The Labour Party's position on a plan to ban opinion polls in the last week of election campaigns was in disarray last night, following opposition from the party's leader, Mr Ruairi Quinn.
Labour TD Mr Eamon Gilmore supported a ban on Wednesday after the idea was put to the Dail Committee on the Environment and Local Government by Fine Gael TD Ms Olivia Mitchell.
The Minister of State for the Environment, Mr Bobby Molloy, accepted the proposal only after he had clarified that all of the Opposition parties were behind it.
Mr Quinn opposed the idea when he spoke in the wake of the Tipperary South by-election result, which had led Fianna Fail to allege that its candidate had been damaged by a late poll.
Speaking in Clonmel, Mr Quinn said the Government should ban corporate donations, rather than polls. He said he was against the suppression of information and against the suppression of news. "The reality is you may have a ban on the publishing and publication of polls for one week before but they would be conducted nevertheless and people would relate to them.
"I would be delighted if Fianna Fail would ban corporate donations in election campaigns and instead of suppressing information would actually equalise the access of the citizen to the ballot box." He saw banning opinion polls as an attempt by established parties to suppress information. "Polls will be taken privately anyway and I think if there's a number of polls coming out, in what way does this publication of the polls make the result any different? It may have given Hayes a bit of a boost, if anything it improved the position of Michael Maguire.
"So I'm obviously not going to give you an instant judgment on it but my instincts are against the suppression of information," he told The Irish Times.
Last night, Fine Gael expressed "surprise" at the Labour leader's remarks: "There is a difference in tone, if not in substance in what he said from what Eamon Gilmore said," conceded a spokesperson.