Ruairi Quinn says he can't see the Labour Party moving closer to Sinn Fein, because Sinn Fein isn't Left-wing enough. And anyway, he goes on, wouldn't Sinn Fein be more at ease with their conservative cousins in Fianna Fail than with a radical outfit like Labour?
If only his principles were as hard as his neck.
Sinn Fein isn't consistently Left-wing. Most of the rank and file members I know are socialists, but the party is capable of talking socialism in urban areas in the South, Catholic-nationalism in the North, and whooping it up for corporate capitalism while scamming the thousand-dollars-a-plate crowd in America. All at the same time, too.
But skittering back and forth across the political spectrum puts the Shinners more often than not to the Left of Labour, which hasn't strayed towards socialism any farther than the centre ground for almost a decade.
Labour hit its political highpoint in 1992 when Dick Spring led the party to an unprecedented 30-plus seats, campaigning against Fianna Fail corruption and lampooning the likes of Albert Reynolds as symbols of moral decrepitude in politics. The context for Labour's triumph had been provided by daily headlines putting the words Telecom, Greencore, Carysfort and Goodman in juxtaposition with the word scandal. Eddies of anger and unease were rippling out across society.
Dick Spring's clarion call to clean up politics by chucking Fianna Fail out of office struck a chord.
Having swept into Leinster House at the head of the biggest Labour contingent in history, Spring then used his bargaining position to strike a deal which saw Labour propping up another Fianna Fail administration, with Spring himself as Tanaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs under Reynolds as Taoiseach. If there was a precise moment in the 1990s when cold cynicism about politics became consensual in southern Ireland, that was it.
Labour's decampment without a backward glance from the moral ground to which they had just attracted tens of thousands of new voters ensured that the gathering anger against the rich robbing the poor would be expressed more in bleak cynicism than in fervour for radical politics.
And now Quinn, himself a Minister in that Fianna Fail-led government, talks of the socialist principles Labour wouldn't want sullied by association with Fianna Fail...
This isn't run-of-the-mill hypocrisy, but the behaviour of someone who is morally inert, incapable of hypocrisy because incapable of generating beliefs to betray.
There's another, related reason for delving into Labour's recent past.
In the course of last year's Dail Public Accounts Committee investigation of the DIRT scandal, it emerged that the Revenue Commissioners and the Department of Finance had opposed the 1993 tax amnesty because they believed that people with hot money in bogus bank accounts would avail of the new measure to launder their loot.
That is, the Revenue and the Department of Finance knew in 1993 (Minister for Finance: Bertie Ahern) of the tax-fraud schemes which the rest of us have only found out about recently. In his book, Snakes and Ladders, which I finally got around to reading a few weeks ago, Dick Spring's sidekick Fergus Finlay concedes that Labour was likewise aware that the sleazy elements involved in the bigger bank scams would benefit most from the proposed amnesty.
And yet Labour went along with it. Finlay offers no explanation for this, other than complaining that Bertie Ahern had told a senior Labour adviser that he'd be arguing against the amnesty in cabinet, and then had done no such thing. As to how or why this prevented Labour opposing the measure, Finlay doesn't say.
Labour could have stopped the amnesty in a instant by telling Reynolds they'd pull the plug on the government if he tried to push it through. Instead, they supported it in the Dail. Ruairi Quinn is an apt leader for the party, with no fixed beliefs of any kind.
None of the TDs on the much-praised Public Accounts Committee pursued the matter of the tax amnesty, although it had arisen in their deliberations and was closely enough adjacent to the DIRT scandal itself to come comfortably within their remit. Bertie Ahern wasn't asked a single question about it.
Neither Ahern nor any other of the five former Ministers for Finance who appeared before the PAC was questioned by Jim Mitchell's committee. The TDs literally took a back seat when the ex-Ministers arrived to give evidence, and left the questioning to officials. None of the Ministers was given a rough ride.
Thus, the single most shocking aspect of the tax scandals of recent years - that a government put through a measure in full knowledge that it would both facilitate the fraud and make the fraudsters immune from prosecution - was ignored in the investigation which has been held up to us as a perfect example of how such matters should be pursued.

Now that Bill Clinton is going out of office, some of his courtiers are anxious to establish themselves as helpmates of Hillary's. Keep this in mind as the saga of the New York AOH and the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation (ILGO) unfolds over the next few weeks.
If the Irish-American operators clustered around Clinton are to keep in with the in-crowd, they not only need Hillary to win the NY Senate race, they need her to know that they helped her to win. Towards this end, some have been seeking to contrive a situation whereby Hillary can march with the Ancient Order of Homophobes on March 17th without alienating voters who support gay rights.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the AOH's ban on ILGO. The AOH won the backing of the US courts for the ban by defining the parade as not only Irish but Irish-Catholic, and arguing that it would be an infringement of AOH members' rights to require them to march alongside people whose lifestyles and sexual practices have been condemned by the Catholic Church.
Last year, more than 100 gays and lesbians and their supporters were arrested when they protested against their exclusion from the parade. This year, more than that number will travel from Ireland to join what it is hoped will be a 2,000-strong protest gathering.
This gives Hillary Clinton a problem. The conventional political wisdom has it that most white NY Catholics will back mayor Rudy Giuliani, out of liking for his law'n'order policies and generally conservative attitudes. Ms. Clinton needs to consolidate the Jewish, black and generally 'progressive' vote - as well as taking as big a slice as possible of Giuliani's 'natural' constituency.
She won't find this easy, not least on account of her pro-choice stance on abortion.
Among those who have rushed to the rescue is Irish Voice editor Niall O'Dowd. In an article in Ireland On Sunday on January 9 O'Dowd spelled out what he has recently been preaching in New York: that ILGO "has almost no Irish members left and has been mainly taken over by extremist gays determined to prove their point, no matter what the cost . . . They continue to insist on marching and being arrested".
We have heard this before. It's what used to be said of the civil rights movements in the North and in the US . . . These groups don't represent the decent majority, but are extremists with an agenda of their own. Any genuine support they once had is gone. They are out to provoke trouble and make martyrs of themselves.
On this reading, Clinton wouldn't be reneging on gay rights by taking part in a parade from which ILGO had been banned. So, she can march with the AOH without alienating broadly progressive opinion.
The key to this strategy is to make rubbish of ILGO. O'Dowd's Irish Voice, owned by Tony O'Reilly, is well to the fore in putting the boot in. Its editorial line is being quoted in wider New York circles as evidence that ILGO represents nothing substantial.
If the strategy works and helps Hillary win, the boot-boys will expect their names to rank high on the new Senator's invite list.
Keep this in mind when you hear, as you will, that ILGO is a no-account organisation these days and that the issue it has struggled to highlight for the last 10 years can be forgotten about. n