Ivana Bacik cycled to the Russian embassy in Dublin carrying a neatly folded letter in her pocket. Over “good coffee” amid the embassy’s Soviet-style decor, the Trinity College law professor handed her missive to Maxim Peshkov, who was ambassador at the time. It was October 2016 and the then senator had come to deliver an all-party Oireachtas motion condemning Russia’s bombardment of Aleppo.
“It was a very bizarre encounter,” recalls the new leader of the Labour Party.
When she told Peshkov that she was there to protest against Russia’s support for President Assad’s ruthless crushing of dissent in Syria, “he tried to persuade me otherwise”, she remembers. “We had a long conversation. At the end, I said to him, ‘Why does Russia support [Donald] Trump?’ He said Hillary Clinton would not have been good for Russia. It was an interesting answer. No denial.”
The following year, Bacik stood alongside her father, an astronomer, at her great-grandmother’s grave in the Czech Republic on a sort of family pilgrimage. Her grandfather, a factory owner named Charles Bacik, had been in the Czech resistance and was imprisoned by the Nazis. In 1946, he arrived in Ireland where he was involved in the re-establishment of Waterford Glass.
“He had left the Czech Republic after the war because he could see the communist takeover was going to result in a Soviet takeover,” Bacik says.
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Now the politician’s mother is preparing to host refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in her Dublin home. “I don’t think she would mind me saying that,” Bacik adds.
The twists and turns in Bacik’s family history continued last week when, after 14 years in the Seanad and only eight months in the Dail, Labour’s sole female TD became the party’s 14th leader. Should the stars align at the next general election, there is a chance she could become the tanaiste — a possibility she refuses to discuss. Nor will she entertain speculation about a potential merger with the Social Democrats, whose joint leaders, Catherine Murphy and Róisín Shortall, both defected from Labour.
After a three-person parliamentary delegation told Alan Kelly on March 2 that he had to quit as leader to save Labour, the party’s newest TD was the uncontested choice to replace him. Her admirers cite her decades of activism, especially on abortion provision, marriage equality and gender pay parity, as reasons to be hopeful she can pull Labour out of the opinion poll doldrums where it has languished at about 3 per cent since the last general election.
Doubters outside the party suggest, however, she is too well-heeled and academic to appeal to Labour’s traditional urban and working-class base. She is one of only three Labour TDs in Dublin, while the party has none in Cork city. Nor does it have a seat in the European parliament.
Advice on how to face the task has been offered by Brendan Howlin, the Labour leader before Kelly, who has told Bacik that it’s “like eating an elephant, one bite at a time”.
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Bacik, who grew up in Crookstown, Co Cork and later in Cork city and Dublin, says she does want to be in government. Yet the most likely way would be hand-in-hand with Sinn Fein. For someone who regards the future of Irish politics as “red and green — a socialist or social democratic and environmental voice”, a coalition with Sinn Fein could be problematic. Though she will not rule any potential government partner in or out, Bacik says Sinn Fein’s objection to carbon taxes is incompatible with her party’s position.
Would she lead her party into government with Labour’s previous coalition partners, Fianna Fail or Fine Gael? “It’s really funny, nobody asks that. It’s not something I think we should be focusing on now. For us in Labour it’s about growing our party, growing our organisation and strengthening our voice as an alternative to either the right-wing Fianna Fail-Fine Gael or the others, whether it’s Sinn Fein or the far left.”
Her words echo a resolution passed at Labour’s annual conference in November “to develop a coherent, constructive left [and] a common platform with others who share our broad, egalitarian perspective, if the opportunity arises, to provide a real alternative to the electorate”.
While the Green Party and the Social Democrats may fill that photofit, Bacik’s repeated assertions that she wants to “work collaboratively” on issues and policies with “other progressive, centre-left and left parties” and that “Labour is not a party that shouts from the sidelines or is content just to remain in opposition” imply Sinn Fein is not an easy fit.
The looming debate on Irish reunification is one clear point of division. In a newsletter circulated to foreign diplomats in Dublin last week, Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Fein leader, claimed Irish unification “is being talked about in every town and city in Ireland”.
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“That’s not my experience and I’ve been travelling extensively in recent weeks,” Bacik says. “I don’t think it’s uppermost in people’s minds, no. I think most people, including myself, would like to see a united Ireland some day but I think, for me, it would have to be about ensuring that the conditions are right — not precipitously engaging in a referendum without doing the groundwork.”
Labour wants “a united Ireland and believes in a true republic”, she says, but talk about the timing of a border poll is “premature”. First, there would have to be an all-island citizens’ assembly, approved by the Stormont assembly as well as the Oireachtas.
“This is crucially about Northern Ireland too and [we need] to ensure there’s a strong process that goes on there, to ensure the holding of a referendum would not undermine the peace process. That’s the real fear that underlies the reluctance to countenance an immediate referendum.”
Now the second party leader, along with the Greens’ Eamon Ryan, in the four-seat Dublin Bay South constituency and the fourth woman in charge of a mainstream party in the current Dail, Bacik says she will rebuild Labour by preaching a gospel of “equality, solidarity and fairness”.
She intends continuing to chair the special Oireachtas committee on gender equality and to remain as deputy chairwoman of the Irish Women’s Parliamentary Caucus in Leinster House.
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“I’m conscious of a structural gender bias that exists in Irish politics. I don’t think anyone is unaware of that, when you look at how few women are in politics — 37 women TDs out of 160.”
Asked if she feels sorry for Kelly, the Tipperary TD, ousted after less than two years as leader, she replies: “Alan and I get on very well. We’ve had a lot of great conversations over recent weeks and he’s been hugely supportive and immensely dignified in his really strongly expressed desire to see the party united and to see a smooth transition.”
Bacik says the vacancy for a new Labour leader was “unexpected” and came at a time “not of my making or choosing”.
“Events overtook us and, as a result, I was put in a position where the decision had to be made,” she says.
So does she want to be leader? “Oh yes, absolutely — yes.”
