The business and political establishment has been relentlessly discredited in the eyes of ordinary people by successive scandals, the Socialist Party TD, Mr Joe Higgins, told his party's annual conference in Athlone at the weekend.
Calling on the Government to concede the demands of the striking nurses, Mr Higgins said many of those most vocal in their calls for health cuts in the past "were themselves involved in a massive fraud of the taxation system through the Ansbacher accounts and through the scam bogus non-resident accounts".
Conceding the nurses' demands would be a first step in ending the "scandal" of one of the lowest levels of public healthcare funding in Europe, he said.
Mr Higgins said political life in the State was "constituted of one grey mass encompassing the major parties who all stand for the same thing". He accused the Labour Party of being part of this grey mass, "having forfeited any allegiance to the ideas of socialism".
The party secretary, Mr Dermot Connolly, said the Socialist Party had gained substantial support and respect during its three years of existence.
"Unlike the main political parties in the Dail the Socialist Party does not exist to further the ambitions of political careerists", he said, "but fights in the tradition of Connolly and Larkin for a new society based on meeting the needs of ordinary people rather than serving the greed of a few".
Cllr Clare Daly, who works at Dublin Airport, said the party would oppose any attempt to privatise Aer Lingus or Aer Rianta.
"The selling off of crucial State assets which generations of workers and taxpayers have built up is a blatant act of piracy in the interests of the major institutions and stock market speculators," she said.
"The cynical attempts to involve ordinary people in this rip-off by persuading them to buy shares will rebound when the stock market casino goes into an inevitable slump."