Gilmore makes final appeal to voters

Labour leader Eamon Gilmore has made an end-of-campaign appeal for people to vote for his party if they want to avoid a single-party Fine Gael government.

Mr Gilmore said the election was about how people saw the future of the country and how Ireland was going to get out of the mess it was in. The choice involved for voters was one between a single-party Fine Gael government or a coalition between Labour and Fine Gael.

The only way for people who didn't want single-party government to avoid this outcome was to vote Labour, Mr Gilmore said. He was speaking at the party's final press conference of the campaign in its headquarters in Dublin.

He said that voters who intend voting for independents or other parties should understand that they may end up with a single-party Fine Gael government as a consequence of doing so. The election could produce a result that they don't want and for this reason they should considering switching their vote to Labour.

"Our message now is that if you don't want single-party government you should vote Labour," he said.

Asked how he thought Labour would do in the election, Mr Gilmore predicted that it would perform better than the polls had indicated. However, he declined to predict the number of seats the party would win.

He pointed out that last night's debate was the first three-way debate that Labour had participated in. Mr Gilmore said that when he first called for Labour to be included in a three-way debate, he was told it was unrealistic and yet this had come to pass.

He declared himself flattered and reassured to be asked questions as to why Labour was leading in the opinion polls. The party was in an entirely different place now than it had ever been historically.

On the EU-IMF deal, he said he still believe it was, as he said earlier in the campaign, a choice between "Labour's way or Frankfurt's way".

The deal would have to be renegotiated, and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael now accepted this. The only area where those two parties were not "on the same page" as Labour was on the period of time allowed to reduce Ireland's deficit.