Bacik: My mission is to win back trust for “Labour policies and Labour values”

Ivana Bacik entered the Irish parliament, the Dáil, as the Irish Labour TD (Teachta Dála) for Dublin Bay South at a by-election in July 2021. From this point on, there was a degree of inexorability about her assent to the leadership of the Irish Labour Party.

Despite her recent election, Bacik is no political neophyte; active in politics since the 1980s, she was likely her party’s best known politician before ever making it to the lower chamber of the House. A professor in the Law department at Trinity College Dublin since 1996, Bacik was elected to the Seanad – the upper chamber of the Irish parliament – in 2007, where she remained until her election as a TD last year. Bacik attended UK Labour’s conference for the first time this year, with an all-women delegation from Irish Labour, our sister party and the possessors of the good twitter @. LabourList caught up with her to talk about her career in politics, Irish Labour’s prospects and relations between our two parties.

Bacik says she was first politicised by seeing the difference in how boys and girls were treated when she was at primary school. “Being forced to stay in and do sewing, while the boys were allowed go out and play football” was, she says, a “stark moment of realising inequality”. She continued to be engaged in politics at secondary school, and went to Trinity to study law in the 1980s. Abortion was at this time illegal in Ireland; an amendment recognising the right to life of the unborn had been made to the constitution in 1983 with the support of 67% of voters.

“I was elected students union president in my final year in Trinity, and at that point students unions had become the only organisations in Ireland openly offering information for pregnant women on how to get an abortion in England. That may sound bizarre, in an internet world, but at the time there was no way of accessing the phone number of the BPAS clinic, or of Marie Stopes, in England. Even British magazines like Cosmopolitan were censored coming into Ireland, the pages with the ads were taken out,” she says.

“There were women ringing up every day – it was an absolutely formative time for me, to get these desperate phone calls from women and girls from all corners of Ireland in crisis pregnancy, some very young, some older, just desperate for a phone number, and we were the only people giving it.”

The activities of the student union drew the ire of an organisation called SPUC (the society of the protection of the unborn child), who took Bacik to court in 1989. “They threatened us with prison, took us to court, made us bankrupt,” Bacik recounts. Mary Robinson, then a Trinity law professor, shortly thereafter to be elected as Ireland’s first female president, represented the students. It was “her argument that kept us out of prison”, Bacik tells me.

It is unsurprising, then, that Bacik cites Mary Robinson as her political hero: “She was a beacon of liberalism in an Ireland that was very, very conservative… her election as president in 1990 really did herald a change.” You can certainly see the argument for this; homosexuality became legal in 1993 in Ireland, and in November of 1995, a referendum legalising divorce passed by a margin of 0.56%. The ban on abortion was ultimately repealed in 2018; Bacik is, she says, “really proud” of the work done by students unions supporting women and pushing for change.

She says her belief that social justice and economic justice are intimately connected made Irish Labour her natural political home, citing trade unionist and 1916 Rising leader James Connolly as a key influence. “It annoys me when I hear abortion referred to as a social issue, because actually the women who are most impacted by crisis pregnancy are the women with no money, women with no power,” she explains, noting that during her time with the student union she would hear from “young women in a corner of Donegal who had no access to the money to fund the travel to England”, adding: “The crisis of a crisis pregnancy is really compounded by economic poverty. It was and remains an economic issue as well as a social one.” It has not, however, been an easy period for Bacik and others who call the Irish Labour Party their political home.

Between 2011 and 2016, Irish Labour was the junior party in a coalition government with the centre-right party Fine Gael. Bacik – a senator in this period – describes the experience as “bruising”, saying that “Labour ministers made decisions that no labour party would want to support in normal times”. Labour paid for the actions of that government, which enacted swinging cuts in response to the financial crisis and the impositions of the Troika, at the ballot box. At the 2016 general election, Labour plummeted from 33 seats to seven; the party fared no better in 2016, when former leader Joan Burton’s loss in Dublin West saw the party slip from seven to six seats.

For all it did to the party electorally, however, Bacik is keen to assert that this government – whose focus she describes as “economic sovereignty” – broadly did what it intended to do. She tells me that by 2016: “Ireland had come out of bankruptcy, had regained economic prosperity, and a real base had been built for investment in public services. And what we’ve seen since 2016 in Ireland is the squandering of that prosperity, and the failure to deliver social housing programmes, the failure to invest in childcare and health.”

She describes her “key mission” as being “to win back trust among voters for Labour policies and Labour values”, which was “certainly lost and not sufficiently emphasised in that 2011 to 2016 government”. However, on present polling Labour does not look overwhelmingly likely to return to government any time soon. “If an election were to be held tomorrow, the most likely outcome would be Sinn Fein-Fianna Fail government,” Bacik acknowledges. “And it would be a right-of-centre government.”

Sinn Fein won 37 seats at the last general election, held in January 2020; Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, the two centre-right parties that have historically dominated Irish politics, won 38 and 35 respectively. The rise of Sinn Fein to parity in the Dail with the two traditional parties of government is the great story of the last half decade in Irish politics, overturning a two-party system (in which smaller parties like Labour, the Greens or the now defunct Progressive Democrats sometimes functioned as junior coalition partners) that had endured since the foundation of the state. Once notorious as the political wing of the IRA, Sinn Fein has under the able leadership of Mary Lou MacDonald (who, like Bacik, graduated from a south Dublin all-girls’ private school before attending Trinity College Dublin and now represents a Dublin constituency) been making a case to voters in the Republic that they are a viable, left-wing party of government.

This is a case Bacik is keen to refute, saying that Sinn Fein are “not clearly a left-of-centre party, although they have many left-of-centre policies. She argues, however: “On property tax, they’re against it. On carbon tax, they’re against us. There’s a populism there that is uncomfortable to us as the party of the trade union movement, and as a party with a clear social democratic philosophy. And clearly, we’re also uncomfortable with their nationalism. For a lot of Sinn Fein members, nationalism is the driving force – while we aspire to a united Ireland, nationalism is not our priority or our guiding philosophy.”

When asked where she would sit factionally within the UK Labour Party, Bacik says she would position herself as a “supporter of Starmer and Rayner” because they are “carefully building to the point where [Labour] will be able to go into government”. “Keir Starmer has managed to unite the party in a way that wasn’t evident under Corbyn,” she says – for her, it’s about “aspiring to get into government to deliver change, not being pure from the sidelines”.

Bacik also has positive words for Labour MPs Louise Haigh, Stella Creasy and Connor McGinn, praising their engagement with Ireland and commenting on how she hopes to see a Labour government in the UK “re-opening negations with the EU in good faith, resolving the outstanding issues with the [Northern Ireland] protocol, and withdrawing Liz Truss’s dreadful legislation”. She is, however, keen to stress that while Irish Labour and UK Labour are sister parties, “we don’t agree on everything”.

She tells me that “Irish labour is probably somewhat to the left” of UK Labour, citing the war in Iraq (a “dreadful decision”) as among the reasons why “that has probably been the case for some time”. She is also critical of the leadership’s line in the recent internal spat about shadow frontbenchers standing on picket lines. “I think it was a pity, I’m a lifelong trade unionist. I came up through the student union movement and I’ve been on the section committees of any workplace I’ve been in,” she says. “It’s not a policy I would have supported, nor as leader of Irish Labour would I ever dream of making a similar call. But you know, it’s a different party.”