Rabbitte rejects coalition with FF

LABOUR PARTY leader Pat Rabbitte has said it would make no sense for the party to go into power with Fianna Fáil in a future government.

He defended yesterday his proposal to form a pre-election pact with Fine Gael, and scotched suggestions by some Labour members who believe the party should instead consider a coalition with Fianna Fáil. “I find it a bit difficult to understand why our people... are so unhappy about issues like the health services and public housing, the inability to make decisions on big infrastructural questions, the chronic waste of taxpayers’ money, and then they want me to put the Government that’s responsible for this back into office? It doesn’t make sense.”

The Fianna Fail-PD coalition, he said, “seems to have been paralysed” on a whole range of issues and had squandered the opportunities presented by the country’s economic success to solve those problems.

Were Fianna Fáil to be successful at the next election, he pointed out, “they will have been in power for a quarter of a century with a minor interregnum of two and a half years.

“A lot of Fianna Fáil people may think that’s a good idea, but I believe that a majority of the Irish people don’t believe it’s a good idea. It’s corrosive of democracy, it’s bad for our institutions, it’s bad for the health of our system.”

Mr Rabbitte was speaking on RTÉ Radio ahead of the party’s annual conference in Co Kerry this weekend, at which a motion paving the way for the pact will be debated. The motion, which has the broad support of the party’s national executive, would authorise Mr Rabbitte to take whatever steps he felt necessary to “see the Government parties removed from office.”

A rival motion, however, calls for Labour to rule out any pre-election pact, and several senior members, including TDs Brendan Howlin, Kathleen Lynch and Tommy Broughan, would prefer to see the party contest the election independently.

Despite the likelihood of divisive debate, however, Mr Rabbitte is expected to gain conference approval for the pre-election pact.

If that happened, he said Labour would still be “campaigning as an independent party on its own platform of policies, but will have “sought to... agree a statement of intent with Fine Gael, and that statement of intent would provide the overarching principles for any detailed programme for government that would be negotiated if the people give us the votes.