IRISH POLITICS requires a major realignment to move away from Civil War politics, Dublin Fianna Fáil TD Chris Andrews has said.
Mr Andrews posted messages on his Twitter site over the weekend suggesting a merger between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael after the next election.
Responding yesterday to the enormous response to his tweets, Mr Andrews said “realignment” might have been a better phrase to use, rather than “merger”.
"'Merger' triggers people off talking about political parties taking over each other," he told The Irish Times. He said the nature of society had changed so much in the past decade that he believed politics needed to be realigned. But yesterday he said the best way of achieving that would not be through Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael joining forces but through two new groupings being formed by the centre-left elements and centre-right elements of the three major parties, including Labour.
“There are diverse views within Labour. There are people in Labour who are centre-right as there are people in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil who are centre-left.
“There are as many differences within Fianna Fáil as there are between Fine Gael and Labour,” he said. He said the issue would not be looked at until after the next general election but accepted that it was “academic in many ways”. His Limerick West Fianna Fáil colleague Niall Collins supported the tenor of Mr Andrews’s comments yesterday. He told RTÉ that he was in favour of a coalition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael if the numbers added up.