Labour needs more than a lust for power — it needs bold new ideas

DURING the postmortems on his time as leader of the Labour Party, Pat Rabbitte has made much of the quest to be in government, his belief that such a quest needs to remain central to the party and his opinion that “lust for office” is the way forward. He’s wrong about that.

Lust for office is precisely what has stalled the progress of the Labour Party in recent years because it enabled Fine Gael to recover seats at its expense while at the same time it ensured Labour, during the election, was the only political party arguing that the leader of another party should be Taoiseach.

Listening to his comments, I was reminded of the words contained in a recent thought-provoking book by the Jesuit Edmund Grace on public happiness and democracy.