Burton does not deny leader hopes

Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton has declined to deny that it is her wish to become leader of the Labour Party.

In a radio interview broadcast this morning, Ms Burton repeatedly dodged questions about whether she would like to become party leader. The party’s deputy leader and her husband were interviewed on the RTÉ Radio One show, Miriam Meets.

When first asked whether she would like to become leader, Ms Burton failed to give a direct answer saying, “I’m very happy doing what I’m doing, and for as long as I can contribute in politics, that’s what I’d like to do.”

Asked a second time, she said, “I hope that I can contribute for a long time to come.” When interviewer Miriam O’Callaghan said she would interpret her answers to mean “yes”, Ms Burton said she felt that at the moment people “expect politicians to focus on running the country rather than on internal political disputes”.

Also hinting at internal unrest, her husband Pat Carroll, a former Labour councillor for Dublin City who has been actively involved in Ms Burton’s election campaigns, said the Labour party electorate “doesn’t want to know” about “strife” in the party.

“They want the party to govern and to be focused on solving the problems…internal disputes leave people very, very cold altogether,” he said.

Referring to the well-known conflict between former UK Labour leader Tony Blair and deputy leader Gordon Brown, Mr Carroll said such conflict can have “incredibly destructive effects”.

“Judging from conversations anyway, Joan is very conscious of that,” he said.

Asked whether it was difficult being the spouse of a Minister, Mr Carroll said, “Sometimes decisions are made and you think, oh God, that’s a dreadful decision and that’s going to have catastrophic both political and social effects.”

Asked about her colleague Roísín Shortall, who resigned as junior Minister for Health last year, Ms Burton said, “I’d certainly like to see some of the people currently in dispute with the party coming back again.”

Recalling conversations on debt relief with former minister for finance the late Brian Lenihan, she said, “The Fianna Fáil view at the time was that it’s not possible, don’t even try…we’ve done it but we’ve done it more slowly and we still have a way to go.”

She said the coalition was “hard for the Labour Party, but I’d say a lot of it is difficult for Fine Gael too”.

“But I certainly stick by it and contribute to it.”

Ms Burton, who was born in Carlow and formally adopted to a Dublin family at age four, also spoke of her search for her birth mother who she did not meet before her death.

She described herself as “very lucky in getting a chance” at a time when some children in orphanages had been sent to Magdalene Laundries.