Labour 'must be leading partner' in govt

It is the Labour Party’s duty to step forward and become the leading partners of Government, Eamon Gilmore said today.

The party leader claimed people are crying out for a political change that can only come with Labour.

He said the party’s mission is not just to change the faces around the cabinet table, but to change the values by which the country is led.

“All over this country, people are crying out for the political change which will rebuild our economy and renew our lives,” Mr Gilmore said at Labour’s annual James Connolly Commemoration at Arbour Hill.

“But not just change for its own sake. Not just to exchange one conservative label for another.

“But real change. The change that can only come with Labour.”

James Connolly co-founded the Labour Party with James Larkin in 1912, but was executed in Kilmainham Jail on May 12 1916 after his participation in the Easter Rising.

He is buried in Arbour Hill.

As Mr Gilmore laid a wreath at his burial site, he said we live in a country where the ideals of Connolly, and of the Proclamation, have been again betrayed.

“Our country has been brought low, by the untrammelled greed and excess of the powerful few,” said Mr Gilmore.

“Those who lectured others on the virtues of unregulated speculation, have brought about a calamity not seen since the 1930s.

“They put themselves before their country. The cost of their excess to be borne by others.”

Siptu General President Jack O’Connor paid tribute to Connolly who he said selflessly spent his life in the service of working people, before he went on to surrender it in pursuit of national interest.

He also told the delegates at the Commemoration that the Labour Party, and other parties of the left in Ireland, offer the real alternative of the social market economy.

Mr O’Connor described Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael as “two sides of the same coin in respect of all the great issues affecting working people”.

“Voting for one, as an alternative to the other, amounts to nothing more than the political equivalent of leaping from the frying pan into the fire,” said Mr O’Connor.

“It simply amounts to endorsing more of the same by a different name.”