Rabbitte defends plan for election pact with FG

Labour leader Pat Rabbitte has said the party would have far more clout in a cabinet with Fine Gael than in any arrangement with Fianna Fáil.

In an interview yesterday, Mr Rabbitte defended plans for a pre-election pact with Fine Gael in the face of opposition to the move at the party's annual conference in Tralee next weekend.

Mr Rabbitte told RTÉ's This Week programme that he "found it difficult to understand how our people, as the conference agenda shows, are so unhappy with the health service, public housing, the inability to make decisions on big capital questions and the chronic waste of taxpayers' money, and then they want me to put those responsible for this back into Government.

"It does not make sense."

People understood that if they were to have a different, better and reforming government, then the Labour Party would have to be at the heart of it, he said. Labour "would have much more clout in a cabinet with Fine Gael than with a larger Fianna Fáil party."

The overwhelming majority of Labour Party members would oppose involvement in a coalition with Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, he said.

One of Mr Rabbitte's critics on any pact with Fine Gael, party vice-chairman Henry Houghton, was yesterday quoted in the Sunday Independent as supporting such a coalition.

Mr Rabbitte said Labour would campaign on an independent platform with its own policies and, if successful, would agree a statement of intent with Fine Gael that would contain the overarching principles of a programme for government.

He described the prospect of Fianna Fáil being in power for a quarter of a century, with the exception of a 2½-year period in the mid-1990s, as "corrosive of democracy". Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea last night said it was "bordering on the sinister" for the Labour leader to suggest this, and he accused Mr Rabbitte of "unbridled arrogance".

"How can the will of the people, freely given in a free election, be corrosive?"

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