LABOUR LEADER Eamon Gilmore has predicted his party will win more than 50 seats in the next general election, eclipsing both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to become the largest party in the Dáil.
Mr Gilmore indicated yesterday the party was likely to run as many as 80 candidates in the election, some 15 more than the historically high figure of 65 candidates to which it is already committed.
He said the need to increase the number of candidates was because of growing evidence that the party could win “enough [seats] to be the largest party”.
“I think most people reckon that to be the largest party you’d probably want to be 50-plus but it’s not a case of predicting.
“I believe we can win a seat in every constituency, that’s 43, and I believe we can win more than one in several constituencies, so you can add it up from that,” Mr Gilmore told reporters yesterday.
He was responding to an opinion poll by Millward Brown Lansdowne for TV3 which indicated that Labour had surged ahead of the traditional two political parties.
The poll showed its support levels had increased to 35 per cent, compared to 30 per cent for Fine Gael and 22 per cent for Fianna Fáil.
Mr Gilmore was also the clear preference among those polled as a potential Taoiseach over the incumbent Brian Cowen and over Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny.
In its response to what was seen as a disappointing poll for the party, Fine Gael said it had come after a “difficult summer” for the party.
A party spokesman said polls would come and go, but this did not take away from the reality that the current economic and banking crises had to be met head-on and the Government replaced as a matter of urgency.
“Fine Gael has detailed policy plans that will get people back to work and get this country back on its feet, and we are the only party with these plans.
“ . . .We were right on Nama, we were right on Anglo, we were right on the bondholders and we have long since prioritised jobs. We are going to concentrate on communicating that message to the electorate.”
However, several Fine Gael backbenchers, all of whom voted against Mr Kenny in the confidence motion on his leadership earlier this summer, said the poll result again reiterated the need for a new leader to lead the party into an election.
One TD, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Mr Gilmore was “wiping the floor” with Mr Kenny, and the party needed to revisit the leadership question with perhaps 12 months to go to an election.
The TD claimed many people who backed Mr Kenny had since changed their mind, and there was a prospect that Fine Gael could lose seats in the election, with some Cork constituencies, Laois-Offaly and Roscommon-South Leitrim being particularly vulnerable.
Government chief whip John Curran accepted that the trend of recent opinion polls had been very poor for Fianna Fáil, but said unpopularity in polls would not distract the Government from taking the correct difficult choices for the country’s future.
“The Opposition, and especially Labour, have taken the cynical approach of putting politics before substance.
“It may work in the short-term, but their support will fall off as soon as they are subject to even basic scrutiny.”
Speaking to reporters in Leinster House, Mr Gilmore said polls had showed a continuing pattern of growth in support for Labour.
He said it reflected “a desire by Irish people to change away from the traditional establishment politics of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and to move to the election for the first time in the history of this State of a government which would be led by the Labour Party”.
Mr Gilmore also said his party supported €3 billion in Exchequer savings but would oppose the Government’s latest proposals to implement more substantial cuts. He rejected the proposition that the party had not specified where it would target savings.
An opinion poll published yesterday shows that Senator David Norris is the leading candidate to win next years Presidential election.
In the poll, conducted by Millward Brown Lansdowne for TV3, Senator Norris was backed by 20 per cent of those surveyed.