Tánaiste says public should ‘dare to hope again’

Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore has staunchly defended Labour's record in Government and said the State would be headed into a second bailout but for his party's influence.

In his keynote address to the Labour National Conference in Killarney tonight, Mr Gilmore said he understood that people were not happy with decisions the party had made in Government and sought to take responsibility for them.

He said Labour had taken on the challenge of fixing the economy which “required of us to think not about the next election but about the next generation”.

“It could of course have been very different,” he said. “If Labour had not done what Labour has done, we could all be here tonight, perhaps in the political comfort of opposition, but instead of exiting the bailout, our country would be going into a second one.”

Mr Gilmore said Ireland needed to "step forward to the next stage - ending the seemingly endless crisis".

“These past few years have been tough and we still have a distance to travel, but for the first time since the crisis began, we can dare to hope again.”

He was heavily critical of Fianna Fáil, which he said had brought the country to its knees, but now the State was "climbing back on our feet again".

Mr Gilmore said the EU-IMF bailout plan agreed by Fianna Fáil in 2010 was “deeply flawed” as it was based on debt, not growth. “The loans were too expensive, the conditions too onerous, and there was no plan to create jobs.”

The stance taken by Labour and Fine Gael had helped Ireland get around some of the more onerous aspects of the pact and in two weeks the State would emerge from the programme, he said.

The Tánaiste heaped praise on Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin, who he said had done more than anyone "to free our country from the shackles of the bailout".

He also complimented the work of his ministers, and highlighted plans for free GP care for children under five, the cleaning up of ghost estates, the building of classrooms, the launch of the personal insolvency service and legislating for the X-case as achievements since the party entered Government 1,000 days ago.

Looking to the future, the Tánaiste said he hoped that when economic conditions improved the Government would be able to “relieve somewhat the burden of taxation on working people.”

“We cannot go back to the politics of the past. No going back to Boom and Bert. No going back to the Ireland run for golden circles; with an economy built on sand. Our people deserve more than that.”

Earlier, Siptu president Jack O’Connor told the conference that those on the political left “have collectively failed to win sufficient support among the electorate for the politics of social solidarity”.

He said far more people supported these policies than voted for them, and the failure to secure this electorate was because of “our perennial failure to distinguish between strategy and tactics on the one hand and values and principles on the other and the accompanying fragmentation that has always afflicted our best endeavours”.

He told delegates however that Labour would now be far more popular if it stayed out of government, but by any reading of Fine Gael’s manifesto, the cuts imposed would be €1.6 billion to €2 billion more than those already inflicted.

Mr O’Connor said it was time to “rise above the petty cut and thrust of day to day politics and to articulate a vision of a new Republic firmly grounded in social solidarity and the primacy of the common good, underpinned by a sustainable economy”.

He said a good place to start would be the objective of a “realisable guarantee of a decent job and a living wage for all”.

Otherwise, he said, Labour must be prepared to go into Government with the Centre Right parties to defend the interests of working people and civil society as far as possible.

He said in an address to the conference: “The consequences of relying on individual greed as the dynamic of public policy are now tragically clear for all to see as we struggle through our third existential crisis in sixty years.”