Rabbitte and Kenny untested, says McManus

LABOUR Party leader Pat Rabbitte remains “untested”, his second-in-command said last night, as does Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny.

But Liz McManus, Labour’s deputy leader, said this was merely “a statement of fact”, and not necessarily a bad thing. She believed Pat Rabbitte could make an excellent Taoiseach.

Furthermore, she added, the country was clearly in need of new government in the shape of a Labour-Fine Gael coalition.

The “rot” had set in to the Fianna Fáil-PD government, she said, and those parties had shown “extraordinary arrogance” in “thinking that they are the only ones who can run the country”.

Deputy McManus was responding to criticism by Defence Minister Willie O’Dea of comments made by her in the April edition of women’s glossy magazine, Prudence, which hit the shelves this week.

The deputy’s remarks in the interview about her personal views on various politicians - including the Taoiseach - clearly riled the minister, who, in turn, personalised his criticism.

Deputy McManus had told interviewer Patricia Devine that she liked Taoiseach Bertie Ahern “neither as a person nor as a politician”.

While she did like Tánaiste Mary Harney on a personal basis, she had “great difficulty” with her politics.

Enda Kenny, meanwhile, was described as untested - a description she subsequently extended to her own leader, Mr Rabbitte, yesterday.

But she told the magazine she was convinced Fine Gael and Labour would form the next government.

“Looking back on the last election, the electorate considers now that they were fooled and misled, ultimately betrayed by all the promises made and not kept,” she said.

Minister O’Dea, however, claimed her comments exposed “once again the hypocrisy at the heart of the Mullingar Accord”, an agreement which Labour and Fine Gael reached with each other last year.

He referred to Deputy McManus as “Lady Wicklow” while labelling the accord “a sham”.

“Since the Mullingar Accord, Fine Gael and Labour have both sought to delude themselves that they are a government in waiting with Enda Kenny at the helm,” he said.

“This fiction is further compounded by (Deputy) McManus’s admission that, far from inspiring the confidence of the Labour Party, Mr Kenny is, in Labour’s view, politically inexperienced.”

Fine Gael chose not to respond to the remarks made by Deputy McManus.