Joan Burton: High probability of Labour re-election

The Tánaiste and Labour Party leader has said she believes there is a “high probability” her party will be returned to government at the next general election despite poor performances in recent polls.

Joan Burton conceded that the election is going to be “very, very challenging,” not just for her party “but for every party”.

Defending her party’s failure to resist cuts they pledged to face down at the last general election, Ms Burton said the promises, which included resisting water charges, were based on the assumption that they would be the main government party in 2011, which hadn’t come to pass.

“Our [2011] election programme was based on what we would do in the context of the Labour Party having the leadership role in government and when the plans were formulated, before the last election, the Labour Party was at about 33%,” she said. “On the day, that actually materialised into 18%. We went into government with our eyes wide open because the country by the time we went in had gone into a much darker place.”

Asked by the Irish Examiner if she was reasonably confident of retaining her own seat in Dublin West, the Tánaiste answered “yes”, justifying her response by claiming that Labour and Fine Gael had provided “the kind of field on which people can put their lives back together”.

Despite Fine Gael taking the plaudits for most of the positive developments over the past five years, while Labour continued to take a hammering, Ms Burton said her coalition partners remained the only party they would consider going into government with in 2016.

“This is like if you were building an extension to your house — would you decide to go for the decent firm who had a reputation for building and finishing? Or would you go down the road to somebody who said they had fabulous ideas?”

She said she was not claiming her party “has been perfect, it has been a difficult learning curve”, “but we now know how to do it, we know how to negotiate”.

She conceded progress on addressing the housing crisis has been slow but argued it was largely down to the drop-off in public social housing programmes in the last decade.

“We have basically had to reinvent the concept of public authorities being responsible for social housing and housing associations being funded to provide significantly more homes,” she said. “We also have the challenge of providing affordable homes for families... we are providing the streams of funding but I have to say it’s a lot slower than I thought... If you’d asked me three years ago, I would have thought we’d be significantly further ahead than what we are now.”

However, she defended her housing minister, Alan Kelly, who has been the subject of negative press recently due to claims he leaked damaging poll data, which he has denied. Asked if he was an asset or a liability, she said: “Alan Kelly is absolutely an asset. He’s presiding over very challenging issues — Irish Water; and to kickstart and get life into a housing industry that had died, and he’s got the funds now and it’s the largest allocation of funds in the history of the state.”

The Tánaiste, in Cork for the official opening of two new Intreo Centres, which act as a ‘One Stop Shop’ for social protection customers, said all politicians, including herself, had made a “big mistake” in relation to water charges.

“We had this futile argument that we could not actually have a system of investing in water until we had cured the leaks,” she said. “Every party took part in that. And I look back now and to be honest, it was quite a futile argument. It’s not possible to fix the leaks until you identify them and it’s not possible to identify them without a metering service.”

Ms Burton said she had “a couple of nightmares” when she came into government. The first was that “every economist in the country said that very shortly the number of people unemployed would reach half a million” but that she made sure “it never got there”. The second was a “huge hole” in the social insurance fund of €2.8bn, which she said this year would be somewhere between €100m-€180m, and in surplus next year.

She said Labour had also restored welfare cuts, including the controversial cut to the respite care grant. Asked why it was cut in the first place she blamed difficulties in borrowing.

“Nobody would lend to us when we came into government,” she said. “International lenders would not lend to Ireland. Once the interest rates went above 7%, the game was over, because countries can’t afford to borrow at those rates.”

Asked if she saw her party following the same sorry fate as other minority government parties, such as the Progressive Democrats and the Green Party, Ms Burton said the PDs “had a particular focus on tax cuts for very rich people, that’s not our focus”. She said her focus was on ensuring jobs and a decent education for people and good services “and we all collectively pay for that through taxation”.

She said Labour had put down five difficult years and “hammered out” positive economic and social change.