war [in Ukraine] hit because we were already seeing people squeezed.”

In focusing on the issues affecting people in their day-to-day lives, Bacik sees an opportunity to both spread her message of positivity in politics and to rebuild Labour as a standalone party: “One of the key strategies we deployed in the byelection was a positive message, a positive focus and a positive campaign. That is why I’m in politics; I don’t believe in the toxic, destructive shouty politics that unfortunately all too often characterises Dáil debate.

“What I want to focus on is building Labour as a standalone party and building support for our message and values. That’s enough of a challenge. I and the party need to build up our strength in numbers locally, and we’re likely to see a local election first in 2024 before we see a general election.”

Much of the early coverage of Bacik’s leadership has centred around a perceived refusal to consider a future coalition with Sinn Féin, the leading party of the left in Ireland both in polling and current seat numbers, but the TD affirms that her comments were misconstrued and that the party needs to build a “critical mass” before considering coalitions or partnerships with any party.

“What I said was we wouldn’t contemplate going into government unless we had a critical mass of TDs and senators to be able to ensure that we could deliver on our policy priorities,” she says. “I think that’s an approach that most parties would take. As we’ve seen in other general elections or the referenda I’ve been involved in, you know when the momentum is with you and whether you’ll be able to deliver critical mass. It’s too soon to say what that will look like in 2025 or whenever that will be, but there will be opportunities in the meantime to show how Labour support is growing, particularly in the local elections.”

In the past, Labour has strengthened via the subsummation of other left parties, most famously in the case of the merger with the Democratic Left, leading to speculation that such a move with a party such as the Social Democrats could be possible presently, but Bacik dismisses this. “I’m not interested in any mergers or alliances with any other party because I think our key task is to grow our own base to see Labour values being put into effect to see actual change being delivered for social and economic equality,” she says.

“But I do also have a strong record personally of working constructively with colleagues from all parties where we have commonality of policies and I will continue to do that, to work not just with opposition but with government where we can, to deliver change. I accept that the 4

“I’m not interested in any mergers or alliances with any other party because I think our key task is to grow our own base to see Labour values being put into effect to see actual change being delivered for social and economic equality.”

left has been and remains fragmented, but that’s always been the case and what we need to do is grow sufficient support to get over that fragmentation.”

Again, Bacik says the overcoming of that fragmentation will be achieved through “promoting our own message positively, rather than knocking other parties”. She points to the fact that she introduced what would have been the State’s first Climate Action Bill with legally binding targets in the Seanad in 2007 as evidence of the party’s green-red agenda, before pivoting to other policy positions. “We support a property tax because it’s a tax on wealth and it’s one way of redistributing wealth, which is the core message of any left-wing party,” she says. “That is core to the Labour message and marks us out from other parties. When we say invest in the building of 40,000 homes a year, we are also offering a means of doing so, which is through a fair taxation system that taxes property.”

As the new leader of the political wing of the trade union movement, Bacik points to her history as a labour lawyer and her work with unions such as the NUJ in ensuring collective bargaining rights for freelancers. “That’s the sort of legislation we need to see and I know now what unions and their members need is legislation that will require organisations to engage in collective bargaining where membership meets a particular level in a workplace,” she says.

“That’s the sort of legislation that has been very effective in growing union strength but also ensuring that minimum rates have been maintained and that workers’ pay and conditions have improved in other European countries where you don’t have that voluntarist model of industrial relations that we have inherited from the British but unfortunately have maintained. It’s about strengthening union rights through legislation, strengthening the union message through delivering change for members, and it’s also about us putting pressure on government to engage in negotiation with unions through the public sector pay talks. In the private sector, we need to see unions growing their membership and union rights strengthened and I think the two go hand in hand.”

Of course, no conversation regarding the fortunes of Labour is complete without reflection on its role in government between 2011 and 2016, but Bacik concludes by saying that it is now time to turn the page from that chapter in the party’s history: “The interesting thing for me is that it’s now six years since Labour left office; in 2016, the country was back from the brink of financial ruin, out of the Troika, in relative prosperity. The people had their verdict, but it is now time for us to move on and I’m always conscious that Fine Gael and Sinn Féin are never asked about their role in voting for the bank guarantee, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party are never asked about bankrupting the country and promoting the bank guarantee.

“We are now in a different space in politics and other parties who brought about the financial ruin or contributed to it by backing a disastrous bank guarantee are not questioned to the same extent as Labour, so we need to move on.”

Largest ever health National Service Plan announced

The Government has unveiled its €20 billion National Service Plan for the HSE, the largest ever, as it seeks to battle record waiting lists and ongoing Covid complications while delivering Sláintecare reforms.

Chief among the aims of the National Service Plan will be getting to grips with Ireland’s outsized hospital waiting lists, with it set out within the plan that the hoped-for maximum time a patient will have to wait for an appointment with a hospital consultant will be reduced to 18 months by the end of 2022, and that 98 per cent of adults and children will be waiting less than 12 months for a planned procedure.

In the weeks following the publication of the National Service Plan in early March 2022, figures for public hospital waiting lists were published for the month of February, showing an increase of over 1,000 people and a total of 626,658 people outpatients waiting. In total, 896,600 people were found to be on some form of public hospital waiting list.

As part of this drive, the plan promises an extra 210,000 inpatient and daycare procedures for its duration, along with 297 additional acute beds and an extra 20 critical care beds. Plans to recruit extra staff, totalling between 5,500 and 10,000, are also afoot. In September 2021, there were 130,636 whole-time equivalent staff employed by the HSE; the plan states that the minimum target for year-end 2022 is 137,414. This recruitment is not without its challenges, as HSE CEO Paul Reid states in the plan: “Attracting additional staff to provide care and progress key reforms is a significant challenge. Very often we find ourselves hiring from one part of the organisation in order to staff another part.”

With these reforms happening under the umbrella of Sláintecare and its goal of delivering higher quality care in improved timescales, the plan also contains details of how the Sláintecare goal of delivering healthcare within local communities will be progressed in 2022. During the year, the HSE and Department of Health will design and develop the specifications of regional health areas, which include the completion of a “comprehensive implementation plan”. The aim of these regional health areas is “to create an organisational structure that aligns corporate and clinical governance at regional level, within a strong national context, and enables better coordination and improved performance across health and social care services”.

Speaking upon the publication of the plan, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly TD said that the plan “supports health objectives set out in the Programme for Government, bringing us closer to universal healthcare” and stated: “This National Service Plan for 2022 will improve outcomes for people who need to engage with our public health service, continue to see capacity increased, build on the reforms and improve timely access.”