Rabbitte urges ‘mood for change’

THE electorate can change Ireland for the better by voting Labour, party leader Pat Rabbitte suggested yesterday.

His party, he said, would publish in the coming days an election manifesto “brimful of new ideas and designed to create a fair society in Ireland”.

The cornerstone of Labour’s manifesto would be its five commitments to change — ensuring more beds in clean hospitals; providing a year’s free pre-school education for every child; putting more gardaí on the beat in neighbourhoods; abolishing the means test for carers and enabling more people to begin to buy a home.

“If you vote for Fianna Fáil and the PDs you get more of the same. Labour is the ingredient for change,” Mr Rabbitte said at the party’s election headquarters on Baggott Street, Dublin.

He believed there was a “broad, clear mood for change” among the electorate, something he said he had witnessed first-hand “on the doorsteps and in the supermarkets”.

The party was better organised than at any time in its history, he added, and was running candidates in every constituency for the first time since 1969.

There was a fleeting moment of embarrassment when Mr Rabbitte couldn’t name the party’s fourth senator running for a Dáil seat, members of his front bench reminding him that it was Kathleen O’Meara.

Elsewhere, Mr Rabbitte took a swipe at the PDs, claiming the party had encouraged selfishness in Irish society and it had no chance of being returned to power. “The only thing we know for certain is that Fianna Fáil and the PDs haven’t the remotest chance in hell of providing the government,” he said.

And he dismissed Tánaiste and PD leader Michael McDowell’s insistence that he would not serve with Fine Gael and Labour in a coalition.

“I have said before that I have never in my life turned up to a wedding to which I wasn’t invited. And I’m really puzzled about Michael McDowell ruling himself out. Nobody invited him. And nobody will invite him.”